Hallelujah for the Resurrection!

Monday, April 18, 2011.  It was a bad day from beginning to end.  I normally wouldn’t be so negative in my remembrances, but this case requires an exception.

I was unable to sleep until somewhere around 3:45 a.m. (typical since receiving steroids during my epidural block).  I then was abruptly wakened by the daily morning ruckus of getting Colson & Josiah off to school without killing each other. 

COLSON:  “Dad, Josiah fell asleep in his closet again.”
BOB:  “Josiah!  Get out of the closet & get downstairs.”
JOSIAH:  “But I have to get dressed still!”
BOB:  “You mean you haven’t even gotten dressed YET???”
JOSIAH:  “Sorry!  I fell asleep trying to find my clothes.”
COLSON:  “It’s 7:40!  We’re going to be late again!  Hurry Up!”
BOB:  “Josiah, get down here right now!”
JOSIAH:  “OK!  OK!  I’m coming!  No reason to get mad about it!”

Yes, that is an accurate sampling of our morning “routine”.  Since I have such a skewed sleep pattern as a result of some of my medications, Bob helps get Josiah off to school in the morning.  What a true demonstration of love!

I dragged my aching body out of bed at 9:00, turned my radio to WOWO to hear The Glenn Beck Show & got into the shower.  No matter how much primping I did, nothing could prepare me for what was to come this day.

I had an 11:00 appointment with Dr. Jakacki.  Reggie, Dr. Jakacki’s amazing mother, called me back to the exam room.  I frustrated Reggie.  She couldn’t get a blood pressure.  She tried 3 times with no success.  That bothered her!  When Dr. Jakacki entered the room, he quickly got down to the issue of the day, which was going over the results of my spinal tap.

Doc was puzzled by the results of the spinal tap.  All of the myriad of tests he ordered came back...  Negative.  My spinal fluid shows not even a trace of MS!  At first I was elated!  Praise God!  But then it hit me:  What about the lesions on my brain?  What are they, if they aren’t caused by MS?  When I asked this question, Doc shrugged & said that the results of the spinal tap are not the only way to diagnose MS.  The theory is, if the spinal fluid has certain markers, it is definitely MS.  However, if the spinal fluid does NOT have certain markers, it does NOT rule out MS.

In an effort to gain some clarity on my results, Dr. Jakacki asked me to wait in the exam room while he called Dr. Liu, a local neurologist.  The more they talked, the more Dr. Liu realized that he needed to examine me.  Next thing I know, Dr. Jakacki came bursting through the door & said, “Dr. Liu wants to see you right now!”  OK.  And off I went.

Dr. Liu’s office was just around the circle from Doc’s office so I didn't have a hard time finding it.  Dr. Liu is a Chinese born neurologist who, before coming to this area, practiced in the greater Chicago area.  I though it was so cute that he brought in his little black doctor’s bag (like Marcus Welby, M.D.!). 

He wanted to study the MRI of my brain that I had previously done at Dupont Hospital, so he accessed my MRI through an Internet portal to Dupont’s radiology testing & records.  He studied it very carefully & discovered two other lesions that are beginning to form.  After explaining the MRI results to us, Dr. Liu performed a neuro exam on me.  I used to be able to do all of those kinds of things without any hesitation.  This time was different.  I couldn’t walk a straight line (heel-to-toe) without nearly falling over.  Standing with my eyes closed & my arms outstretched was very difficult.  I felt like I was spinning almost.  My reflexes were tested & failed miserably.  I had some difficulty with the whole finger to the nose thing.

At the end of my appointment, Dr. Liu told us what he knew for certain: there are lesions on my brain & I have signs of neurological deficits.  Even so, it is too premature to say that I have MS.  There are strict diagnostic guidelines to follow with Multiple Sclerosis & I don’t meet enough of the criteria to achieve a diagnosis.  He said that after I experience some sort of relapse, he can officially diagnose me.  So that was that with Dr. Yu Liu.

I left Dr. Liu’s office & headed north to Bridgewater Golf Course to pick up Josiah.  I thought he had his first golf match of the season, so I assumed that I would need to pick him up around 6:00.  When I arrived at the course, I didn’t see Josiah anywhere.  As a matter of fact, I didn’t see his coach’s van in the parking lot.  I sat there for a while waiting for Josiah to appear, but he didn’t.  Then it hit me that maybe I was at the wrong course.  Sometimes the team plays at Bridgewater East, where I was, & Bridgewater West (formerly known as Greenhurst Golf Course).  I decided to head over to the West course to see if they were playing there.  Sure enough, I pulled into the parking lot at 6:00 to find Josiah sitting on the grass reading.  His coach was in his van nearby.  Josiah got in the truck & said, “Finally!  I’ve been waiting here for an hour!”  The schedule I was given was wrong.  They only had practice until 5:00 - no match with another team.  ARGH!  Sorry for making you wait around, Mr. Baker!

