Going back and reliving the pain and the disappointment I felt after the surgery is extremely difficult. My expectations of how I thought things should be and how my health problems and pain should be managed were not met. It wasn’t that most of the doctors I saw weren’t wonderful, kind people, but they simply couldn’t do anything more medically than they were doing.
I was discharged from the hospital mid-January, but the spasming in my colon did not go away, and I had new troubles because of scar tissue buildup. Mark and I went to see the GI surgeon in March. I told her I was in considerable pain because adhesions had formed that were affecting my bladder. She had done her best to do a very low incision to remove my sigmoid in order not to have adhesions form, which would constrict my small bowel. Thank God for that, but the pain when my bladder was full or emptying was nauseating, and nothing could be done because opening me up again would just cause more scar tissue to form, a no-win situation.
As we sat there with her and I explained the confusion over my painful GI symptoms still remaining, she pushed her stool back into the corner, crossed her legs, sighed, and said, “There’s a new study out that says people with IBS have normal peristalsis [bowel contractions], they just perceive it as pain, but it really isn’t painful. You’re obviously struggling and depressed. Maybe you need to see a psychiatrist and get some help for it.” She stood then, shrugged her shoulders slightly, looked at me with pity, and excused herself.
I didn’t think I could be knocked down any further. Yeah, I could consider being depressed part of my issues, understandably so, but her words intimating the debilitating pain was a figment of my imagination made me feel as if I had been swallowed up in a dark hole.
My dear husband shook his head in disbelief and muttered, “Right. It’s not painful, just normal peristalsis that wakes you up out of a sound sleep at 2:00 a.m. and causes you to stagger to the bathroom and pass out. I don’t think so. Let’s get out of here.”
I spent most of my time in bed in the fetal position. The fear of being left with no recourse or hope made me resort to anger in defense. I had no filter on my mouth anymore. The drugs and the pain left me saying whatever I wanted to whomever was in my path, but Mark received the worst of it.
He has told me it was the most frightening to him when I would not respond at all. He would purposely goad me to get a reaction because even an angry response showed I still had some spark. I have been told numerous times that the fact he didn’t hightail it out of the marriage is extraordinary. Mark did not stay because it was fun. He did not stay because I was meeting his needs. He didn’t even stay because he had any feelings of warm, fuzzy love. The reason the man did not abandon me is because God enabled him to put his head down, “grab the bull by the horns,” and carry on. Mark had vowed “I do,” in sickness and in health and for richer and poorer. What we both hoped for on our wedding day was continued health and some riches. Our marriage would not have survived had God not used my husband’s steadfast determination not to quit to sustain him day after day in such bleak, unrelenting circumstances.
I’m sure Mark cried a number of times during my extended illness, but he usually did not cry in front of me. One day he did tell me—but only once—“We’re going to get through this.”
Wanting him to feel the depth of my pain too, I looked at him and, practically hissing, said, “We are not in pain. I am in pain. You have no idea what I’m going through. We are not going to get through anything!”
At one point I got hysterical and shouted, “I hate you! I hate you!”
He bowed his head, and barely glancing back up, he said softly, “You can’t say that to me. I know you’re in pain, but I’m trying. You just can’t say that to me.” He walked away with his shoulders slumped in defeat.
Oh how I wanted to escape, out of my house, out of my family, out of my pain, and I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t function physically. I couldn’t drive. Mark had hidden the car keys so I wouldn’t be able to attempt to do so either. Okay, so I could stumble to the bathroom a couple of times a day, but that was it. The helplessness and the pain wore me to a frazzle.
At one point I decided to run away. I don’t know how I did it, but I walked to the bus station in downtown Sheboygan, about a mile and a half from my house. I had my purse and some money I had taken out of our savings account. I was too weak to carry a suitcase. I wanted to get on a bus and maybe go to Florida where it was warm and I could lie on the beach and soak up the sun, possibly relieving some of the pain I was in.
I was under the influence of the Valium and narcotics prescribed for my pain, so I was not able to think as clearly as the situation called for. I couldn’t quite make out the bus schedule, but the man who oversaw the station informed me there wouldn’t be another bus to Chicago until evening. It was only 11:00 a.m. I was getting hungry and feeling faint. How in the world was I going to survive if I left? I could picture a couple of dear people I loved finding me on their doorstep and the fear and uneasiness their eyes would reflect upon seeing me in my unstable state. They might have cared about me a lot, but they wouldn’t want me. I was too much to handle, and even the bravest souls in my life would quail and were not up for the task of helping me. The sobering realization came over me. I had no place to go. I couldn’t get out of the pain I was in, and nobody else wanted me to be with them because they were helpless to do anything for me. My family may have not been able to redeem my life from the pit I was in, but they were the only ones who were willing to stay by me day after incredibly long, painful day. I made my way home again and have no recollection of getting there.
Mark heroically and tenaciously clung to the hope that God had not abandoned us, and even that grated on my nerves because I could not see where having faith in God was helpful. God had the power to relieve this suffering with a word, but He didn’t. Why in the world was His silence so deafening?
