My gift to Jesus this past Christmas season was to not be
stressed out about anything. I hope he’s
pleased - I didn’t stress. A lot of things didn’t get done and no one
seemed to notice. Some cards are yet to
be mailed, the Christmas decorations didn’t all get out and even now, aren’t
all tucked back in the attic. Life just
clicked along one day after the next and before I knew it, it was Christmas and
I’m pretty sure I didn’t lose my cool even once, not even when I thought Kory
was having a heart attack.
Every day for months now I felt like something was going to
happen. Each night when I laid my head
on the pillow I thanked God for another day of normal and that Kory was still
with us. He’s been very careless with
his health and I knew it was just a matter of time. I couldn’t fight the battle anymore with him,
so I prayed that God would get through to him somehow before it was too late.
Last Thursday at 5am he woke me up crawling back in
bed. I asked why he was up and he said
he’d just taken a shower. I asked why he
would shower at such an odd hour. He
said he was sweating so much he couldn’t stand himself. I asked if he had anything else going on and
he said he had a bad pain in his shoulder and hadn’t slept much all night
because of it. I told him to get in the
car; I was taking him to the ER. I
called my favorite prayer warrior before I even left the driveway.
We have a volunteer fire department and I didn’t want to
wait for them to arrive so I didn’t call 911, and I didn’t want them to take
him to the nearest hospital since his cardiologist is in Everett. I drove at least 80mph all the way to
Providence. The doctor later told me it
was a good thing I got him in as soon as I did.
Initially they said Kory was having a heart attack, but the
EKG didn’t show any signs of it. They
did the blood enzyme test and that didn’t show a heart attack either but they
said it often takes 12 hours before it shows up so he needed to hang out for
the day. The heart monitor showed his
heart beating at 85, then it would drop to 40 for several beats. It was erratic and crazy. They gave him aspirin and nitro glycerin as
his pain worsened once we arrived. He
had a bad reaction to the nitro as his blood pressure dropped to 30 and they
had to put him on an IV and oxygen after that.
I wasn’t fearful at all. I felt
the peace that passes all understanding, but I also called a few more people to
pray. I knew it was serious.
I left Kaleb at home since we were dog-sitting a puppy. I called my neighbor to go get the dog and a
friend from our home fellowship group got Kaleb for the day. A friend that lives near the hospital was by
my side before I even knew what was happening.
She stayed until three other women from our home group, plus another
prayer warrior, showed up to be with me the bulk of the day. Kory was prayed over and prayed for all the
way from Norway. He’d grabbed his I-pad
before we left so I was able to post notices on Facebook and it was amazing how
quickly people started praying. It was a
powerful experience.
Because of where Kory’s pain was, and that no tests showed
he was having a heart attack, the doctor thought he might have a blood clot
going to his lung, so they ordered up a CT scan to rule that out. Fortunately, there was no clot, but they did
discover from that test, he has an aneurism on his aorta that worried them a
great deal. They said he’d need surgery
on it (open heart!) because of how large it was. More prayers went up.
The doctor wasn’t sure if the aneurism was a new thing or an
old thing. She felt his pain could be
caused by that, but to rule out he didn’t have any blockages in his arteries,
she wanted to do an angiogram and go in with the camera to check things
out. We agreed it was a good idea. More prayers while we waited and especially
when he was in surgery. My “homies” were
right there with me, took me to coffee and tried to get me to eat something. I couldn’t, my stomach was in knots, but I
wasn’t afraid.
The angiogram revealed that Kory was 100% blocked in his
Right Coronary artery – an artery that last year was hardly blocked at
all. Something in his body isn’t dealing
with cholesterol very well, even though his cholesterol count has always been
low, as has his blood pressure. Go
figure.
They measured the aneurism when they were in there, and were
surprised to see the size was much smaller.
The doctor was confused, as they don’t ever shrink in size. She ordered a specialist to come in and look
at the first CT scan and the new information from the angiogram. Medically, it was a mystery. The second test showed the aneurism to be
“insignificant” in size and not needing surgery. I told the doctor that many people were
praying for him and this was a miracle.
She responded with, “It’s good to have happy thoughts.” I knew better.
The doctor told me several times that day Kory had had a
heart attack. Later that night I asked
the nurse if it was “mild or medium.” He looked up Kory’s medical record and
said, “Well, that’s strange, they aren’t calling this a heart attack at
all. They just say he had a blockage
that was repaired.” He later asked the
doctor about it and she confided to him (but never to us) that he “came as
close to having a heart attack as a person could, within 1%, but never had
one,” and there is no damage to his heart whatsoever. Another miracle.
Kory couldn’t leave the hospital for a whole extra day
because of the discrepancies in the tests for his aneurism. They wanted to know more – so he had to stay
24 hours until the iodine got out of his body and they could order another CT
test. They couldn’t believe it could go
down in size, but it did. The third test
confirmed it, so they sent him home late Friday night. Saturday night he was at a New Year’s Eve
party and Sunday we all went to church.
Miracles all the way around.
Kory’s recovering well and taking it easy. He’s been watching You Tube videos on how to
draw faces, since that’s the latest challenge he’s taken up – trying to learn
how to draw people. He’s been sitting at
the dining room table and practicing for hours on end. I love it.
He knows not to be physical, like the last time he had stents put in.
We were able to have our annual “business meeting” on Sunday
night, since Kaleb wasn't home and has been bounced around from house to house while Kory
recovered. We talked about the plans for
the year, house projects to get done, where we’ll go on vacation. Kory has his 2012 to-do list all ready to go. He likes to quote some ancient Chinese
proverb that says, “house done when man die” and he realized he can’t die yet
because there’s still stuff to do on the house.
Our trip to Disneyworld in Florida has been indefinitely
postponed until we can figure out a week in our lives that we can fit it in
again. Prior to all this, I was joking
that I’d rather have surgery than go to a theme park, and I guess I shouldn’t
have said that because it ended up being Kory that had the surgery, but still,
I’m thrilled we aren’t going – Kaleb – not so much. He understands though and that place isn’t
going anywhere so we’ll get there when we
get there.
We are happy to be back to normal, to have Kory with us, and
to have this new year all mapped out, but just in case things don’t turn out
exactly like we’d planned, we most definitely know that God has our back, no matter what. Hallelujah!
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