I truly believe that angels come into your life disguised as people sometimes to help you along!  I had this very experience when I was in the hospital after having knee replacement surgery last month.  I had not slept in three days and was in excrusiating pain after the surgery. Things had not gone at all well in surgery and I ended up in so much pain that the medicines they were giving me did not at all help even though it was a very high dose of morphine.  I was so miserable I wished I had died in surgery when my heart had briefly stopped and was resusitated.  At that moment laying there in my hospital room totally sleep deprived and in agony, all I could think about was wanting an end to the pain. It felt like there was an animal knawing on my leg and it was relentless, and I was so upset that I could not make it stop.

About 2 AM on the third night of my sleepless hospital stay, an older woman with curly white hair and very fair skin just walked into my room and sat down next to my bed and pulled the chair close and wiped a cool moist towel to my feverish forehead (the towel just appeared in her hand, she did not walk over to the sink and wet a towel it was just there in her hand) which I found very curious and then she took my hand and held it softly caressing my hand.  I asked her who she was and I thought maybe she had come in the wrong room or something but when I asked her if she was in the wrong room she said she was here for me to help me to finally get some sleep.  I looked at her like she was crazy but she just keep holding my hand and massaging it, and she was humming a most beautiful tune that I had never heard before. She kept telling me to sleep and that I would not feel the pain for awhile and to just shut my eyes and relax.  I did shut my eyes as I could not keep them open, they became heavy and felt like lead.  I must have fallen asleep right away, because I saw her lovely face and curly fluffy silver white hair and smelled lilacs and lillies in the air as I drifted off to the most delicious sleep I had had in months. I slept for six painfree hours and when I was awakened for breakfast, my hand was laying on the chair that was pulled up right next to the bed.  I could smell lilacs in the air and  my hand smelled like lilacs very distinctly like I had just held a bouquet in my hand.

I asked the night nurse who was still on duty who came to visit me in the middle of the night and the nurse told me that visitors were not allowed after nine PM and they had to sign in to see patients and no one had signed in to see me. The nurse was in the hall most of the night with her med cart doing meds and she said that so no one gone in or out of my room. So it had to be an angel, that is the only explanation I can come to.  It was so wonderful. Some of my friends think it was just hallucinations from lack of sleep and pain, but I will always think that it was angel who knew I needed sleep to get through the trauma. When I awoke I was no longer in the intense pain I had been it, it was only a discomfort. I asked around to see if anyone of that description was a patient in ICU where I was, and there was no one looking like her as a patient there either. Whether she was an angel I will never know for sure, but for me she will always be an angel.