I didn’t save my caustic words just for family. A longtime friend, Darin, who was in treatment for kidney failure, came and sat by my bedside day after day. He would talk about everything and nothing and demand that I get out of bed and walk down the hallway. I would wearily turn my face toward him and pathetically say, “Can you not see I’m in no shape to move out of this bed. I cannot breathe without pain, let alone move my body without it hurting. Go! Away!”
He would continue to sit in the rocking chair and tell me, “I’m not leaving until you walk down the hall. You can walk twenty feet, then get back into bed.”
“And what about no can you not understand?” I would say. “Leave me alone!”
“I will, as soon as you get out of that bed and walk.”
“If you don’t get out of my room, I am going to hurt you!”
“Fine. But you will have to get out of bed in order to come over here and hurt me, so let’s be doing it.”
I could have fallen back asleep and tolerated his presence, but he wouldn’t give up. He kept talking and talking about nothing intelligent or pertinent to my life, and I finally pushed back the covers. Wincing in pain and cussing at him all the while, I sat up, eased out of bed, walked down the hall and back again, then climbed back into bed and rolled toward the wall away from him.
“Nice going!” he would cheerfully quip. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out,” was my pleasant, heartfelt response to his promise not to leave me alone.
A plaque hangs on my bedroom wall that my son Jonathan gave me for Christmas in 2010. It’s a picture of a completely barren tree in a field covered with snow. A single set of footprints can be seen in the snow. And like my journal, the line from the “Footprints” poem—“When you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you”—is written in script across the gray landscape, totally devoid of color. I looked at that plaque regularly and at one point asked Jesus in utter defeat, tears flowing, “Why do I have to be carried? I’d much rather be able to carry my own weight and walk.”
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nbsp; By April 2012, I was completely bedridden, getting up only to use the bathroom. Nearly everything I ate caused me intestinal distress, and I hardly swallowed anything. I moaned in pain whenever I adjusted my position in bed, whether awake or asleep. There was nothing any of the doctors I had seen could do. They were baffled at my physical decline. I was stuck. I soaked my pillow with tears, asking in confusion why I was still living, if you could call my existence living. How could this be bringing any glory to God?
All the prayers offered appeared useless. What was the point of praying when day in and day out I was still lying in that bed? Mark had to homeschool the kids and chauffeur them to appointments without my help. My teen girls came alongside Mark and took on the housework—the vacuuming and mopping, the dozen loads of laundry per week, the endless cycle of cooking and dishwashing. At times they felt irritated and ornery, even bitter about having to help clean or make meals. Those were normally my jobs, and I was failing miserably at them. So to say my children had an undercurrent of tension and rebellion in their hearts would be a colossal understatement.
There was no larking about with a song in our hearts. Our family was in mourning. We were surviving. With no end in sight. I was too sick to live and not sick enough to die. Life faded to gray and we had little hope color would ever enter into it again.
My son Andrew was twelve years old at the time and was struggling at school. He lived in constant fear of coming home and learning that I had been admitted to the hospital again or having to call 911 and watch the EMTs haul me out or coming home to find out I had died.
God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8–9). My children also needed to have their faith shaken to the core. Any false assumptions about the goodness of God corresponding to the goodness of our circumstances needed to be sifted.
We praise God for being good because our mortgage is paid, our children are healthy, or the new job came through. We give thanks for favorable things and circumstances. But what happens when all our prayers appear to go unheard and our circumstances are not favorable? Does God become evil then? Is His character so fickle that when my life is good, He is good, and when it’s not, somehow He has changed?
I’m an avid reader, but because of the medications I was taking for the pain and spasming, I couldn’t focus enough to read more than a few sentences at a time. A couple of our dearest friends, Todd and Kelly, called me one afternoon. I asked them in desperation, “Why is God not taking me home? Why is He leaving me to barely exist, wanting to die but not able to do so?” There was silence on the other end of the phone, but then they quietly said to me, “We don’t know. We don’t know, Cori.” They could not fix it for me, and that fact had made most people disappear. But then Todd offered gently, “I have found comfort in listening to Dr. John Piper’s sermons on Suffering and the Sovereignty of God. I’ll send you the website link, and maybe it will be a way for you to make some sense of this.”
I looked up desiringgod.org as Todd had suggested. Day after day, night after night when I could not sleep because I was hurting so badly from my entire body being in a state of inflammation, I would listen to Dr. Piper’s messages. I played his series about Job over and over and over again. I would fall asleep listening to the words he was speaking, and God literally used them to help clear my thinking in spite of the drugs I was taking. I did not lose my mind in complete despair over the suffering I was enduring.
Later that month a friend of ours at church waded into our suffering and gave us a brochure about Sanoviv Medical Institute in Rosarito, Mexico. The brochure featured a spa-like resort, complete with saltwater swimming pools and an ocean view. I laughed when I saw it, much like Sarah did when told she was going to have a baby at ninety. Yeah, right. Not.
We lacked the $15,000 in up-front money needed to secure a spot. This was a sure sign to me that it was a stupid idea and not worth taking a second look. Mark, however, researched the institute thoroughly and was convinced it was the answer to all the tears and prayers he had cried and prayed.