My Monday ended with many questions still tumbling through my thoughts.  As I finish writing this entry, it is nearly a week later & those questions are just as problematic as ever.  Last week was brutal for me.  I ended up having to go to the Outpatient Clinic at Dupont Hospital for magnesium infusions every day.  I also received IV antibiotics because I had a kidney infection - a common occurrence for me.  I struggled terribly with my emotions all week.  Getting up every day was a feat in itself.  My heart was racing & my stomach was churning because of all of the unsettled scenarios in my life. 

One night Bob & I had a challenging time with our sons & I became very upset.  I started to cry, which is not something I do frequently.  Bob came to comfort me.  He put his arms around me & asked what was wrong.  I replied, “What has happened to our family?”  His answer hit me with a thud.  “Well, a lot.”  Wow!  How profound those few words were!  That just broke the floodgates wide open & I couldn’t turn the tears off!  Since losing my job in 2008 due to my health problems, I have lost two of my most beloved mentors to cancer.  My mother, my greatest mentor, also succumbed to that heinous disease.  My husband had a massive stroke & had to fight for months to regain his strength.  Two of our children walked away from the biblical values we raised them in.  Bob was essentially fired (aka “forced to resign”) from his position as senior pastor.  My dad had a mild heart attack.  One of my sisters left her family because of adultery.  Our oldest daughter left an abusive relationship, but didn’t do so alone.  It wasn’t until she suffered a miscarriage that she knew she had been pregnant.  Our first grandchild is in Heaven.  I have had five invasive surgeries JUST since 2008, not including the many facet joint blocks & nerve ablations I’ve had in my neck & low back.  Because of Bob’s stroke, my medical problems & the loss of Bob’s job, we suffered tremendously financially.  On Thursday, we had our primary hearing in bankruptcy court.  We had a vehicle repossessed, the land contract agreement we had for our last house fell through & the home is in foreclosure, we are unable to do anything to help our sons with their college expenses & we learned last week that Lutheran Medical Group, who owns Dr. Jakacki’s practice, is kicking us out of his practice because of their inclusion in our bankruptcy.  That is a LOT to take in over such a short period of time!

I honestly thought that I have dealt with all of our suffering fairly well.  But this past week has pushed me past my ability to withstand & I have struggled tremendously just to keep my composure.  I have cried myself to sleep nearly every night for the past week.  I have been anxious & fearful.  I have felt alone & forgotten.  I have been void of strength, both physically & emotionally.  The news about losing Dr. Jakacki as my primary care physician sent me over the edge.  I know the man is only human & certainly doesn’t have every answer to my health riddles.  But he was the first doctor to take me seriously after four years of desperate searching for answers.  I became his patient when he was still in medical school.  Over the past 10 years he has been faithful to give me the very best care.  The thought of leaving my doctor is frightening because it means I will have to start from scratch with someone new, someone who has no idea of who I am & what my health puzzle looks like.  Frankly, I am terrified. 

As I finish composing this note, it is Easter Sunday.  I was so glad to be in God’s house today!  Easter is my favorite day of the year.  It is even more important to me than my birthday.  I was blessed to have Jess & Jeff sitting with us, as well as Rachel & a friend of hers.  The worship time at Pathway today was invigorating & powerful.  After our time singing, they played a video clip of a testimony about someone’s near-death experience.  I about fell over when I saw Dr. Jakacki on the big screen!  God used his testimony to remind me that times of hardship & pain are designed to draw us nearer to Christ.  God spoke to my heart & reminded me know that all of the suffering of the past & future are a sign that He has a purpose for the pain.  If tribulation is my companion, He will give me the grace sufficient to rise above it.  However, His grace can only be utilized through complete abandonment to His lordship.  “Trust and Obey, for there’s NO other way to be happy in Jesus, but to Trust and Obey.”

Oh, my precious Savior!  I beg your forgiveness for allowing seeds of doubt & fear to gain a foothold in my heart.  Forgive me for questioning Your sovereignty in my life.  Thank You, Jesus, for enduring the cross, scorning it’s shame.  Thank You for conquering sin & death forever!  And thank You for drawing me near to Yourself in a personal love relationship that will never end!  I am most unworthy of Your sacrifice.  I am but one insignificant vapor of life in the grand scheme of the universe, yet from the beginning of time You set me apart for Your purposes, to somehow become a vessel of use in Your hands.  I am humbled.  I am awed.  I am forever grateful.  Make my life a living sacrifice, holy & acceptable to You.  I yield my whole being to Your design & direction.  Let Your grace be sufficient for me, for Your power is made perfect in weakness.

He is Risen!  HE IS RISEN, INDEED!

