PERSONAL: Sisters & Daughters

It doesn't matter how you try to analyze the situation from this side of the event. To understand me, you have to be right in it. I woke up with a shooting pain in my neck at 2:45a.m. Nausea swallowed me. This was a few weeks after my initial neck pain (subluxations and pinched nerves at C3 and C4), and I wasn't in the mood for more. I woke Charissa up and told her I needed help. While getting dressed I started to shake, not like shivering, but full-on spasms. This was new. This was not desirable.

We headed for a taxi in the rain, but Charissa remembered that she needed something and ran back to the apartment leaving me holding the umbrella. I prayed I wouldn't pass out because I didn't know how she'd get me to the hospital. She got back and we waved a taxi.

By the time we got to the hospital around 3:30a.m., my tremors had mostly stopped, but nausea and pain were still real. The only thing they could do for me at that point was to try accupuncture for my nausea. But instead of improving, I thought I was going to, I wanted to, die.
My heart started racing, my blood pressure dropped to 80/50, I went numb from my elbows to my fingers and from my knees to my toes. I was hunched over ready to dry heave and then my legs and arms cramped up like I'd been riding The Black Stallion bareback (remember that scene when they have to cut the horse's mane to get him off? or was that a different movie?). I looked like the adventurous people you see steering mechanized wheelchairs with their teeth, only there wasn't any adventure in me. I was pretty much out of it.

Call it shock, a panic attack, or nervous system disruptions--I was hurting, confused, and scared. And in the bewilderment and pain, I couldn't communicate with my doctor very well. My body was totally out of control, and I had no tools to deal with it.

I felt like I was dying (part of the panic attack aspect maybe, but intellectualizing it now destracts from the moment), and I was just praying to God for forgiveness for my selfish, sinful life. Just praying that He would take me home.

But mostly praying that He would bring my sister home. "Bring her home, God. Just bring her home," I kept repeating in my head.

That was all I could think about.

Well 8 hours later they let me out of the ER, and I went home with no answers. Later an X-ray and an MRI would show there was nothing major wrong, just one slightly bulging disc, so we still don't know for sure what the pain was the woke me up. This happened twice more. Once with no tremors when I stayed home, and once when tremors started again and I spent another 2 hours in the ER. (Sidenote: the 2 hours in ER cost me about $15 U.S. dollars, exactly half of what my friend spent on lamb chops that night at a good-bye party I had planned to attend.)

I used to work as a janitor for a lady named Donna T. She was the nicest lady. She really cared about the people who worked for her. She used to pray for her daughters, that they would love Jesus and follow Him. Donna died a few years after I moved away, and I wonder how her daughters are now. I never met them, but I pray for them when I think about them. I think she'd like people to keep praying for her daughters since she can't anymore. Maybe you can pray for them also. "Jesus, do everything you can to bring them home."

Sisters and daughters--heaven needs to be full of them.

We'll take nothing to heaven except the friends we make now, so for that trip let's just pray and pack light.



(The rest of the story: Later at home after my first ER visit, I flipped open my Bible. My eyes rested on Psalm 118:5-6. "In my anguish I cried to the LORD, and he answered by setting me free. The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid.")