The Encounter

Dawn Husnick was a young nurse in a Chicago Emergency room when she had The Encounter . He was a “lock-down” patient -- violent, with psychotic episodes who had been brought in off the streets one evening. His feet were wrapped in plastic bags, barely disguising their mold-covered, puss-oozing state. Dawn was instructed to take him to the hazmat shower, and though the man desperately needed his feet treated and tended to with antiseptics and antibiotics, the charge nurse's instructions were simply to get him into the shower as a bare minimum.

She wasn't terribly anxious to treat the man, but reflecting later on the episode Dawn writes: “This poor shell of a man had no one to love him…No one in the ER that day really looked at him and no one wanted to touch him. They wanted to ignore him and his broken life. But as much as I tried…I could not.”

So she laid out all of the tools and supplies to treat his feet, prepared warm towels and a chair, and when he was finished with the shower, she led him to the chair and she knelt down to tend his broken feet: “The room was quiet as the once-mocking security guards started to help by handing me towels. As I patted the last foot dry, I looked up and for the first time [his] eyes looked into mine. For that moment he was alert, aware and weeping as he quietly said, ‘Thank you’. In that moment, I was the one seeing Jesus. He was there all along, right where he said he would be."

It was in a Chicago Emergency room that Dawn Husnick had her Encounter. Where will you have yours?