Greetings to you in the name of Jesus who is Lord of all. Most of you probably heard through the grape vine about my past few weeks. August 20th through the 27th was by far the worst week of my life. It all started with slight stomach pains that I thought was just a 24-hour stomach bug. Friday I had stomach all day long, but was still able to do some manual labor with my day off. Then Friday night I couldn't sleep as the stomach pain moved from my whole stomach to just the lower right hand side. Saturday morning when I woke up, it hurt to get up or sit down, but not that bad if I would just sit there. After a phone call to mom, she convinced me to go get it checked out. I unloaded a bunch of junk out of my back seat, drove myself to the hospital, walked in and told them I was having some stomach pains that I wanted to get checked out. The doctor at first did not think it was my appendix, but he ordered some lab tests. After those results came back with signs of inflammation, he ordered a scan. This is where a bad week went worse. As they injected the contrast die into my IV in my right arm for the scan, something happened with the IV that instead of going into my vein, the die ended up under the fascia in my muscle compartments. It didn't hurt at first, but my forearm swelled up and got extremely tight. After a while it really began to hurt and ended up being more painful than the appendix ever was. They put a new IV in my left arm, the die went right that time, and they did the scan. It was not very long after that they knew for sure it was my appendix and were scheduling me for surgery. By the time they got me to pre-op my arm was in so much pain I couldn't think of anything else.
As I woke up from surgery, (which is not a fun experience to come to after being put under), they told me my appendix had ruptured. Most people's rupture from the bottom, but since I don't do anything normal, mine ruptured from the top and they actually had to slice off a thin slice of my colon to make sure they got it all. This is also when I found out they had operated on my arm while I was already under. There was a wound vac on my arm, and the suction of the vac was so strong, even though my arm was still over twice the normal size, it was caved-in in several places. So I had a hose running from my right arm to the wound vac, I had several IV lines running out of my left arm to machines, my abdomen muscles were still very tender, so getting up to do anything was a very long, slow process. I won't go into the rest of the gory details for the rest of the week, other than to let you know it took all week for my digestive system to finally start working again. For a week, I couldn't eat, sleep for more than an hour at a time, or do anything without being miserable.
However, for as much as I would love to complain about this experience, the Good Lord was with me through the whole thing. Mom came up and was a life-saver taking care of me all week. The medical staff and nurses were amazing for the most part, and the love and support from family, friends, church members, and others was truly humbling. God used that week to remind me how many amazing people I have in my life that love me and genuinely care about me.
Now I am back to work and feeling pretty good again. The family was up here this weekend and we have an awesome time out on the lake, brewery hopping, and playing tourists. Now it is time to get back into full speed ahead here at church as all of our Bible studies, classes, confirmation, pre-school, and the like start back up again. I really do enjoy the busyness of it all and am so thankful to be at a busy thriving church with so much going on. God is good all the time and all the time God is good! I hope you are feeling as blessed as I am as you evaluate how much God is directly at work in your life every day. Blessings to you all.
