ABOUT THREE YEARS AGO while watering my garden and enjoying the sounds of birds settling in for the evening, I inadvertently stepped backwards off a retaining wall. I fell about seven feet, landing on my back on a sloping concrete path, entangling my legs in a wooden gate. Immediately, the first line of "the scientific statement of being" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures flooded my thought: "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter" (p. 468). In severe pain, I held to this thought, reasoning that my body as matter has no substance, and that the concrete I'd fallen on has no real substance as matter, so the one coming into contact with the other could not be harmful. The pain, although not completely gone, lessened.
My husband and daughter came running, as I must have called out as I fell. They opened the gate, releasing my legs, but because of the steep slope of the ground they couldn't help me get on my feet. I asked them to turn me on my stomach, thinking that I could crawl up the slope. I then discovered that I could not move my legs at all.
My husband contacted the ambulance service to carry me into the house. My husband and daughter are not Christian Scientists and were very concerned about my condition, as were the ambulance officers. I assured them that as a Christian Scientist, I had found prayer effective to meet all kinds of emergencies. However, because of the seriousness of the injury, the ambulance officers insisted on taking me to the emergency department of our city's major hospital.
