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The day ended much better than it started.

It was mid-August. Early-morning rush hour.

I parked the car on the street and ran inside to drop off my daughter at day camp. I left my lights flashing, because that's what you do when you want to signal you will be moving right along.

I came back out to find a police officer writing a ticket. Parking there - during rush hour, and in the bicycle lane, as it happens - was a no-no.

So I did what any stressed-out mom would do: I stamped my feet. I pleaded and yelled. I even tried to reason with him: "Come on, I was only there for two minutes. And besides, listen to what I'm dealing with. ..."

"Are you a school bus? No, you are not." End of discussion. He flipped shut his little pad, popped his pen in his pocket and drove off to find new infractions.

The rules were clear: He was following them, I was not.

I slammed the door and ripped up the ticket.

In a fury I drove to the hospital, and back into the suspended animation of our family health crisis.

My husband had just had a lung transplant. He was improving, but life was feeling out of control.

We were spending most of our time shuttling between Tim Hortons and a wing on the seventh floor.

They had rules, too. You couldn't miss them. No cellphones. Visitors for 10 minutes an hour. Absolutely no children under 12. No snotty noses.

In practice, nurses let us bend almost all of these restrictions.

We smuggled in a cellphone. We stayed for as long as the patient wanted us. And the four-year-old could visit, as long as she was quiet. Her nose stayed mercifully

snot-free.

Still, after three weeks of this, we were all feeling the strain.

Life had become a non-stop commute from our temporary home to hospital to day camp and back again. Daily e-mail updates to a growing circle of relatives and friends I didn't know we had. Dinners to make, and a child to entertain. An impossible struggle to appear normal when life had turned upside down.

When all of this started, we discovered we would have to relocate to Toronto from Nova Scotia. You know how people ask, "What can I do to help?" So many people somehow knew exactly what we would need.

A colleague sent an immediate e-mail: "I'll be out of my apartment for four weeks," she wrote. "Take it." We did. Two grateful adults and a busy little girl, living carefully in a condo furnished in white.

It turned out my husband was too sick to fly to Toronto. So another friend jumped in on a day's notice: He drove us more than 1,600 kilometres over two days, with Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony playing on the speaker in the back seat. Over and over again.

I rented parking from a guy who posted on a bulletin board. He talked to the woman who runs his health club and she waived a long list of rules. Suddenly we had access to a pool - in the hottest weeks of summer.

Fast forward to this day in August.

I was still stewing about the ticket when my phone rang late in the afternoon. Oh God. What now?

It was a woman I'd never met, returning my call from the week before. She runs the daycare down the street. A five-minute walk from our temporary home. Spitting distance from where I hoped to work when the hospital stay was over.

"We have a very long waiting list," she started, "but this is an emergency. I have no idea what you must be going through. I want to help."

She said our daughter could start the next week. Finally: order from chaos.

I sat down on the grass and cried.

A new friend recently said something I'll never forget: What he likes most about life is the random ability for good things to happen at the right time when they're least expected.

People do good things for each other all the time. They live by the golden rule.

But sometimes it's the people who break the rules who take your breath away.

Nancy Waugh-Umlah lives in Dartmouth, N.S.

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