I have been so incredibly ungrateful. Over the past several months, God has proven himself more faithful than I could ever hope to imagine. And yet...it's like once He's done what I need Him to do, I practically just forget that He ever existed. So now there's only one thing that I can do: simply ask, knowing what His answer has been and will always be, "Lord, have mercy."
From this past March till the beginning of June, I was suffering from debilitating and seemingly inexplicable pain. Most of the time I could barely walk, and when I could it was only with the aid of huge amounts of narcotics and nerve relaxants. An entire neuro-surgical team at Johns Hopkins Hospital couldn't find anything wrong with me, and I was trying to mentally prepare myself for the possibility that I may be searching for the rest of my life for answers and never find them, and that I may have to remain in a constant mental and emotional flux due to the extreme amounts of medications needed to simply hold my pain to a manageable level.
And then my old doctor from back in Chicago had an idea: he thought that maybe my spinal fluid level was elevated and that with a lumbar puncture this level could be tested and then reduced. In theory, this could completely alleviate my pain.
You'd think that this potential solution would excite me and give me hope. Instead, it filled me with a dread and fear worse than anything I can remember. You see, having to have a spinal tap again was one of my greatest fears in life. When I was eleven and initially going through the ringer of medical tests before my doctors discovered that I have Chiari Malformation, I had several MRIs, and on one of them the doctors saw a blurry spot. This could simply mean that I moved ever so slightly during the taking of that image or it could mean something much worse (i.e. a tumor or some other irregularity in my spinal column). My doctor recommended a spinal tap, and my parents consented.
The actual procedure itself, while uncomfortable and quite annoying, wasn't that bad (probably mostly due to the fact that I had no real clue what they were doing, and thus my nerves couldn't set in). The worst part was afterwards. First, I had to lay flat on my back for upwards of six hours. For an eleven year old kid, this seemed like torture. I couldn't get up to eat or go to the bathroom or even just to stretch. I had to remain relatively still and could only switch positions from my back to my side (or vise versa) every so often. The reason for all of this was to make sure that my spine had time to form a clot over the hole which the spinal tap put in it.
While I vaguely remember this six plus hour process as being beyond annoying, that's not really what sticks out in my mind. What I remember most vividly, what still makes me cringe at the very thought was the one thing that laying on my back for over six hours was supposed to prevent: spinal headaches (and all the wonderful things that come with it).
At some point while lying on my back in the hospital room, the doctors came back in with the results of the spinal tap: everything was fine and the initial assumption was assumed correct (I probably moved ever so slightly during the MRI process). After about five and a half hours of lying flat on my back, I actually ended up falling asleep for about an hour and a half and was thus flat on my back for at least seven hours. After I woke up, the doctors sent me home essentially because they had run out of ideas to explain my pain and I was reasonably well medicated.
The next couple days were filled with a pain that I can just barely begin to explain. My head literally felt like it was going to explode. My room had to be blackened as much as possible and my family could only speak to me in whispers. Every time I had to raise my head above my heart, these symptoms multiplied tenfold and I would begin to throw up violently and uncontrollably. I barely let myself eat or drink. This lasted for about a day and a half when my parents knew that I simply couldn't go on like this. They took me back to the hospital where the doctors drew some blood out of my arm to essentially force a clot to form over the hole in my spinal cord where my spinal fluid was leaking.
These memories are some of the worst in my life. On a scale of one to ten, the pain that I felt was easily skyrocketing past a twelve. So knowing that I might have to go through it again terrified me. But at the same, I knew that I couldn't keep living like that. I couldn't spend the rest of my life feeling high out of my mind on narcotics while still only barely able to walk.
So when I went home in June, I scheduled an appointment with my old doctor in Chicago. We scheduled the lumbar puncture for the day after my LSAT, which actually meant that I couldn't focus on my potentially paralyzing fear, so that was good (although the stress of studying for the LSAT wasn't necessarily a fun alternative).
The actual procedure turned out to be not that bad. They put me under anesthesia, so I remember very little. After I had been in recovery for about an hour, the nurse started talking to me about sitting up. This is when my fear really set in. It took me probably another hour or so to get up the courage to just tilt the bed forward a little. Over the next several hours and even days, I was incredibly anxious at even the slightest pressure or pain in my head.
But the headaches never came.
I have yet to really sit down and process what all this means. Since I had that lumbar puncture and they drained a huge portion of my spinal fluid, I have yet to feel like I cannot walk down the hall. To be perfectly honest, the hardest thing since then has been both getting off of my narcotics and building back up my endurance after having been forced to remain relatively sedentary for several months. For the past week or so, I have been pretty much off of my narcotics (for the first time in months) and my endurance is coming back.
You'd think that I'd be shouting about the amazing provision of God from every rooftop I can. And yet...
And then at the end of last month, it became quite evident that my maternal grandfather's leukemia had progressed rapidly and he would only have a couple more days to live. I've only begun to process everything that happened in the days before and after my grandpa's death, but there's one thing that I know for sure: the one thing that I asked God for was some form of reassurance that my Grandpa was truly a man of faith. You see, everyone had been saying that we knew he was going to a better place and that he was just "graduating" into heaven and other such platitudes. But the thing is that for my entire life my grandfather has always just been a man that I see at most a few times a year. I loved him dearly and will always remember his love and sense of humour incredibly fondly. But unlike my paternal grandfather of whom practically my every memory is of him telling stories about how God has worked in his life or professing his incredible faith, my memories of my maternal grandfather are all about him playing games and telling jokes to me and and my brothers. The day that my grandfather died, when I knew that he only had a few hours left, I lay on a park bench just crying because while every one else had such confidence about where my Grandpa was going, I felt like I couldn't know. While I know that no one but God can ever know for sure, there can at least be a reasonable degree of confidence if you know the person's heart. I cried because I never really knew my Grandpa, at least not on a spiritual level.
A few hours later I got the call from my Dad that my grandpa had passed and the story that he told me took my breath away: throughout that whole day, my grandfather had been almost entirely out of it, never fully having a lucid moment. Furthermore, he rarely had his eyes opened, and when he did they were foggy and unfocused. But in the moments before his death, my grandfather opened his eyes, clear as ever, tried his hardest to sit up, hum, and sing along to his favourite hymn: "How Great Thou Art". After he sang through the whole song once, my mother and aunt told their daddy to go home. And he breathed his last.
My grandfather died with a song in his heart and worship on his lips. And I know that, at least in part, my grandfather died in that incredible, God-filled way in answer to my prayer. My grandfather's death was God's amazing way of giving me peace.
Yet I haven't admitted that to anyone. Until now that is. And I really can't seem to figure out why. I don't know why I feel like I can't admit how much God has done for me. I'm still in this place where, if my Christian friends are talking on the metro about how God is working in their lives, I still look around, worried that some people within earshot might hear what we're talking about and think that we're crazy. I don't entirely know why I'm like this, but I do know that it needs to change. I need to be bolder and I need to be so much more willing to just be honest about who I am and what I believe.
So I claim God's mercy, because I know that it truly is new every morning. So tomorrow I will begin a new day, and maybe tomorrow I will be just a little bit bolder and I little bit less shy about everything that I am and everything that God is, and how incredibly amazing He has been in my life. Maybe I'll actually be able to use this testimony and this voice and these words to impact someone's life, someone else who is desperately crying out for some reassure, crying out for answers, crying out for some peace.
