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My Story - How God Led Me Through
How God Led Me Through
Date: 2/25/2005 6:41:27 PM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 2141 times I have never really considered myself a "physical" person, things of a spiritual nature have been the greater interest for me. In my general disinterest for physical things I paid little attention to my body and my health, but I think higher beings wanted me to pay more attention to my gift of physical life and guided me through a health ordeal so that I would become aware and possibly, so that I could help others. I am more attuned to spirituality than ever before as a result & here I would like to share my experiences with God & His guidance throughout my year long battle for my life, and hope that by doing so I can give him glory and express my deepest appreciation to him.
How God Led me Through
I am a very self-effacing person. My understanding of why I am this way is that from the time I was very little I have been surrounded with people who belittle me, family mostly. I've always been very sensitive and emotionally deep too and so I probably hurt more over these insults and torments, I let them burn into my spirit and so carried them around with me longer than most others would. To make matters worse I am always berated for BEING sensitive and hurting over the things that hurt me. But on any account, it's made me hard on myself. I have a nasty self-destructive habit of imitating the depreciating outlook others have had of me. As a result I often get so down on myself that I believe that God could never want or love me, that he is as sickeningly disappointed with me as everyone else is, that he is as disgusted with me as I am. It was during such a period that I was shown by God just how untrue that belief was.
Since January of 2002 I was suffering through the beginnings of the hemorrhaging of cervical cancer. A couple times a month, lasting a week each time, I would just, at a moments notice, hemorrhage! Reading about such things online I believed it was merely one of the common and unfortunate things man women must go through at pre-menopause, "flooding" as it was called. I dealt with it though it was a pain in the neck and worrisome. I never went to the doctor about it, hoping it would work itself out. But events happened that made sure I was seen by doctors and that I would find out what was wrong with me.
It was June 2002, I had just finished a week long "flood" 2 weeks prior when I decided that I would try once again to do something for God and boost my spirituality and attend an assembly of worship in San Diego. As I dressed to leave I tried to ignore the bloating of my abdomen, a tell tale sign, & decided God was more important so I'd hope for the best.
4½ hours into the day I felt great, spiritually too, and before the lunch break was over I took a trip to the bathroom before the crowds returned to their seats, but as I climbed the steps I felt a familiar pop deep inside, like a water balloon exploding and I rushed to the front of the ladies room line just in time. I hemorrhaged so quickly and so badly, worse than any time before, that I immediately went into shock. I was trembling violently and went ice cold. Fifteen minutes later I was able to exit the bathroom, & I must have looked white as a sheet because I was met with stunned looks by two brothers who got me a wheelchair & took me to first aid, I could barely talk.
They put me on a gurney, I was truly terrified, thinking I was going to die, and as I laid down on the bed, from a speaker in the ceiling directly over me, the resumed sermon seemed to speak from God just to me, "Be not afraid, for I am with you." I smiled despite everything and thanked God for being at my side.
The nurse-sisters just fretted over me something awful, one of them asked if I'd been under any stress lately & I burst into tears to think of the grievous suffering I was enduring by the actions of my 16 year old daughter and my sister. I cried "Yes!" and briefly & tearfully disclosed the recent events of my life. The sister took my hand and exclaimed "And yet you're HERE!" I understood exactly what she meant and felt immediately appreciated by God.
My shock got worse, my trembling was so bad that I almost looked convulsive and my hands and feet were like ice. The brothers went to get Adrian and when he saw me he started to cry. I told him I'd be ok, but really, I didn't even know that. Then they called my family back home and told them I was being taken to the hospital. It was the first time I'd ever been in an ambulance & I was scared. Poor Adrian, who rode in the front watched me over his shoulder, never turning around once.
I was in icu for 45 minutes but when I refused blood they threw up their hands and stuck me in an e.r. stall. More calls to family were made. I never got to talk to anyone though. I was given a round of tests and was there until midnight when they released me with Provera pills, telling me I had uterine fibroids, benign tumors.
Finally, exhausted, I was on my way home. My family, whom I had thought for sure would come to the hospital never did. In fact, it was, and still is, my great pain to find that upon my return no one in my family (except my parents) even cared that I'd been there in the hospital. One of my daughters was pacing because my delay was preventing her from spending the night at her friend's house for the umpteenth time, she left before I got home, another of my daughters was harping because my trip to the e.r. prevented her from seeing Star Wars for the 10th time (literally), and another of my 3 daughters who was staying with my sister never even called me until the next night & there was no concern in her voice, and my loving "husband," a tweaking dope addict, who had slept all day and ignored the ringing phone didn't know I'd even been in the hospital till 10 minutes before I got home. He gave me no affection or solicitude whatsoever and 10 minutes after I returned he went into his bedroom to sleep some more.
