 If someone told you to go find a needle in a haystack, would you? Would you if that “needle” consisted of two diamond rings and a pearl bracelet belonging to someone you didn’t even know?
As a custodian at Paoli Hospital in Paoli, PA, Frank Dabney spends his days cleaning the messes other people leave behind. Why then would he volunteer to sift through a mountain of hospital waste to help a family he had just met?
On September 25, 2007, one day before his 54th wedding anniversary, George Myers died in his sleep. His widow, Susan Myers, passed out after his funeral. A diabetic, Susan did not respond well to her insulin, and was taken to Paoli Hospital. There, her children removed her wedding band, a 50th Anniversary ring, and a pearl bracelet. For safe keeping her son Greg put them inside a rubber glove, tied it off at the end, and thought he put it in his pocket. A day later, he couldn’t find the glove, and he and his siblings began to panic. The frightful conclusion was that the glove had been left inside their mother’s hospital room, mistaken for trash, and thrown away. The thought of telling their just-widowed mother that her wedding band was gone was gut wrenching. When Dabney informed the family that the garbage had already been picked up and taken to the local landfill, the Myers’ clan called the waste management company. Since that load—a huge compacted mass of garbage, 10-feet wide, 30-feet long and 10-feet high—had not yet been dumped, the haulers agreed to let the family pick through it. Dabney volunteered to help.
Dressed in head-to-toe plastic clothing and cheap face masks, the group headed for the landfill. Seven hours and hundreds of bags of hospital trash later, the exhausted, emotionally spent family was ready to call it quits. Dabney told them, “Never quit five minutes before the miracle.” Dabney said one more prayer and pulled one last bag from the pile. There it was. A blue hospital glove, tied off at the end, containing the small treasures of a beloved mother. “I’m no hero,” Dabney said. “I felt compassion for them. I would just want someone to do the same for me.” Marvelous Mercer Megan Megale always knew that her daughter Shea was special. Confined to a wheelchair, Shea is one of only a few hundred children in the U.S. diagnosed with a rare degenerative muscular disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 2. Unable to do many things on her own, Shea is often found in the company of her canine companion, a black retriever mix named Mercer.
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