Is
this the end?
By Ada
Brownell
I rushed to the doctor’s office almost in
panic. Bronchitis had me by the chest and I’d had a lung-ripping cough for nearly
three months. In the middle of that siege, I came down with an
antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infection that flared with an invading army
of bacteria. While I battled that, my face bloomed red and Rosacea pimples
formed from my scalp to my neck, one of the worst cases my dermatologist had
seen.
A urologist warned me years ago some day
antibiotics wouldn’t clear up the resistant infections for me.
For
these simultaneous illnesses I’d tried two different antibiotics and they
didn’t work.
After a CT scan, a lung doctor diagnosed the
bronchitis problem as pneumonia, emphysema and asthma and prescribed an inhaler
that cost $200 a month, as well as a rescue inhaler to make breathing easier.
Those two prescriptions alone would quickly devour my yearly insurance
provision, and he insisted I take them the remainder of my life.
I’d nearly emptied similar inhalers my primary care
doctor prescribed and the bronchitis was worse.
“Have you had your flu shot?” the pulmonologist
(lung doc) asked. “If you get the flu, you’ll be in the hospital.”
I got
the shot.
I’d made two or three trips to Urgent Care,
then to my primary care doctor, and then to the kidney physician (nephrologist)
who has done wonders for my blood pressure and also is great for infections.
Nothing helped.
At first I stayed home because of the Rosacea, but
then I ventured out. People stared. “Does it hurt?” more than one person asked.
Being stared at gave me empathy for the handicapped.
I know God heals because we’ve had miracles in
our churches and family. Yet, I always think of James’ teaching in the Bible
that tells us faith without works is dead (James 2:17), so I usually follow a
physician’s instructions. But nothing worked.
Because
they weren’t helping, I quit the inhalers and coughed less, wheezed less, and
breathed easier.
But it was the dangerous UTI infection that
propelled me to the prayer line at church. An unchecked infection sometimes can
go throughout the body and kill you. I went forward once. I went twice. I went
three times.
My faith wound around James 5:14: “Is anyone
among you sick? Let him call for elders of the church, and let him pray over
him, anointing him with in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will
save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up.” Yet I know God is sovereign and
the Word says, “This is the confidence we have in him that if we ask anything
according to his will, he hears. And if we know he hears us, we know we have
the petition we desire of him” (1 John 5:14).
I
believe God wants us to be in health. Jesus not only healed when He walked the
earth, He took the beating before He was crucified for our healing: “By His
stripes we are healed” (1 Peter 2:24 and Isaiah 53:5). He knows what it is to
hurt.
Healing and miracles depend on my faith, too,
and fear isn’t faith. Yet, God confirmed His word with signs following.
The day I went into a panic, I told the kidney
doctor, “I’m willing to try one from the family of drugs I was allergic to
thirty years ago and I’d had welts all over me.”
He prescribed the drug. I took it and no
reaction occurred. The UTI pain disappeared. I was on the road to recovery!
He’d tested the bacteria to see what kind of
medication would help, and discovered another drug also would kill the
infection. Praise the Lord! Now I have at least two antibiotics that work.
Perhaps when I need them, others will work also.
The bronchitis and Rosacea gradually
disappeared, too.
It’s been three years and I have no symptoms of
emphysema or asthma and two of my physicians told me not to return to the lung
doctor.
God still cares when we’re sick, and he tells
us how to believe for healing, what to do, including going to physicians that
He has poured His wisdom into. Yet, we also know the Lord is there when we
aren’t healed. He loves us just as much, comforting and sending other people to
love on us.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment