Bill was cut, but he felt no pain. He and his co-worker concluded that the nail must have ricocheted off his head. Still, to be on the safe side, paramedics were called, and Bill was taken to Roseau Hospital. The paramedics didn't think there was a nail in the wound. The nurses and doctors didn't think there was a nail there either. Nevertheless, Dr. Ron Bremer ordered a CAT scan of Bill's head as a precaution. Bill was waiting for the test when his wife Dawn arrived.
"They had called me at work," Dawn recalls. "I ran every stop sign between the store and the hospital. I was thinking, 'He's dead, and they didn't tell me.' "
When she rushed into the hospital room, Bill had just finished asking the nurse to tell Dawn that he was all right. She burst into tears, thankful that he was OK. Bill grabbed her hand and said, "Look, I'm fine."
Dr. Bremer's presence was also comforting. He is one of the elders at First Baptist Church in Roseau, where the McLead's attended. "He's the nicest guy you'll ever meet," Dawn says.
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Bremer was back with the test results. The nail had penetrated three inches into Bill's skull, entering just above the place where a baby has a soft spot. It was lodged between the two hemispheres of the brain, very near a major artery. Bill had not felt anything because there are no nerve endings in the brain mass.
Dawn notified Bill's parents, Bill Sr. and Marleana McLead in Newton, IA, who asked people in their church, Newton Community Heights Alliance Church, to pray for Bill. Dawn also phoned her family and asked them to pray. In addition to his day job, Bill works part-time as a newspaper carrier; the wife of the general manager for the routes put Bill's name on her church's prayer chain. (Each person on the chain phones the next person with the prayer request and then spends 15 minutes praying for the request.)
Bill was sent to United Hospital in Grand Forks, ND by ambulance, with Dawn riding along. Bill wanted to stop at the Dairy Queen on the way. He figured the ambulance would get through the line faster, with its sirens wailing.
In Grand Forks, neurosurgeon Stuart Rice prepared for surgery. He told the McLeads that, based on his experience with bullets lodged in people's brains, Bill had a 20% chance of surviving the operation and, if he survived, a 10% chance of a full recovery.
Bill's operation began at 8:00 p.m. and lasted two-and-a-half hours. Then began the worst part of the ordeal for Dawn.
"I was sitting there alone," she recalls. "The doctor said it would be touch and go. I hadn't eaten, but during the night I was throwing up and was just beside myself. About 2 a.m., the hospital chaplain came walking in. He sat down and prayed with me. I needed that. It got me through the rest of the night."
Dawn says the incident "forced me to let go. I want to hold on to everything. I want things to be OK because I made them OK, and there was nothing I could do."
The nail had entered between the two hemispheres of the brain and was pressing against an artery wall. If it had punctured the artery, Bill would have died immediately, or at least as soon as the nail had been removed. Dr Rice said he had never seen anything press against an artery wall like that without puncturing it.
But the nail did not puncture the artery, and Bill is now making a full recovery. Amazingly, the nails Bill had grabbed a few days earlier for work on the project were the wrong size. They were a quarter-inch shorter than what he had intended to use.
Bill says, "I guess I was pretty calm through the whole thing. I just felt that if God was going to take me, He would have taken me."
Dawn says, "God was good to us."
Bill's mother Marleana agrees: "This I consider an old-fashioned read-it-in-the-Bible miracle. God had His hand in it two weeks before, when Bill picked up the wrong nails."
Evangelical Press News Service