I’ve been meeting so many closet amazing people here – you know, the type who pretend they’re normal until you ask a few questions, and then they reluctantly reveal their true superhuman identities - that I have decided it would be selfish to keep their stories to myself. Here’s the first one, enjoy!
Carmen Walker is a fiery, talkative biomedical engineer from Florida. She flies in every few months, sometimes in response to a frantic phone call at the last minute, to fix and maintain our medical machinery and avert disasters of all sorts. In her civilian life she runs an anesthetic supply company; I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, so she described it to me: Essentially, when a patient is on the operating table and something goes wrong with any of the machines, she is called in and has about 3 minutes (1 minute for a child) to figure out the problem and fix it. Carmen is smarter than me.
The path that brought Carmen to Mercy Ships is quite fascinating. She took a few years off after college and eventually decided to go to medical school. She was in her final year of residency for cardiac surgery (that’s six and a half years, folks) when she had an experience that changed the course of her life: She had a woman on the operating table all cut up and prepared for open heart surgery, when someone from the hospital came rushing in and told her she couldn’t operate because the patient didn’t have insurance. They had to sew the patient back up without fixing what needed to be fixed. Disillusioned, Carmen walked out on her career as a surgeon.
After looking around for a new profession that would suit her qualifications and abilities, Carmen decided to go into biomedical engineering, choosing anesthesia as a specialty because everyone said it was the hardest. Some years later, she was reading a Reader’s Digest article about Mercy Ships’ chief surgeon, Dr. Gary Parker, and felt an inexplicable compulsion to call the ship. After being passed around from department to department, as one is wont to do when calling Mercy Ships, she finally spoke to someone in a position to help her. She told him who she was and that she didn’t really know why she was calling; he told her that he knew exactly why she was calling – it was because they had just finished a prayer meeting where they were asking God for a biomedical engineer to call.
So, five years later, Carmen is still swooping in to save the day, with her little blue suitcase containing everything she needs to work her magic and keep the Operating in Operating Rooms. Thank God for the smart people!
Carmen Walker is a fiery, talkative biomedical engineer from Florida. She flies in every few months, sometimes in response to a frantic phone call at the last minute, to fix and maintain our medical machinery and avert disasters of all sorts. In her civilian life she runs an anesthetic supply company; I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, so she described it to me: Essentially, when a patient is on the operating table and something goes wrong with any of the machines, she is called in and has about 3 minutes (1 minute for a child) to figure out the problem and fix it. Carmen is smarter than me.
The path that brought Carmen to Mercy Ships is quite fascinating. She took a few years off after college and eventually decided to go to medical school. She was in her final year of residency for cardiac surgery (that’s six and a half years, folks) when she had an experience that changed the course of her life: She had a woman on the operating table all cut up and prepared for open heart surgery, when someone from the hospital came rushing in and told her she couldn’t operate because the patient didn’t have insurance. They had to sew the patient back up without fixing what needed to be fixed. Disillusioned, Carmen walked out on her career as a surgeon.
After looking around for a new profession that would suit her qualifications and abilities, Carmen decided to go into biomedical engineering, choosing anesthesia as a specialty because everyone said it was the hardest. Some years later, she was reading a Reader’s Digest article about Mercy Ships’ chief surgeon, Dr. Gary Parker, and felt an inexplicable compulsion to call the ship. After being passed around from department to department, as one is wont to do when calling Mercy Ships, she finally spoke to someone in a position to help her. She told him who she was and that she didn’t really know why she was calling; he told her that he knew exactly why she was calling – it was because they had just finished a prayer meeting where they were asking God for a biomedical engineer to call.
So, five years later, Carmen is still swooping in to save the day, with her little blue suitcase containing everything she needs to work her magic and keep the Operating in Operating Rooms. Thank God for the smart people!
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