I suppose it’d be too long to cover all the details, but the gist is, I found myself out of state and in severe pain.  It had the symptoms of maybe a kidney stone, maybe appendicitis, (both of which I’ve suffered in the last three years once, and never before).  At the behest of my loved ones around me watching me suffer, I agreed to let them take me to an ER at about one in the morning.  (The pains had started about seven that evening, and I tried very hard to hide them and manage them myself.  Unfortunately they intensified and I was no longer able to shrug it off as “a little stomach pain”.)

After an especially grueling five hour ER visit in small town (out of state) hospital with ZERO other patients, they assessed I had a 4mm stone and it was about 1.5 inches from the bladder.  Oh good, I reasoned, the last one I had was 5mm and I passed it.  This one is almost all the way down, should be over with soon, I reasoned.  They gave me a strong pain killer and sent me on my way.

I thought the reason I was so tired when we were driving the 6+ hours home the next day was just from getting back to the hotel at six and having about four hours of sleep.  I thought it a little odd I was nauseous and had to pull over a few times to vomit. 

A friend picked me up and took me to the pharmacy where I got the pain killer prescription and I arrived home Thursday evening.  I felt shredded so laid down, for what ended up being several hours.  I tried to get up around eight or nine that evening and get something to eat, but didn’t have much appetite, and kept falling asleep, so finally went to bed for the night.  Oddly, a couple hours before I went to bed this phrase from a worship song began playing in my head, “This is how I fight my battles.  It may feel like I’m surrounded but I’m surrounded by You.”  Hmm, weird, I thought.  God usually gives me songs in the night or early morning.

I woke up in the three o’clock hour with that intense pain moving in.  Trying to ward it off, I got up and took the pain killer and went back to bed.  About an hour later I woke up to my teeth chattering.  Weird, I thought.  Weirder still, it worsened.  They began clattering violently, and it hurt.  I tried to hold my jaws to settle them, but I couldn’t control it.  My husband was now awake and trying to figure out what was going on.  It kept getting worse, more violent, until my body even began convulsing.  I couldn’t speak because my teeth were chattering so badly.  By now I was quite frightened because I had no idea what was going on in my body or how to alleviate it.

Bill got up and began gathering things to go to the ER.  When I got out of bed I was startled that I couldn’t walk well because of my body shaking so badly.  I couldn’t grab anything with my hands, and I could barely speak other than with single words and repeating them until they came through the teeth correctly. 

Our city has two main hospitals that carry their own problems, and we have found a non-corporate ER room that is free of so many of the hospital bureaucracies.  There they got me right in, began assessing, threw warm blankets on me, and started drawing blood while administering pain control.  After several blood draws, examining my prior night’s ER records we had brought, and a urinalysis, I was surprised when the doctor came in and said, “Well you won’t be going home today.”

I wasn’t really prepared for that.  I thought it was another matter of just passing the stone.  I had been chiding myself that I should have been doing the preventative treatment the weeks prior when I thought my kidney was a little achy. 

He went on to say they were going to give me some powerful antibiotics intravenously because my blood was sepsis, and my white blood count was quite elevated (and I had a 103 temperature).  He said that either the stone was infected, or the stone had gotten caught and caused an infection, and now my blood was poisoned.  He made it sound rather urgent, rather life or death if left untreated, and they immediately began administering antibiotics.

He then went on to tell me the next course of action where I would be transferred by ambulance (!) to a major hospital where an urologist will be selected to determine the next steps, which would likely be surgery.  There were other details that I’m missing but that’s the crucial part.

I waited for all the hospital staff to finish and leave the room, then turned to Bill and said, “I don’t think I can do it.  He’s never failed me before.”  Bill knows me, knows my heart and understands me.  He said, “Maybe there will be another option.”  So he asked the doctor when he came back next how likely he thinks surgery will be the solution.  He said in my current state he thought it very likely, but that would be the urologist’s decision.  When Bill asked what other options we had, he answered that I could pass the stone and then they’d just have to do intense antibiotic treatment. 

That became my prayer.  That’s when I reached out to friends to pray the stone passed so that surgery was removed from the solutions.  The phrase of that song became the song I sang to myself in my head the next 24 hours or so.

The hospital adventure is too long for this rant, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be in some ways, and worse in others.  Bureaucracy was definitely still an issue.  The urologist was ready to do surgery, but was actually quite reasonable and said he couldn’t do that without knowing where the stone was.  He ordered x-rays and they couldn’t find anything.  He ordered another CT scan and couldn’t find anything conclusive.  He requested I stay overnight while they kept fluids in me, monitored my temperature (which wasn’t as dramatic, but still showed infection), and saw how I landed in the morning.  When he left it was left that surgery was still a possibility the next afternoon.

That’s the backstory.  But it’s the context for the next part.

My first musing about said trial

I was absolutely miserable.  My body ached from the fever, from the hospital bed, from the whole ordeal.  Pain meds minimized but didn’t remove the pains.  My only prayer was that the stone pass so that I didn’t need surgery.  I was okay with antibiotics; I saw their urgent place.

This is where I hate explaining.  I have no desire to defend my decisions, yet explaining them is burdensome.  I don’t need anyone to agree with me, and I certainly don’t expect anyone else live by my own standards.  These are standards I acquired as I grew.

I have some very basic beliefs.  They’re mine; they’re my beliefs, and I’m not asking anyone else to believe them.  I’ve had too many encounters with God where He established His sovereignty over my body and I relinquished personal choice in the matter.  I simply yielded myself into His hands.

I didn’t have anyone in my life I could depend on (before Bill), and I threw myself at the mercy of my Creator decades ago.  I’d rather be at His mercy than man’s.  I’d rather yield to His wisdom and power than man’s.  Those are my beliefs, my convictions. 

