The Surgeon Who Worked by Candlelight

During the fall of 1944, Dr. grueling months of the London Blitz had left — actually, let me craft something more fitting and specific.

The Night the Power Went Out on Maplewood Drive

In March of 2012, a massive ice storm knocked out electricity across central Oklahoma for eleven days. On Maplewood Drive in Norman, eighty-three-year-old Margaret Tillman sat in her darkened living room on the third night, wrapped in quilts, listening to tree limbs crack like gunshots outside her window. She was alone, and she was afraid.

What Margaret did not know — what she could not see from her frozen living room — was everything happening on her behalf. Three streets over, her neighbor Brian had already called the Red Cross. At the National Guard armory, soldiers were loading generators onto flatbed trucks headed for her zip code. Her grandson in Dallas was halfway through a six-hour drive north with space heaters and groceries in the back seat. The electric company had sixty-two linemen working double shifts within a four-mile radius of her house.