I went to bed in tears, crushed by a pain I have yet to heal from, but thanking Jehovah for my son, Adrian, and for showing me my true family was not blood, but spiritual. Brother & sister Sheets sat by my side the entire day and then drove me home at midnight, and they didn't even know me. The brothers and sisters in the first aid center at the stadium, with their spiritually encouraging words and genuine sympathy I will never forget, and the message that came from the speaker as I laid down, I knew God had directed it all. Even though I had refused seeing a doctor, He made sure I went to find out what was wrong with me (uterin fibroids) and that I would be safe and treated kindly when it happened. Thus was the first incident that led me to see that my heavenly Father was caring for me
Now let me tell you something about emotional pain, (just in case you readers have gone through something similar you won't feel so alone & maybe won't feel so guilty for letting it happen) Emotional pain can overshadow ones faith in God's love when it is relentlessly inflicted. I believe Satan uses that fact to his advantage to undermine ones faith that God loves them, and I believe he did just that to me. To understand the way in which Satan played this game against me and how I came to see God WAS with me I'll have to tell more in depth about my life during this time. I was to add it to another page so as not to detract from the point of this being a page dedicated to showing how God was there in my life, but I have decided that it is too much a part of the story to be side-stepped, so if you'll continue, here is a little more, but by no means all, of what I endured and with God's loving mercy, overcame...
Returning home from this ordeal, as I said, was heartbreaking to me. The loving concern of my family which I naively daydreamed on my ride home would surround me as I came in the door was completely absent. I had made excuses all day & all the way home for receiving no phone calls from my family and no one coming to see if I was alright, but now I was struck with the unarguable truth that no one called or came to see me there because no one cared. Here they were so concerned with the petty desires of the self that I and my illness had become no more than an annoyance to their affairs. Yes, I did draw comfort in the fact that God had shown his love for me, but still, this stung deeply nonetheless, and as I look back upon it, it still does.
The 7 months that were to follow were the blackest of my entire life. I got sicker and sicker until I was quite literally bed-ridden. If I got up out of bed to go to the kitchen to make myself something to eat I would begin to hemorrhage again. I could not roll to my side or sit up in bed without bleeding profusely, it was awful! But as awful as it was, what made it black was not the physical aspects, what made it black was the emotional pain I suffered at the hands of my own family.
Now some in my family may become offended that I should speak openly about their actions, openly about my feelings about them, but that is once again only their concern with self and for once I need to be concerned with myself, or I shall never heal of their painful wounds. In my home at that time lived my 19 year old son, (whom I would like to point out right now was a blessing to me) two of my three teen daughters, and whenever he wanted a place to burn-out at, Brett, who proclaims himself my husband but does little to behave like it. My 16 year old daughter, as I have said, lived with my 50some year old sister only a few blocks down the street. I hardly ever saw her, maybe once in two months would she pop in for a mere moment. But what became a new and painful surprise to me was that, aside from my son, I hardly ever saw the people who lived in the same home with me! I was confined to bed in the back of the house. Occasionally one of my remaining two daughters would come into my room to ask if they could go somewhere or have something, throwing a hissy if they were told no, and that was it. Neither of them showed any concern for me. Though they were aware by my lack of presence in the rest of the house that I could not get up to get myself food, none of them ever asked if I was hungry or brought me food. They will remember opposite I'm sure, but their only care came the last weeks I spent in bed. By that time I was so hurt by their lack of concern for me that I almost always refused food. I cried a great deal over this. I think a couple of the things that hurt me the worst was when my youngest daughter came in my room to show me gifts she had made for a friends mothers whom she said was going through the same thing as I was and with whom she spent all of her time with and on, yet to her own mother she showed no such love. One day when she was screaming at her dad over what a mean person I was to never let her have her way her father said "You have a good mother, she doesn't drink or sleaze around, she always tried to give you a good home and taught you about God---" and she cut him off screaming as she flung her arm out toward me laying in bed white as a sheet and 25 sickly pounds less that normal and said "You call that a good mother!? All she ever does is lay on her fat F##kig A$$!!!! I was crushed. Not long after my other daughter made some nasty comment about a sign I had hung on my door asking for some quiet (as they fought constantly) and I just snapped, I was so hurt I threw her out to live with her boyfriend who had gotten her pregnant.
I just didn't feel I could cope with one more trouble, not one more person hurting me. Out on the patio as she packed her things she threw barbs at me, letting me know her sister (the one who was living her degraded lifestyle at my sister's house) had been blackening my name and good-standing with my family by telling her I did drugs! When she told me this my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. It was a double stab, that one daughter would wish to make me appear this way to another, and the other daughter, not caring what I was going through, would throw such an arrow at me just to hurt me.
