Season of Sharing delivers aid to woman after surgery.
Woman gets help after emergency surgery
When Melody Nichols was stuck at home recovering from sudden appendicitis surgery, she kept trying to return to work so she could pay her bills. But her body, riddled with pain, held her back.
“It was like God said, ‘Sit there, and let me do my work,’ ” Nichols said, while drinking a cup of coffee at her grandfather’s kitchen table several months after the surgery.
Nichols, a 30-year-old single mother, is usually able to get by on her own. As a dental assistant, she made enough money per hour to afford a two-bedroom in San Ramon and put food on the table for herself and 12-year-old son. But when she started getting an agonizing pain in her stomach last spring, her sense of self-sufficiency began to unravel.
At first, she found herself having to go in to work late, or leave a little early, a few days a week. Then the pain became progressively worse. The next few weeks were a blur of days spent in bed, doctor’s appointments and then a rush to the hospital for emergency surgery. If she didn’t get an appendectomy the next day, her doctor worried her appendix would explode, Nichols said.
It felt so unfair, she said, as she did not even know what had caused the appendicitis. To her, it just seemed like a case of bad luck.
After the surgery, she was stuck at home for about three weeks, and while she was recovering, her bills started piling up. Car payments. Electric bills. Cable bills. Rent. It got to the point where she didn’t think she would be able to pay her landlord on time, risking eviction from her beloved apartment.
One day she went to the welfare office, looking for government assistance. But the case worker said
she already had made too much money during the year to qualify for assistance, she said. So instead, he recommended she apply for The Chronicle’s Season of Sharing fund, which provides one-time funds to people facing unexpected crises.
But after several weeks, she heard nothing back from the fund, and began to give up hope that she would get the help. But then, she said, God suddenly worked his magic. One day in July, she found a letter in her mailbox: It was from Season of Sharing, telling her that the fund would cover her July rent.
“I got in my car and started crying and was like, ‘He totally came through,’ ” she said.
Nichols credits her receipt of the Season of Sharing money to her faith in God, which she found a few years ago when she began attending the Victory Outreach Heart of the Bay church in Hayward.
While she was at home in pain and stressed out about her looming debt, one Scripture verse constantly rang through her head: “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
And so she did, and then her prayers were answered on that day in July.
“God taught me to just be humble, and he’ll provide,” she said. Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani