I’ve been back on the Race for about 2.5 weeks.
I have grown more in the past 2 weeks on the Race than I did in the 3 months before I was sent home with malaria.
Why?
Because I took a walk with death.
No, I didn’t die, but I got really sick and it was really scary and I felt a lot of emotions and experienced a lot of things that I had never experienced before and never thought I would.
My experience with Cerebral Malaria changed my perspective on just about everything and I came back on the Race with a new outlook on the Race, life and everything in-between.
Here’s my story.
In Ethiopia I started to get sick with a fever and chills and aches. It seemed like your typical flu but when you are on the Race we take extra precautions because there are many illnesses that our bodies aren’t used to. So by the second day of me being sick we went to the clinic to get some tests done to rule out things like malaria and typhoid.
By day two I was extremely weak and could hardly walk the 10min to the clinic. I was dizzy and getting short of breath.
By day two my teammate had also come down with identical symptoms.
The clinic was in a remote village, one that happened to be in an area that did not have malaria. As such the clinic did not do the test properly and told me I did not have malaria.
So we went back to the compound where we lived and I tried to rest up and kick my flu in the butt.
The next day a bunch of Canadian doctors and nurses arrived to do a health clinic in the village. This was a huge God thing. Without these doctors and nurses I probably would have gotten a lot sicker.
They kept me hydrated and gave me some nausea medicine. On day 4 they hooked me up to an IV, hanging from my bunk bed to keep me hydrated and gave me a bunch of different medicines for things like parasites and such. At this point I couldn’t really get out of bed and was vomiting and had diarrhea.
The next day is when things got scary.
I had gotten really short of breath and I honestly don’t remember a lot from this day. I remember that I was convinced I definitely had malaria and that the clinic had messed up.
That afternoon they took us back to the clinic and hooked us up to IVs and the Canadian doctors retested us for malaria.
Guess what?
It was positive.
They sent us home with some anti-malaria medicine.
That night I remember a bunch of floating blobs above me, that happened to be the doctors and nurses. They decided that I was getting worse and needed to be sent to a hospital. My team also was concerned about it. So the doctors loaded me up into the van and we were shipped off to the closest, but still pretty remote, hospital.
The first hospital was a village hospital, we stayed in a room that was a part of the hostel attached to the hospital. They didn’t have nurses for us so the Canadian nurses took shifts taking care of us. At this point I was hooked up to oxygen and they were administering anti-malarials.
Here’s the tricky thing about malaria, there are different strands of malaria and different medicines to treat each strand.
And we were lucky enough to catch the worst and most deadly strand, cerebral malaria, falciparum.
After 2 nights and 3 days at this hospital the doctors decided we were not improving fast enough and that their facility did not have the capacity to treat us.
So we were transported in the sketchiest ambulance ever, basically the back of a covered truck. We traveled 3 hours to the biggest city in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, and got to a hospital that was pretty close to an American hospital.
Here they got us on the right medications, we got blood transfusions and spent 5 miserable days recovering.
There we recovered and there we also found out the World Race was sending us home.
So I got to spend 2 weeks and 2 days at home in America.
There are few racers who get the experience of going back to America and then coming back to the Race.
In fact my teammate and I are the first racers to contract Cerebral Malaria and return to the field.
But while I was home I had a lot of time to think about my experience and wrestle with God about what I was supposed to take from the experience.
Why send me home?
Why interrupt my race, the thing you called me to, to have me come home and binge watch Netflix?
And I left home still not understanding what I was supposed to take from it all.
But the first few days back on the Race I got slapped in the face with it.
As I shared my story with squad mates I realized for the first time how seriously I was sick and how I really had taken a walk with death and come out on the other side.
When you are Morgan Woods and you get sick, you aren’t focused on the sickness, you aren’t focused on the suck of being sick, you are focused on forcing yourself to get better. Morgan Woods focuses on when am I leaving the hospital, when I am I getting back to ministry, when are they going to free me from the prison that was the Addis hospital? Morgan Woods wasn’t scared or fearful, Morgan was frustrated that she was being held back from doing the thing, the World Race.
So it wasn’t until my friends and teammates started asking me, ‘Weren’t you scared?’, that I really looked back and saw that I had gotten a second chance.
I got a second chance for my Race.
I got to go home, leave the Race and come back and use what I had learned.
I looked back on my Race and asked, if this was the end, ‘if I wasn’t going back on the Race, would I have been satisfied and what would I have done differently?’
The answer was no I wasn’t satisfied, I’m not regretful, but there are things I want to do differently heading into the next 7 months.
I’m all in, and this time I mean it.
I want to give the hard feedback to my teammates. I don’t want to hold back.
I want to be in the river. I want to explode with the Holy Spirit.
I want to tear down all my walls and jump into my true identity as it should be in Jesus.
I want to spend more time in solitude with God, walking the streets of the country just soaking Him in, just me and Jesus, hanging out like old friends.
I don’t want vanity and selfishness to cloud my walk into my true identity.
I want to love more and love bigger.
I want to give more and serve selflessly.
I want to dive into my ministries and trust wholeheartedly in the Holy Spirit.
I want to have a face to face relationship with Jesus.
I have a unique opportunity. One that Racers never get. I have seen what it looks like to go home and look back on your Race, I have walked with death.
But I get to do something about it. I get to change my course on the Race. And I get to share my new perspectives with my teammates and my squadmates.
I’m all in.
And this time I mean it.
