Facing Health Challenges With Faith

This week's overcoming experience is from Carolee Hall. She is an amazing woman. I have had the pleasure of knowing for years and I'm grateful for her courage and insight.

I personally feel that one of my callings in life is to find my family history. As soon as I began working on this project I became ill. I had extremely high blood pressure - high enough to kill me and we didn't know why. After a year of blood pressure numbers measuring 246/146, we finally discovered the adrenal glands were enlarged and producing too much adrenaline and so they were removed. Their removal caused minor but ongoing problems for some time, and then one day (only 6 hours before I was scheduled to have a laser treatment to remove kidney stones) I felt a horrible ripping sensation in my chest. I had previously had a small heart attack and assumed this was the big one.  The pain was so awful I couldn't call for help or move.  I laid there, in the kitchen where I had gone to get a drink in the night, and croaked until someone heard me.  I lived to make it to the emergency room, an hour away, and was told it was a dissected aorta and the thoracic doctor there told me he could not save me.  That I could not live.

The pain was incredible and my husband and I decided that if we simply asked God to take me now, that it would save my suffering, and it seemed reasonable to us both since I wouldn't be able to recover anyway.  We prayed hard and for the rest of the night I kept thinking the next breath I took would be my last, and wondering what paradise would be like.  I couldn't move.  The pain was so intense that I simply couldn't move.  By morning I wondered why God had not taken me. I was beginning to feel upset that he would leave me in this death watch and in such great pain for so long.  They kept me on pain meds, and one day ran into another, and still I lived.  I prayed every waking moment - asking Him to just end it.  My children and grandchildren all came and said goodbye tearfully and told me it was okay to go.  Meanwhile the doctors and nurses were telling me not to sneeze, not to cough, not to move too fast as it would be instant death.  One even said to me that when it happened, it wouldn't last long and shouldn't be any worse than what I had already experienced.
The doctor said if I got to the point that I could be moved to a rehab facility, I would need to "wrap myself in bubble wrap and not drive over any bumps in the road." I was indeed moved to a rehab facility a few days later and put on a hospice program with counselors trying to prepare me mentally for death.  Old high school friends came to say goodbye, cousins, and neighbors, all telling me goodbye. And still I could see no purpose in this nonsense. Since I couldn't live, why didn't God just do it now?  One morning I was blowing my nose when the nurse came with my pain meds. When she saw me blowing my nose she begged me to stop because she didn't want the paperwork it would generate when I died.  I lived that way for about 25 days.

 I couldn't sleep on my side -- the aorta would pull and cause too much pain to sleep.  I was disappointed each morning to see a new day and I still had to endure another day of it.  It absolutely felt like a horror movie I was living in. It couldn't be true -- but it was. The doctor then scheduled me for a follow-up CAT scan to see how much the aorta was still bleeding inside, since I was still alive.  Immediately following the CAT scan, he said the leaking could possibly be be fixed if he could find the right surgeon, but he couldn't do that sort of thing. A couple of hours later, he came in and said he had found one in Salt Lake City, and I was life flighted there where they did surgery and repaired it, saving my life.  My doctor tells me I can claim this as a bonafide miracle since surviving such an injury is very rare.

 

The reason for telling this lengthy tale is this: as I thought about this whole experience, I kept wondering why God had not taken me -- why had He saved me?  The post-surgery pain is still significant and I can only stand or walk for short amounts of time. So why? I still have other health issues I cannot survive.  I am in kidney failure, so why?  Finally, I worked it out in my mind. Since I felt that my life assignment has been to do family history work and that was when my health suddenly took a turn for the worse, maybe the adversary had some hand in this. I finally found a quote from one of my early church leaders that said all illness and pain came from the adversary.  If that was the case, I was being attacked to keep me from doing what I was assigned to do. Somehow I had given him power over me and my health.  I decided to take my life back, to claim my own right over myself to be free from any such future bombardment.

I began noticing that while getting ready for church, I would find myself in great pain and I'd think I should stay home.  But every time this happens, if I can overcome it and go anyway, the pain stops.  I am convinced that there is an influence there in an effort to keep me ill. Now I pray daily to protect me from that influence.

 

I believe this is part of the challenges we have to face in life.  All are different. Some of us have health challenges and some have other challenges, but all are designed to help us grow. I must admit that when I didn't die after begging God to take me, I almost felt betrayed by Him.  He had always answered my prayers before. However it was pointed out to me that He didn't refuse to answer my prayer - He just said "no". . . for now.  I still have a work to do. God knows all our assignments and all we have done and all we still have to do.  He will not take us until we are done.  He will walk beside us until we can stand alone. He loves us and He knows us.