After that last optimistic post, I hate to follow through with a tale of negative bearing on my health...the probablity of my needing surgery on my cervical and lumbar spines....In fact, the locally well known Spine surgeon whom I'd visited last July had corroborated that and said that this was his plan, once I'd sufficiently recovered from the MRSA. He was basing this decision on a 2oo7 MRI. But then my pain doctor recently ordered a set of MRIs and xrays....and thhe news there was not good. They did change the picture...
Yesterday I went back to the spine surgeon, fully anticipating that I would leave that office armed with a concrete treatment plan and a date for the first of the two surgeries. And I anticipated that once the pain of the two surgeries was relatively gone, that my pain would be significantly less than it is now. That was my expectation.
This was my reality:
The doctor looked at the test results before entering the exam room. He asked me a few questions about my general health. Then he lowered the boom. He told me that he could not operate;That basically, my spine had deteriorated beyond any hope of repair or even relief; That surgery would remove all of my mobility and would not diminish my pain. I listened to him silently and mentally cursed the tears which welled up in my eyes and poured down my face.
The nurse, who was there, silently handed my a tissue from a box she held out to me. And I mopped futily at the flood tide.
The doctor paused, and then said rather uncertainly, "Cynthia, it's not that I don't care. I do. But it's just that the technology you would need to help you doesn't exist right now. I wish I could help you; I really do." And then he stepped toward me with tears in his own eyes and pulled me close.
I don't think I've ever been hugged by a doctor before.
And I don't think I've ever needed a doctor to hug me, as much as I did right then.
I thanked the doctor...and the only thing on my mind was to get out of that office and to the ladies room in the hallway so I could bawl properly as I knew I needed to. So that is what I did. I wailed and sobbed in the ladies room outside of the office....and felt such a crushing disappointment that I couldn't breathe.
And underlying that disappointment was the real problem; and that was terror. What is coming?? And is there truly nothing that can be done? Am I supposed to sit back while this disease eats me alive and cripples me more and more? What kind of pain will that involve? How can I possibly endure pain greater than what I feel now?
I tried to call my husband a few minutes later from the cafeteria where my friend took me to get some lunch. I was desperate for a comforting word. And I got .....zip.
He said some completely inappropriate and, I felt, heartless thing that totally did not recognize my pain or affirm me or bring me any comfort. I muttered into the phone as tears once more threatened to undo me, "I've got to go" and hung up the phone...
I sat there alone. My friend who was with me offered advice which was not helpful (this being to refuse to accept and in fact, to deny that I was ill or had a problem and instead "Claim by faith that God had already healed me." I refused to engage in this falsehood and bad theology, which angered her, I could tell. We exchanged a few words of mild dispute and I fell silent again....locked up with my misery.
Last night, I went to our monthly prayer meeting at church. Our pastor took one look at me and commented that I looked exhausted --and pale. "What's the matter??" he asked, coming closer to me. I unfolded the tale of the doctor's prognosis for me. And tears came to the pastor's eyes also. He asked a few questions and then had to walk away to begin the meeting.
Midmeeting he directed the prayer in a general direction, which I knew was specifically aimed at my need. The at the end of the service he placed a chair in front of him, facing the congregation. He invited anyone with a need for prayer to come and sit in that prayer to receive prayer. I was the first one to go up and they all rose up and came forward, placing their hands on me and began to pray. Many, many of them sobbed as they prayed out of the intensity of their desire for God to move and to heal me.
The pastor tied things up after a good fifteen minutes of prayer, during which the presence of the Holy Spirit was palpable, with a prayer that the congregation would surround me during the next legs of my journey. That, at times when I was suffering and felt overwhelmed, God would move one of them to call at just the right moment. That I would have supernatural power to endure and to face whatever is coming. I noticed in this prayer the change in direction in his prayers from the prayers he'd offered for me on Sunday. No longer was he insisting that God heal me. I think that God must have given him the same sense that he'd given me: that it is not God's intention to remove this trial from my life. That instead, I will need support and aid and love and help ...rather than a continued beating on the closed door of God's will toward me for healing.
I, for one, was glad to see this shift. Not that I did not like or desire the prayer for healing. It simply did not jive with the strong sense that God has given me that this is a path that I MUST walk...like it or not. Accept it or not. So this type of prayer actually was more in line with my need than were the prayers for healing. My friends do not accept this point of view that I have. They do not understand that sometimes God answers requests such as theirs--sincere, heart broken and heart wrenched prayer for healing--with a negative response.
But I understand it.
As did Job. ("Though He slay me; yet will I trust in Him")
And as did Paul, ("My strength is made perfect in your weakness)- and therefore he ceased his petitions to God for healing after three requests to God, which were all denied.
There have been times in my life, when I KNEW that God intended to heal me. Like the time when I was wheelchair ridden for over two years and was told that I would never walk again. So strong was this faith and sense of God's good intention toward me, that I never worried, and never even allowed myself to imagine the"what ifs" of being permanently crippled. No, I KNEW God would heal me and with the help of two years of very hard work on my part, I began, once more to walk--haltingly at first but with greater and greater sureness, until now, only a doctor or physical therapist can see the residual damage to my muscles from that time.
Like the times when I was in serious shape due to pneumonias, asthma, and meningitis. I never feared at those times, despite the fears of the doctors then.
But this time is different.
This road is unavoidable.. God has a plan for it and for me. And the plan is for me to walk it....or crawl it...And I truly do not want to. But I truly will do so, if that is God 's plan. And I will have to cling so tightly to his hand to get me through this. Already, night by night I take it minute by minute as I am overwhelmed by pain and by loneliness. This is just the beginning of my personal villa de la rosa; I pray that I can walk it with strngth and yieldedness and openness to what God wants to do in me as a result.
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