One night I was working in ICU and as I walked out of the room I saw the nursing supervisor and a medical unit nurse pushing a bed into ICU. I took one look at the patient in that bed, and it seemed as though he had no life in him. I helped them into the room and the nursing supervisor said, “This is your patient. Give one of your patients to another nurse and take this one.” She then said that the patient has gastrointestinal bleeding, and is not responsive. She said “we didn't have time to take his recent vital signs . . . we had to transfer him to ICU.” Any ICU nurse knows that this means a lot of work. I worked and worked on him until he became responsive.

As the Bible says, “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Leviticus 17:11 If we lose a certain amount of blood, we will die. Our brilliant God designed the human body more wonderfully than any sophisticated piece of equipment. He put pressure receptors in the carotid artery, and the heart chambers, so that when the blood volume goes down, the pressure sensors pick up the volume of blood and signal the brain. Then the sympathetic nervous system tries to compensate for the low volume of blood by speeding the heart and decreasing the diameter of the blood vessels in order to increase the blood pressure to keep the brain and all the other vital organs alive. The adrenal gland starts producing a hormone???? to send a message to the bone marrow: “Hurry up and send red blood cells into circulation, for we have no red blood cells to carry oxygen.” The brain compensates also for the lack of oxygen by telling the lungs, “take deeper breaths.” The adrenal gland also produces hormones by telling the kidneys “hold the water and salt, for we have no blood volume.”

Modern medicine uses God's given physiology, and copies God's techniques to keep a patient alive. Our bodies have a language, and all the body parts are in communication with each other to keep us alive, for our God is pro-life! Glory be to my heavenly Father. I could just kiss his brain and his feet too!

Back to this patient. I worked and worked for about 9 hours to keep him alive. Toward morning, I noticed his urine output declined and he was getting diaphoretic (sweaty). I knew that he was going into hypovolemic shock again. When I checked him for responsiveness, he said “Nurse, I am going to die.” I grabbed his gown and said, “If you die, I am going to kill you. I came 11,000 miles from Iran to learn all the modern tricks to keep you alive, and now you want to die on me.” I kept pumping blood, fluids and medications, and praying for him. He finally made it. Later, he told me, “Simin, it was your love that brought me back. I saw how hard you worked, and then, when you told me if I died you were going to kill me, I knew you cared about my life.”