Martha Gets Arthritis

Tom: What happened, we were over in Alabama playing golf, and she started on the second hole, she started to swing and she couldn’t raise her arm and said “there’s something wrong with me.” So I went back to the hotel and checked out and went home, and she was diagnosed with acute arthritis, and it got from there to worse. Her hand just swelled up all over, and her body was half again the size it is now, and we had a swimming pool in that particular house. So I would pick her up and put her in the pool where she could just move around a little bit.

And one day she was feeling particularly bad, and my doctor was Charlie Lard, and he never called my house a day in his life, and I carried her to the bathroom, physically picked her up and put her down, and she fainted, and she was on the floor and I had no idea what to do. Well, I had a phone in the bathroom. At that second the phone rang, and said “Tommy, Charlie Lard!” I said “you couldn’t have called at a better time in your life,” and I told him what happened. He said “there’s a nurse right down the street from you, here’s her phone number, call her and tell her to come over and do whatever she needs to do and then meet me at the DeKalb hospital.” So I did all that, met him at the hospital and gave her a treatment, and next day she was feeling better.

But think of the odds — all the time I’ve known him and never had a phone call, I don’t guess ever from him, but to call me in the split second that she fell in the bathroom. You got to believe there’s a little more to it than that.

I think that the Lord had something to do with it maybe, I don’t know what to think beyond that. But the odds would be one in a million!

I carried her to the Piedmont hospital, and got the head arthritis doctor. He looked at her, talked to her, and he said “Mrs. Forkner, I got to tell you this now: you’re in bad shape and before you get better you’re going to be in a wheelchair,” and I’m sitting right there listening, and I interrupted and said “excuse me doctor — Martha, let’s get out of here.” So I just took her out right then. You don’t tell anybody something like that.

So I got her back home and I called a doctor in Decatur. He said “you bring her over here and we’ll get her fixed up.” So I took her over there, and walked in the door and he met us and came in, he said “Mrs. Forkner, we’re going to have you well in just a little while,” and that’s the difference between two doctors. And he did, he kept treating her and treating her, and we kept going back, going back, and eventually she got over it, but he later said that she was in the worst shape that he’s ever had a patient, and she got over it quicker than anybody he’d ever seen. But she and that doctor got to be good friends; she was always at ease around him.