I felt there was no further into this emotional pain that I could go. I was laying there wasting away, pale, dying, and my daughters didn't seem to care at all. And further, no one in my extended family came see me, called me or helped me. (parent's aside) This was the point from which I sank into the black grief that had me praying to God many times a day that I would die. I could no longer see His love. I could no longer understand why He wanted me to live and endure all of this. Each time I came close to death I sneered at God in anger. One morning daughters and son were fighting. I was literally pleading in tears for them to stop, I just couldn't tolerate it any longer. I think what I couldn't tolerate was not literally their fighting as it was they would continue to do so without regard for the upset it was bringing to me in my condition! I hemorrhaged again, very badly and again went into shock and went to the hospital for a second time in an ambulance.
They did little for me there but hook me up to an i.v. and throw a heated blanket on me. After a couple hours of laying in the ER they just sent me home. No tests, no medication, nothing. As much as this dismayed me, it was the way everyone acted once I got home that really got me, as if nothing had happened. This was the last downhill slide before surgery, but to me if felt like (and was wished) to be the last days of my life. It is all a blur really. I don't remember much except laying in bed being very hungry and being afraid to move from or even in my bed. I can still remember the designs in the wood paneling ceiling of my room. There was but one thing on my mind during his time, during the whole time but mostly during these last weeks, Brandy & Sue.
Brandy was the coldest person I had ever encountered in all of my life. This was my daughter. My sweet, funny, smart golden curled daughter who loved me so much, wasn't it? Now before me was a "punk" (as in the Punk/goth thing) hair black, cut short and straight, ugly clothes, foul angry words spewing from her mouth, abandoning school for drugs and alcohol with a bunch of crude boys, whom she became just like, playing around with lesbianism and basically abandoning any and all integrity she had ever had. This was a stranger and she treated me like one. There was no expression whatsoever upon her face when she would hear the pain in my voice or see my tears. If anything my longing for her love was seen as a weak spot into which to stab her sword of cruelty. She even smiled with satisfaction when she saw her meanness crushed my heart. No, this was not my daughter. This was the person my sister Sue had allowed her to transform into. "Your mother was always a square. She never knew what it was like to have fun and be a kid." That's the sort of things Brandy told me my sister told her about me. I was horrified that my own sister, the one who told me she would put an end to this wild and rebellious behaviour Brandy was just getting into, would not only give her free reign to do it, but belittle me to my own daughter in the process! Here now was my daughter laughing at me and my "square & naive" ways, feeling she was totally justified in behaving as she was for she had the approval and encouragement of her cool aunt. Every time one of my other daughters or son would tell me about Brandy's debauched lifestyle and lowlife friends my soul withered a little more, and my heart became loathsome of my sister who helped it all come to be. One time one of my daughters told me Sue had said to her "I wouldn't pick up your mother if she was walking down the street with groceries in the rain." In my mind I screamed WHY??? Demanding answers from God, "Why??? Why did my sister hate me so? What had I ever done to her???" I imagined myself curled in a tiny ball at the bottom of a long black pit, pain consumed me. But hate too. I HATED Brett with every fiber of my soul for turning my sister against me. It could have only been him. No one else would speak against me so influentially than Brett, beloved of my sister and her son David. (When he was in my house I wanted him out but I was so weak, I could not even argue that he go.) I couldn't understand why they were so loving and loyal to that piece of sh#t who had been such a horrible and mean husband and father to us! That drug addict, lying brown-nosed creep! I begged God to tell me "WHY DO THEY LOVE HIM AND NOT ME???
I had an appointment at a GYN, finally, but I was so apathetic that when he spent no more than three minutes with me, rashly signing a persciption for Provera for me and then quickly dismissing me, I just shuffled weakly from the office, not caring if I lived or died. I got on the elevator, (after hemorrhaging again in the office bathroom before I left) and stood trembling against the wall, not able to look up for the room was spinning. Just as the elevator door closed someone else got on, I could see their shoes and a cardboard box lid. The man explained to my mom who was with me that he just had to take the lid down to the basement. I recognized the voice as the doctor. I looked up and I must have looked like walking-death, I always did after bleeding badly, and he asked if I was alright. "I'm ok" I whispered, used to self depreciating what everyone else in my life depreciated too. I made my way to the car and then the doctor came to the window and told my mom to follow him to the hospital. We did. This time they checked me in, but when I refused a blood transfusion I was dismissed some hours later. But not until after some tests were finally run on me.