He Who Began a Good Work

It has been some time since I last wrote about life with the Gweeds.  You may (or may not) be wondering what God is doing in gweedlife, the Herman family as we are commonly known.  Be assured that God is at work in each of our lives, as the work He began in us is not complete as of yet.  He is faithful to complete the good work He started in our hearts.

A primary avenue that God uses to mold my heart is through my health.  Even as an infant, I had unusual health challenges.  Once I suddenly stopped breathing.  I was only a few weeks old.  My dad performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive me.  God used that instance to impact my parents’ lives more than my own.  Then there were the many, many times I was hospitalized as a child due to complications of the flu.  It seemed like I had a flu bug shadowing me & I was susceptible to frequent invasions.  Because of my unusual frailty, my parents took me to a pediatrician.  Dr. Eric Schaab was his name, and he saved my life many times.  His office was all the way on Tillman Road, right next to Atz’ Ice Cream Parlor.  My mom witnessed to “Schaabie” (as she called him) every time I had an appointment.  She was relentless in her pursuit of his spiritual awakening, always giving him books, magazine articles, tracts, etc.  She spoke boldly with him & always asked him what he thought of the different things she had given him to read.  He knew that she would ask, so he made sure to read the stuff!

When I was in 2nd grade at Harlan Elementary, I had a particularly poor year with my health.  Mrs. Ehle was my teacher, & I really liked her.  She was always very patient with me & helped me to catch up with the rest of the class after periods of absence.  One thing I never learned, though, was the proper way to write cursive capital W’s & Q’s.  I know.  How have I made It thus far in life without knowing that?  It is truly miraculous.  Somehow through my period of frequent illness, Dr. Schaab began to see a pattern of some kind, which prompted him to order some testing to see what was the root cause of my vulnerable health.  I hated those tests!  They were extremely frightening for an 8 year old.  I still have nightmares about some of those tests.

God had prompted Dr. Schaab’s curiosity, & it paid off.  The testing revealed that I had a birth defect related to my kidneys.  The ureters were not located in the proper spot, which made it difficult for my kidneys to expel urine to my bladder.  So in early June, 1976, I spent two weeks as a patient at Lutheran Hospital following surgery to re-implant my ureters.  Back then, it was a much bigger ordeal than it would be today.  My incision was over 8” long!  The surgery was a success & my health greatly improved after that.

When I became a teenager, I was examined for scoliosis along with everyone else in gym class.  I was one of the few who were told to seek medical attention because I had a curvy spine.  My parents took me to a chiropractor for evaluation & treatment of scoliosis.  Since I was young, I wasn’t really bothered by any limitations from scoliosis.  But as my body has aged, it has become very evident that I had more spinal abnormalities than just scoliosis. 

I was very energetic teenager.  I enjoyed sports & spent many summer hours on the softball diamond.  In my youth group, we played a lot of volleyball, which I loved even though I wasn’t particularly skilled at it.  I liked to play basketball & played on the team in junior high.  In an 8th grade game, I stole the ball from the other team, took off dribbling & shot a lay-up that swished in.  I heard my coach (Miss B, for those of you who know her from Leo) screaming my name, & not because she was happy.  I had just scored two points for the other team!  That demoralized me & I gave up team sports then & there.

As I walked through my high school years, I experienced some “female” issues.  I experienced very painful periods & struggled with several hormonal problems.  When Bob & I got married & wanted to start a family, my “female” issue were a problem.  God sent us to Birmingham, Alabama, as church planters for the Missionary Church, & while there I began hormone therapy with a fertility specialist.  God created Jessica within me, but towards the end of my pregnancy, she became an unwelcome tenant in my body.  I had pre-eclampsia (also known as toxemia), a condition which occurs most often in first pregnancies & is caused by the mother's immune system unleashing a destructive attack on the tissues of the developing child.  The womb becomes a hostile environment for the baby.

At 35 weeks gestation, she was not moving in the womb & was basically starving to death inside me.  So I had an emergency c-section & was blessed with my tiny baby Jessica Kay.  She was only 3# 6oz & was 19” long.  Her head was only 11” around!  With each of the successive 4 pregnancies, I gave birth the old fashioned way.  So my one & only c-section was for my tiniest baby.  Just a little backward, I think!

In my early 20’s I began to struggle terribly with headaches.  Migraines were a frequent visitor.  I felt like I was a bobble head that had it’s head on crooked.  The only thing that seemed to help relieve them was chiropractic adjustment.  I also began having sinus headaches around the same time.  That is something that runs in the family.  My mom suffered from chronic sinusitis for many years, even going so far as to have surgery to open her sinuses up more.    As years passed, my migraines continued to increase in frequency, as did my sinus headaches.  It got to the point that if I had a day without a headache, it was a miracle.

