Written On Human Hearts

This is not the first time I have written about what happened in 1987. In fact, this is the third time. The first I wrote as a junior in high school. I wrote it as my S.W.E.T test essay. S.W.E.T was an essay test I remember doing every year in school. I have no idea what it stood for but it was a big deal in English class. It had to have a rough draft, a couple of other pages to help edit it and it had to be handwritten in cursive. I wrote it more as a technical description of the surgeries and ICU stay; I left out the prayer and my fear. My teacher, after having read my story, offered some advice to make it better. She said something about making it more personal and sharing more of what I felt in the darkness. I remember saying, “I don’t want to share that. It’s too personal.” She graciously said okay and I got a 4 instead of a 4 plus. That grade basically translated to a B+ and I was mad. I was an A student and felt I deserved that plus. I stewed over that for a while, but I also considered what she said. The incident had taken place only a few years before and I was very guarded against people finding out that I had prayed to die. Wasn’t that a sin or something? I thought.
In college ENG 101 I tried it again, this time with feeling, and the teacher wrote “WOW! What an amazing story!” on my paper. Yet that time I still did not tell how God was woven around the events of that December. It has and always will be one of the most pivotal times in my life. Writing this now, I have edited this version about 1000 times and each time I get to the end, to the part with the light, I cannot help but shed a tear of relief. I remember all of it so well that tension builds in my shoulders as I remember the horrors and the light. It is a lesson I will never forget.
To make the story of how Christ called me through all of the events in 1987 make sense to you, I will have to tell you a lot of back story, beginning with the fact that I never remember a time when I did not know God. He was always there and I never doubted that. The youngest child of a single-parent mother, I began life as a healthy baby, the healthiest baby of Mom’s five children. Oh, the irony in that thought.

At five years old, I came down with a bad case of strep throat. My mom made sure I finished the medicine, but almost immediately the infection came right back. This happened over and over for about three months. Mom begged the doctor to remove my tonsils but the doctor refused, saying that they did not remove tonsils any more. I guess 1981 medicine was far too sophisticated for barbaric practices such as removing tonsils. The doctor kept prescribing stronger and stronger doses of Amoxicillin. The final round of antibiotics were big green capsules that I had to learn how to swallow. Mom had a hard time trying to get her kindergartner to swallow that pill. She felt so bad for me, her baby girl, because my throat hurt so much I could barely swallow water, much less this giant capsule. Mom resorted to bribing me with ice cream. She coaxed me to swallow the pill with a chocolate milkshake, then she gave me a small bowl of chocolate ice cream to soothe my throat and my anger. The strep infection subsided and I was back to normal again. Or so we thought. Doctors later discovered that the infection had permanently damaged my kidneys and to a lesser extent, my heart and eyes.
The summer when I was seven, I remember going to the bathroom one afternoon. When I turned to flush, I saw the toilet bowl was bright red with blood. Horrified, I tried to flush it down to hide it, but the chain inside the toilet tank broke and the handle hung uselessly. I ran upstairs and hid under my bed, knowing that someone would see the blood and I would have to go back to the dreaded doctor again. My brother saw the blood, which he promptly reported to Mom. A life of doctors, needles, and pills ensued.
Living with kidney failure is not easy. I was weak and had no appetite. My family called me “puny.” Being in poor health also made me susceptible to many other illnesses such as pneumonia. Oftentimes I sadly had to sit and watch my brothers, sister, and friends go play while I laid on the couch with some sickness or I would miserably watch the through the window as the other children had exciting adventures I heard about later. I hated life by the time I was nine years old and occasionally contemplated suicide. I did not tell anyone of those thoughts and did not want to actually kill myself, but I wanted to die.
In my eyes, kidney failure was the most embarrassing of all illnesses one could get. In my first hospital stay when I seven years old, my roommate was a 16-year-old cheerleader who had been diagnosed with diabetes. I thought her illness and giving shots was amazingly powerful, yet I was stuck peeing in a cup. I wished for a “cool” disease like diabetes - not a disease involving bathroom stuff. Ridiculous, yes, but that was a child’s reasoning through misery.
I was not miserable all the time and had a fairly happy, sheltered childhood. My disease was like a silent shadow that often went unnoticed until it stopped me from doing the things I wanted to do or brought attention to me as the “sick” kid.