Another friend, Mike, came over and handed us a check for $15,000. His motive wasn’t completely altruistic. He told us with a wink, “I don’t want your kids. I don’t need eight kids hanging out at my farm. If you die, I’m gonna get ’em, and I don’t need that kind of hassle in my life. Get yourself to that hospital in Mexico.”
I didn’t want to go.
Mark badgered me day after day, telling me I had no choice. He was not paying for a funeral before we exhausted this possibility.
He did not care that I did not want to go.
He did not care that I did not care.
Mark is a rock and can be even more stubborn and mule-headed than I. As proof of this, he put me on a plane. Mark didn’t have a passport, so he couldn’t go with me. He needed to stay home and take care of the kids. I had to go alone 95 percent against my will.
I have little recollection of my trip to Mexico. I know we had to be up at 3:00 a.m., and my husband drove me to the airport and put me in a wheelchair. The man in charge took me through security to the plane, where I moved into my seat. I was in so much pain I could hardly breathe, and my medications were barely making it tolerable. My fervent prayer was that I would not be sick and unable to get to the bathroom in time or that I would not be stuck in the restroom while others grew impatient waiting for me to exit.
I was transported from the plane to the baggage claim area and picked up by one of the many kind people who work for Sanoviv. I lay down in the seat of the van and dozed fitfully until we arrived at the hospital. My doctors at Sanoviv had their work cut out for them, in part because I was so discouraged about the decline of my physical health. I was not feeling up to the challenge or able to engage in my own healing. I was too weak to try or to care.
The staff at Sanoviv gave back my life to me in many more ways than just the physical realm. I felt as if I had to go through the even darker shadows of death before I found healing. I had deep-seated fears over being more trouble than I was worth and that I would be abandoned as a result. Add to that the crushing disappointment over multiple medications, treatments, surgeries, and procedures that were not helping. The root causes of my autoimmune diseases had yet to be addressed so true healing could take place. Mere symptom control was not cutting it anymore, no way, no how.
Several days after being admitted, the detoxification from all the drugs I had been taking as well as the physical demise I had endured got the best of me. I felt more hopeless and helpless than ever before. The drug withdrawal caused me to have nightmares, and there was no help for that. I called my husband on Friday, sobbing and resigned to the fact that I could not be helped. The physical pain was unbearable.
Dr. Francisco, the primary doctor in charge of evaluating my treatments looked at me one day with tenderness and compassion and said quietly but with intensity, “I believe I can help you. I know you do not believe right now, but I will believe for the both of us.”
A little while later, one of the housekeepers entered my room. In her limited English, she asked and motioned with her hands if she could pray for me. I nodded yes, and even that hurt as my head was splitting with pain. She laid a tiny, cool hand on my forehead and proceeded to pray with deep, intense fervency. I understood only the name Jesucristo, which she murmured repeatedly. When finished, she gently kissed the area where she had placed her hand on my head and then left as soundlessly as she had come in.
The strange thing was, she wasn’t even the housekeeper assigned to my room but apparently had felt compelled to come pray for me. I did not speak to or see her again the rest of my stay.
The oppressive agony I was experiencing did not immediately lift, but that night my dreams were not quite as terrifying. I awoke on Sunday morning with less pain than I’d had in more than a year. I felt a spark of hope, but by no means was it even a candle flame. I guardedly thought, Okay, maybe it’s going to be all right, or at least better than I’d thought. Sanoviv’s m
edical approach is to decrease or eliminate inflammation at the cellular level and provide health nutritionally and medically with supplements and treatments. The underlying philosophy is that if the body has what it needs to function and toxic substances—certain food, drugs, and environmental pollutants—are eliminated, it can heal.
Everything at Sanoviv is given great thought, from the food, to the water, to the clothing and bedding, to the aesthetically pleasant surroundings and the medical treatments for diseases.
I had no idea how necessary it was to have such a beautifully serene place to endure the medical treatments prescribed, and those pools, one of them quite warm, were the only way my muscles would stop cramping and aching. Unable to sleep because of the pain, I would go down to them at 1:00 a.m. and slip in for an hour to relax enough to be able to sleep.
I spent most of my mornings waking up and crying for thirty minutes, praying for God to help me get out of bed. I would then make myself go to the nurses’ station and receive the prescribed injections, the IVs, or whatever else was on my program. A battle was going on for my life. It was not easy, light warfare. I had told God for years that I wasn’t a soldier. But I was required to be tougher than I had ever needed to be in my life, and He was there to strengthen and enable me to do what was required. A warrior emerged in those mornings when I battled with my desires to shrink back from the painful procedures and treatments. I instead gathered my wits and waded into the pain designed to heal.
I was humanly alone for the most part in having to deal with the process. I was isolated, and God met me in that place in ways I could not have anticipated. I know firsthand what it’s like to be at your wit’s end with no solutions offered except misery and death. I can also say with deep assurance, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4 NKJV).
I Will Love You Forever Page 12