I’ve heard it all over the years.  “God made doctors.”  (Did He?  Or did He create man and give man wisdom?  Let’s be clear.)  “God uses doctors.”  Absolutely.  I have no qualms with that.  “God gave us brains.”  (I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.)  If you can think of an objection to my belief system, I’d pretty much guarantee I’ve either heard it or contemplated it myself.

But I view life and the matters of life through the lens of walking with my Creator.  So every time I’ve had a crisis point, a moment of decision, a place I must choose which way to turn, I look for God first.  Where is He in this?  What is He saying?  What can I glean from what I’ve learned about Him to help me make this decision?

And I try to never, ever go backwards.  If I trusted God for matters of my health/finances/relationships/etc. in the past, how do I stop trusting Him in this new, scary instance?  Is this new situation too big for Him?  Is it somehow going to stump Him?  If He has proven Himself faithful with my particular needs before, is this an instance He may drop the ball?  Would I rather trust God or man?

See, that’s where I think the rub comes in.  We make decisions, have reactions based on fear too much of the time.  I’m in excruciating pain and suffering and there’s a possibility I may die from said pain without intervention, so at this instance I am at the same crossroads I’ve been before.  If I decide differently, that this is somehow too big or scary to trust God, then I have walked backward in my faith.  That’s not a place I’m comfortable being.  To be honest, I’d rather die.  When I looked at Bill and said, “I don’t think I can do that; He’s never failed me.”  I also said, “I’m okay with dying.”

For all of my life, God has been my one constant.  He has never failed me.  (Bill is a close second, but he has not been here all of my life.)  God cares for me more than anyone possibly could.  He knows me better than anyone ever will.  It is simple to trust Him (but not always easy).  There is no doctor who knows my body better than God.  There is no doctor that knows what’s going on in my body better than God.  I like my odds there.  Now it’s just trying to get myself aligned with God for the needs of my body.  I don’t mind that work.  I’m working with God.  Man is so much more inconsistent.  (Which is not to say God does not use man, because there have been many instances God has and I have acquiesced to the person He put in my path.)

My second musing about trial

Saturday morning when they still did not have a visual on the stone and my fever had not spiked but had remained under control, they reluctantly sent me home with oral antibiotics and pain killers and specific instructions.  If my fever was to spike and/or pain increase, I was to return at once. 

Little did I realize my real battle was in front of me.  Once I got home (Saturday morning around ten), I laid down after taking my antibiotic, only to wake up twenty minutes later and vomit it up.  My fever shot up a bit and I felt quite sick.  As the day progressed I fought nausea, loss of appetite, fever, and absolutely no strength or energy.  It took too much energy to speak, and I communicated by whispers meted out by necessity.  I was not able to walk well on my own.  If I had to walk on my own it was painfully slow and shuffled.

If I were to be honest, I would think this may be what it feels like to be dying.  I couldn’t take antibiotics or pain killers because I couldn’t eat and if I didn’t eat, I vomited.  It was a very, very long day.  The day before I had sorta joked, “I didn’t see my week going like this.”  On Saturday, I wasn’t sure what the next 24 hours were going to bring.

Everyone who saw me (except Bill) begged me to go back to the hospital.  My kids saw me early afternoon, and when they returned late afternoon they were dismayed.  They exclaimed that I looked horribly worse.  They lovingly implored us to not be “stubborn” and to go back to the hospital, that I was doing terribly and sepsis is not something you can take lightly. 

My daughter got me some jello.  Another daughter got me some pretzels.  I ate what I could (a few bites of each), and waited to see if I could keep them down.  My children left.  After thirty minutes or so, Bill and I prayed over the antibiotics and asked God to remove the nausea.  I took the pill.  A couple hours later I laid down, feeling the worse I had been feeling all day, honestly wondering if I was dying.  I was too weak to pray, to answer my phone, to talk, to move, to do anything at all.

When I laid down, I committed it all to God – the whole thing.  If I should go to the hospital, I would do what He said.  If I were to die, please take care of my family.  I asked Him to heal me, to remove the infection, but however it went, I released myself (again, as I always do) into His care.  The last words I prayed were, “I trust You.”

Around midnight I woke up in a pool of sweat and pain free.  My fever had broken.  I think I laid in bed smiling for an hour, thanking God for the breakthrough.  When I laid down, I thought the possibility existed that maybe I wouldn’t wake up the next day.

I’m not out of the woods yet.  I’ll be taking antibiotics for another eight days.  I had a low grade fever off and on all day on Sunday.  There are still risks involved.  I’m not here to make a stand for “never going to the doctor”.  I just haven’t quite figured out how to trust God and man simultaneously. 

Which leads me to this last muse…. Is it really stubbornness?  In an age of unfaithfulness, wouldn’t conviction seem a lot like stubbornness?  We live in a world, a society, a nation even, that bows the knee to human prowess and has been quite vocal in recent years at mocking God.  Is me trying to walk out my convictions that contradict worldly systems offensive?  Didn’t Paul speak of such things when he spoke of the carnal mind being unable to comprehend the things of the spirit?  When you come at me with human reasoning in matters of faith, you solidify my stance. 

Can I have the freedom to exercise my faith to the best of my ability?  Or is that now somehow relegated to categories of “stubbornness” or “stupidity”?   Should I bend my convictions to the altars of human knowledge and human wisdom?  Or should the altars of human knowledge and wisdom bend to the wisdom of God?  I want to represent Him well.

I don’t necessarily have the answers.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I needed time to seek Him, to figure it out.  I went home to do that.  I have to take each of these situations on a case by case and see if I am able to walk out my convictions with the decisions I make.  It is my greatest desire to walk with God in the manner He created me for, and sometimes that takes some time to figure out.