“Knock-knock! Brud! Brud John! Someone’s sick!”

“Ohhhhh,” I groaned. It had been a late night and a hard week. This couldn’t be happening, not tonight. I groaned again. “Is it really an emergency? Are you sure it can’t wait until morning?”

“I don’t know, Brud,” the voice came back. “She’s having an awfully hard time breathing.”

“Oh, okay,” I mumbled in a tone that probably wasn’t as gracious as a missionary’s should be. “I’m coming. Let me grab my stuff.”

After making sure I was awake, my summoner disappeared into the night, apparently not stopping to think that I might not know where the sick person lived. I grabbed my stethoscope and a few common drugs and rushed out to the end of my porch. There I paused, my fuzzy brain trying to figure out what to do. There are 70 houses in Balangabong, I thought to myself. How am I supposed to find one sick lady?

Thoughts of going back to bed flitted through my mind, but my better sense won out. My summoner had said it was an emergency, so I’d better get going. Vaguely hoping I might hear a commotion that would lead me to the right house, I stumbled off. Groping along the trail in a semi-awake state, barely able to see anything in the dim light of my dying flashlight, I came to my senses as I felt myself sliding down a bank and landing in mush. Flicking the faint beam from my feet to the bank around me, I realized I had fallen into a neighbor’s open trash pit. The family dog, wondering why a white man was standing in his masters’ trash pit at two in the morning, began barking furiously.

I finally got my wits about me enough to figure out how to get back to the trail, and I staggered on, listening for the ruckus I hoped would lead me to the woman who was sick enough that I needed to be called in the middle of the night. Sure enough, as I came to the outskirts of the village I heard a hum of voices that led me to Rosa’s hut.

What I heard as I ducked under the eaves brought me wide awake instantly. Rosa’s labored breathing rattled in her throat so loudly that it was clearly audible across the hut. “Why?” I muttered to myself under my breath. “Why do people always wait until two in the morning? She must have been sick for days or weeks.”

Rosa was six months pregnant, and the drugs I had brought were not safe in pregnancy. So, after a quick assessment, I told the family to start boiling water, and I ran back to my house for the right medicines.

At this point, God stepped in to compensate for my lack of experience and resources. I didn’t have a blood pressure cuff at the time. Even if I’d had one, I was so focused on Rosa’s breathing that I would have missed the real problem.

While I was getting medicines, the local village health care worker arrived. Her training consisted of one thing and one thing only—taking blood pressure. So, desperately wanting to help, the lady took Rosa’s blood pressure, and I overheard her report just as I arrived back at the hut. Rosa’s blood pressure was through the roof. I paused in the darkness outside the hut. Something was tickling the back of my brain. And then it hit me. Rosa had toxemia.

Instantly, I knew I was not equipped to handle this in the mountains, and Rosa had to get to a hospital. I also knew that the doctors in the hospital regularly use the same injectable medicine I had been about to administer, and they don’t listen to their patients. So if I gave Rosa the medicine for her respiratory symptoms, and she told them she had already received the dose, they would inject her again anyway and overdose her.

I explained to the family that they had to get Rosa to the hospital. I made her husband memorize the word toxemia so he could prompt the doctors to check for it. Then we sat down to wait for morning when the first available transportation left from the barrio a half hour away.

I heard the rest of the story later. Rosa almost died on the trip to the hospital, but by God’s grace she made it there alive. The doctors confirmed my diagnosis. Sadly, they were unable to save the baby. Rosa is healthy, back home in Balangabong.

Sometimes I am tempted to wonder whether I’m making a difference among the Batangan. So much continues on just as it has for millennia. But when I see Rosa sitting in front of me in church, I know that God is indeed working. And yet, I wonder. How many others are calling in the night and dying for want of someone willing to leave all and follow Jesus?

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