Okay: confession time. I hate doctors. Anytime I’m in a doctor’s office, I get sick to my stomach. The feel of latex gloves touching me, the smell of an alcohol rub prepping my arm for yet another shot, those things that they stick in your ear…. I hate it all!! Okay, maybe that’s not the biggest confession since most of my friends and family know I hate the doctor.
However, something that most people don’t know about me: I’m somewhat of a hypochondriac… or a drama queen… one of those. If the littlest thing is off about me, I start to wonder if I have something. Then I go to war with myself. My fear of doctors goes against my hypochondria. Normally, my fear of doctors wins out.
In Malawi, we had exposure to parasites and six weeks later (April 7th) we were supposed to take anti-parasite pills in case we had picked up any… friends. I wasn’t really about it, but as we approached Pill Day, I did wonder. I have lost weight dramatically, and as we approached the date, I began to have pain in my abdomen. We were told that if we had a reaction to the medicine, then we had parasites. We weren’t told what to do in the case we did have a reaction. Information which in hindsight would have been good to know. I was the only one on my team to have a reaction. However, my stomach doesn’t do well with pills, and we had to take six big ‘uns. So I looked up the symptoms of a parasitic infection, and told myself if I developed even just one, I would go to the doctor.
Over the week, I began developing symptoms. However, they were all things that if they were isolated from the reaction or even from themselves, I wouldn’t bat an eye. My fear of the doctor was overcoming my conviction to get myself checked out.
On that Saturday, I was beginning to get worried. Some of the symptoms weren’t getting any better, and some of them were getting worse. We were about to head into a full week of ministry, and I didn’t want to miss out or make any of my teammates miss out on ministry.
Then, we found out that we weren’t doing ministry on Monday. At first, I was excited to have a day to focus on doing quiet time and such. God gently reminded me that I was having symptoms and told me that one of the reasons that Monday was opened up was so that I could go to the doctor. I finally accepted the fact that I needed to go to the doctor, and informed my team that I needed to go. I hadn’t told them I was showing symptoms because I didn’t want to seem like an alarmist, and wasn’t sure if I was just being a hypochondriac.
It was arranged for one of my teammates and one of our contacts to go with me to the clinic. I had convinced myself that I was just going to get checked out, to get the doctor’s okay that I did not, in fact, have parasites.
