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Father Juan and Doctor John: more than we deserve

15 Jun

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Father Juan is the Director of the Notre Dame Center where I stayed in Jerusalem. Last night, in asking me about my knee and getting me absolutely convinced that I should be worried about blood clots in my leg and that I should not get on a plane without seeing a doctor, I agreed to allow him to call the house doctor for me, and set up an appointment for me for one hour before the taxi was to pick me up to drive me north to the Sea of Galilee. Dr. John showed up and took me to my hotel room for some questions and an exam. A youngish, nice looking man with perfect English and a British accent, casually dressed and wearing sandals, he pushed and pulled my left leg and left knee in different directions, and knew exactly where to press on the ball of my right foot to get a reaction from that side of my walking problems. He decided it was probably just something strained within the knee itself. He was satisfied that there was no need to worry about clots, assured me that I was doing everything right with resting the knee and elevating it, and gave me his cell phone number in case anything were to change. Doctor John charged me nothing, as a favor to his friend Father Juan. “Consider it done for God and for the Church and for a priest,” he said. I am so well taken care of. When I gave him abundant thanks with, “It is more than I deserve,” he came back with, “We all get more than we deserve, don’t we?” As I shook his hand, he wished me well and kissed my hand.

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