March 14
God has taken me to a new place this past week and I am so blessed.
For the last two weeks in Nicaragua, I was waking up multiple times during the night with numb hands. We are sleeping on sleeping mats and doing a lot of manual labor so I did not think is was a big deal.
After talking to Teresa, a woman on our squad who is a nurse, she told me that I should get it checked out while in Honduras since my team would be in the capital.
I didn’t want to make it a big deal if it was nothing so I prayed specifically that God would make it go away the night we arrived to Honduras if He didn’t want me to go to the doctor.
Well I woke up that night with the same thing in my hands so I decided I would go. The doctor had a couple things in mind and gave me some medicine and asked me to come back the next day for some blood and urine tests.
I went back and did the tests and nothing really showed up. I had a different doctor this time and he had me taking almost 3 times the medicine the other doctor prescribed and told me if in a week it didn’t go away that I needed to see a Neurologist.
That night, I was starting not to feel good, I had a headache and walking started to feel really weird. I figured it was just the medicine and I went to bed. The next morning, I woke up and it hadn’t gone away. My legs did not feel right and everything seemed to be spinning.
We all thought it was just the medicine so I stayed back that day and slept for a really long time. When I woke up, I felt really weak and dizzy and everything felt weird, even talking felt strange. As it was getting later in the evening, I was only getting worse. I was pretty out of it and even though I told everyone no, they took me to the hospital that night anyways, PRAISE GOD!
At this point I could not walk and even squeezing the doctors hand was too hard for me. We went first to a private hospital where they brought a Neurologist in where she almost immediately diagnosed me with Guillian-Barre. To stay in that hospital and get the treatment I needed, it would be $5,000 a day. I decided that going to the teaching hospital would be the better decision so I took an ambulance over this Hospital Escuela.
They started treatment right away and then had to do a spinal tap to confirm. That was pretty painful but at this point I was still convinced I just had too much medicine in my system. After the results of my spinal fluid, I began to realize that I was actually sick.
This disease can quickly spread to the lungs and other parts of the body since it is my immune system fighting my nervous system. Even the fact that my lungs were not affected was a miracle from God.
I had to stay in the Emergency Room so that the doctors could be constantly checking up on me. These next days all started to blend together. I saw a lot of things in there. The patient to my left started to code and they were not able to bring him back and the next morning I woke up to sobs, as the patient to my right hadn’t made it through the night.
I have a great squad here and I constantly had people at the hospital but they could hardly come in the room and when they did it was not for long since I was in the emergency room. I was doing pretty good at staying strong and not really thinking about my situation and the things that I saw but that could only last for so long.
It came to a point where I was feeling all alone and I was done. I couldn’t do it anymore. I needed to go home, but that still wouldn’t be soon enough. I was crying out to God saying, “I need you to show up right now, I can’t do this and I’m about to freak out.” I started to sing the song in my head, “I lean not on my own understanding, my life is in the hands of the Maker of Heaven, I give it all to you God, trusting that you’ll make something beautiful out of me.” I was crying out to God to make me believe this!
Not long after this cry, the Lord sent Vanessa, my beautiful team leader, to come in the room. I broke out into tears and told her everything I was feeling. This was another gift from God because Vanessa is like a sister to me and she had just the prayers and words to say to me.
I told her I had never felt this way before, I had never felt like I was no longer strong enough and she told be that this was kind of beautiful. God brought me to a place of complete brokenness and I could no longer rely on my own strength because I had absolutely nothing left. What a blessing. Wow, God loves me so much!
I am learning to see Him as a Father and putting myself as not only His daughter (like what I wrote my last blog about) but as a helpless child. He loves me so much that He allowed me to go through a super hard time and was there holding my hand, even when I didn’t feel it, the whole time!
After this moment, I felt His strength, He gave me joy beyond my understanding and He gave me His eyes for the people around me.
