Now I know I typically do these more towards the end of the month and also as a part of a series, but something happened today that I just had to get home and write about. Over the last year, God has blown me away with all the attributes of Himself that He has shown me. Sure, I knew what the Bible has to say about Him, but this whole Christianity deal is about the relationship and going beyond religious practices. Today, I went in to visit the doctor for one quick question. In my doctor’s answer, I was able to see another attribute of God.
A little over seven weeks ago, I was playing basketball, and I rolled my ankle. I’ve been playing sports my entire life, and I’ve never even sprained my ankle, so I thought this pain was a little weird. As I laid on the ground, I didn’t know what I had just done, but I wasn’t too hopeful. All the other players gathered around and were discussing about what to do when one of the guys revealed he was trained in physical therapy. He grabbed my ankle and tugged on it a few ways until I felt what I thought was my ankle popping back into socket. The pain subsided, and while it was still unbearable to walk on, I was at least not having to roll on the ground anymore. When I went to get an X-Ray at the hospital, I was told there wasn’t a break, but I was expected to be on crutches for at least four weeks.
The following weeks were never unbearable, but the pain never seemed to fully go away. When I finally made it back to the States this week, I couldn’t handle not being able to be at full strength any longer, so I took the gamble to go see the doctor. When I recounted the story, they told me that they wanted to get some follow up X-Rays because even though there didn’t seem to be a break, they could still see all they would need to. In the last year, I have been to this doctor’s office three times, and each time something crazy has happened. So the comments from the support staff about being excited to see what would happen today were rather expected. What ended up happening wasn’t quite as much.
Dr. Laubenthal walked into the room and told me the X-Rays looked good, and he wanted to do some tests to see if there was any further damage. As he tested my ankle, nothing really hurt, it was just super weak. He told me that he needed to check one more thing that he suspected, so he left the room. When he came back in less than a minute later with a huge smile on his face, I was a taken a little off guard. He said, “I need to show you something. Everything is fine, but you need to see this.” I looked at the X-Ray and didn’t really understand what the big deal was. I guess there’s a reason these guys go to school for so long. He asked the other doctors what they saw, and the first statement I heard was, “Well, it looks normal. It healed perfectly.” When seeing Dr. Laubenthal’s face, one of the other doctors realized that he had done nothing to heal it, and they all walked away amazed.
Since I was the only one in the room that didn’t know what was going on, Dr. Laubenthal walked me through what everyone else already knew. “You see that line going across the bone right there? Well that is a clean break. This couldn’t have been healed or set better if we had done it here and casted it for six weeks.” As I told him the full story again, we realized that when I was laying on the court and the guy “slipped my ankle back into socket,” he may have actually set the bone and was probably the reason it didn’t show up on the initial X-Ray. I was amazed.
I’m lucky in the Philippines because the health care is pretty good. However, it still doesn’t have the technology that we have in the States, and so it often misses things. I was supposed to stay off of my foot for a month. I lasted almost two weeks. Despite that, the lack of full health care, and being thousands of miles from home, my ankle healed completely. You can call me stubborn, ignorant, or lucky that this happened, but there’s no reason my ankle should have healed that way. But it did. I was amazed to see that even though I didn’t have the pain killers, the cast, or the full X-Rays, my ankle still healed like I did have those things. My God is a healer, and there are some things that just can’t be explained away. I think my doctors agree…