The tests revealed that my uterus was filled with fibroids. They would need to operate, a hysterectomy. By this time I was so tired of being confined to bed, weak and starving to death that I looked at this as a blessing. I could either, at the very least, escape the incessant bleeding, or at the very best, DIE. I had for weeks lay there praying that god show mercy for me and allow me escape this misery, this emotional devastation, his family, and let me have peace at last. I laid there whispering "peace... peace...." as I willed my life to stop. I honestly believed this was God's answer to those prayers, this was His mercy, a serene death under anesthesia, peace, beautiful peace, at last.
The date of my surgery was set a month from that day, Jan 03. My blood count was so low that they would not chance surgery now, especially with me refusing blood transfusions, so they doubled the dose of Provera which stopped the bleeding. I spent that month outside walking the town window shopping and eating as much as I could, for I was happy that all of my heartache was soon to end, or at least, as I said, I'd escape the bleeding hardship.
Finally the morning came. I was unafraid. It was the first surgery I had ever had and I was not in the slightest bit afraid. I almost felt like I was getting ready for a vacation. I was wheeled past my mother, father, son and 2 daughters in the waiting room. They all stood up as I went past and I smiled at them, a little sad to be "leaving" some of them. I was put in the pre-op room and my blood pressure was taken many times in that hour or so that I waited. The nurse exclaimed later that mine was the lowest blood pressure she'd ever seen in a pre-op patient, even old-pro's (those who had had many surgery's and were used to them) in all her career. I didn't tell her why, it was because I was so at peace with the possibility that I would be dying in there.
But then, I opened my eyes in the post-op room. Nausea washed over me and I wiggled my finger at the nurses sitting at a desk at the foot of my bed and one came and gave me a shot so I wouldn't throw up. I think I was just sick to still be there. The only thing I could think of was "Oh my God! I'm alive! WHY am I alive!!!!" I was SO angry at God for not taking me as I slept! By the next day though I was beginning to come to grips with "living" and started thinking about how things were going to be different when I got home. I let my mind even entertain getting the heck out of that roach-infested dilapidated tiny trailer in that drug-infested trailer park and going at long last to Tennessee, beautiful place of my dreams. I was out of it, drugged up, most of the time I was in the hospital recovering, only 2 days there, but every time I awoke I longed to see Brandy there, not just there, but the Brandy who had been my daughter, the one who had once loved me so much. Opening my eyes though, I was greeted with a marijuana belt buckle and disappointingly saw it was on Brandy. I had hoped she would have had the decency to leave such proclamations of her liberation from me at "home" (Sue's house) but no, and it made my heart sink again.
One day as I lay there trying to pull myself out of the grog of Darvon shots they kept pumping into me, I saw Sue sitting on the side of my bed. She was asking me how I was. I wanted to knock her off my bed for all the suffering she'd brought me, but I was amiable to her, like I'd always been, like I am to this day. As she sat there the doctor came in. I thought he was just there to check on how I was doing but he leaned over me, his face looking like it was 6 feet above me and said "Noelle, we found cancer, it was invasive..." I slapped my hand over my mouth, immediately going into a panic. I hyperventilated. In my mind I screamed at God! "How could you do this to me!!!! I thought you loved me!!!! You could have let me go peacefully in my sleep but you kept me alive, FOR WHAT!!!!! So I can die in even more pain and humiliation with CANCER!!!!" Sue kept trying to calm me, she even cried a little. The doctor tried calming me too and finally I did enough for him to tell me the rest. He ended his talk to me on a rather surprising note, one for a facts and statistics doctor anyway, he said, "This was a miracle Noelle, it was a miracle. If we had not done this surgery right when we did we would not have caught it in time, it would have been spread throughout your body in only a couple months. If I had not seen you in the elevator that day and taken you to the hospital for tests, I would have just kept giving you Provera to stop the bleeding and you would have died of cancer. Somebody up there was looking out for you." It didn't sink in to me then, I was still reeling in self pity that I should have to deal with cancer now after everything I had gone through, but later, it would.
I went to my mother's house to recuperate & had my webtv & small television brought over so I could start researching chemo & radiation therapy, that was to undergo in a month or so. What I was reading sounded scary, I wasn't at all thrilled with the prospect. I became depressed, just thinking about it overwhelmed me & I was very sad. Then, one night as I lay there in bed feeling sorry for myself, a phone call came, it was Gwynn, she was crying hard. She said Moggie (my favorite and deeply beloved kitty) was dying of a uterine infection and the vet said it would cost $600 to operate and treat her or else she would have to be put to sleep. I would have paid a million dollars to save her life, I would! She meant that much to me! But without even $600 I was helpless and had to give the horrible order to kill her. I immediately went into a state of grief that was inconsolable. A black grief where my heart was full of hate at myself and everything else, and my life meant absolutely nothing.
To be continued in my next entry
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