In spite of my constant headaches, I did my best to live as though I was pain free.  Bob & I decided to home school our kids shortly after Colson was born.  I can’t truthfully say I enjoyed doing it, because I felt that I was inadequately prepared & equipped to effectively teach my children.  The curriculum we used was a product of Bill Gothard’s ministry, Advanced Training Institute of America.  The thought behind that curriculum was that biblical principles were to be the basis of all learning, so everything, including math & phonics, was supposed to somehow be related to Scripture.  Supplementing the ATIA curriculum was anathema!  It was a very difficult curriculum to use.  In fact, Bob & I really regret using that curriculum to home school our kids.  That’s a topic for another time.

On New Year’s Eve, 1996, Bob & I learned that we were expecting again.  Three days later, I began to have the worst morning sickness I had ever experienced.  I assumed that just like with all of my other pregnancies, morning sickness would be short lived.  Boy was I wrong!  My doctor tried all kinds of medications & remedies that normally were helpful, but they didn’t do anything for me.  Well, that’s not true.  They made me more sick!  I had many, many adverse reactions to medications used during that time.  Things got so bad that I was given a PICC line & received nutrition through a bag.  After a few weeks of morning sickness that never went away, I felt a little better, so I went into Fort Wayne with my sister Kristie.  It was nice to get out of the house for a little bit!  We had dinner at Arby’s & I ordered a chicken sandwich.  That was the beginning of my very bad relationship with Arby’s chicken sandwiches.

Kristie noticed how pale I became & she quickly drove me home.  I remember getting into the house, but that’s as far as I got.  The next thing I knew, I was in the ER at Parkview.  That migraine that had come on so suddenly was the worst I have ever had.  The ER docs gave me some meds & tried to send me home, but we hardly got down the road before Bob turned around & went back.  I was admitted then & my doctor tried various medications to dispel my headache.  Nothing worked.  He ended up trying medications that were known to be very risky for pregnant women & their unborn child.  One of those class C meds really scared me.  They gave me a dose of Stadol & I fell asleep.  Then I woke up because Bob was standing next to my bed, talking with someone who had come to visit.  Although I was awake, I couldn’t open my eyes.  I couldn’t move, not even a twitch of my finger.  I could not communicate in any way!  I was terrified because I heard Bob telling the visitor that he hadn’t seen me sleeping so soundly in weeks & that he was going to leave the room so that I wasn’t disturbed.  I prayed that God would somehow tip Bob off that something wasn’t right.

The visitor left, & Bob leaned over to give me a little kiss before he left the room as well.  For some reason, he hesitated after delivering my little peck on the cheek.  He looked at me, & God allowed him to be troubled.  He couldn’t put a finger on it, but he knew something was very wrong.  He summoned a nurse who began doing a neurological evaluation.  I failed.  That got things really moving in my room!  They gave me Benadryl & slowly I came out of my catatonic state.

I ended up staying in the hospital for 9 days.  I was released to go home on Bob’s 35th birthday!  The rest of the pregnancy was much more low-key, but I was very weak & struggled with my overly sensitive stomach for 6 1/2 months of the pregnancy.  We were beyond overjoyed when Josiah entered the world.  He was healthy, which was a concern for us because of all of the medications that I had used throughout my pregnancy.  We assumed that I would quickly revert back to the person I was before I got pregnant.  That assumption was very wrong.

Well, this is getting to be a long posting again, so I will stop now & will begin my next posting at this point.  But let me reiterate the point I am trying to make with this posting.  “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it”, Philippians 1:6  God Almighty, who was & is & is to come, the one TRUE God, the King of kings, HE created me.  He started something stirring in my heart from before my birth.  He began a good work in me!  How awesome!  And not only did He start a good thing in me, but HE WILL BE FAITHFUL!  Why should the Most High God be faithful to me?  I have sinned against Him time & time again.  He doesn’t owe me anything, least of all faithfulness.  Why in the world is He going to be faithful to me?  Because God always finishes what He starts.  God not only started something good in my heart from the beginning of my life, but He has promised that He will continue to work in my life until His good work is completed in me! 

God has chosen to use my not-so-great health to mold me into the woman He designed me to be.  He uses different avenues with each individual; none of us are the same.  For me, health stuff seems to be the issue that God has used to develop my character & deepen my faith.  I don’t think I’m destined to be famous.  I don’t think I will ever be amazingly talented or unusually brilliant.  But I do know for a fact that I can be a tool in God’s hands!  I can be a tool to bring encouragement to others, a tool to shape the lives of people in my family, a tool that only truly becomes useful when it is in the hand of the Master. 

Oh, God!  Please keep me usable for your purposes!  Keep my heart soft & responsive to You!  No matter what it takes, complete the good work You began in my heart.