The Gift of Pain - Chapter 7

To read chapters 1-6 of My Story – The Gift of Pain, click on the links at right.

I don’t know about you, but reading through this story again, I’m ready for it to be over! Stick with me. There are only a few chapters left.

This is not a happy story. It is also fairly one-sided. In spite of the pain and sickness of the past several years, I have 

• enjoyed my children and celebrated their achievements, 
• made new friends and savored time with old ones, 
• loved my husband and my family, 
• laughed with friends and relished the good times, 
• dug dipper into the Word and worshiped my Savior. 

With each new trial that has come our way, I have grown to rely on God more and more and for that, and all the other blessings He has given me, I thank Him.

I have set the LORD always before me;
Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved.
Psalm 16:8 (NKJV)

As I lay in the outpatient recovery room, I began to feel the pain as the anesthetic wore off. Steve called over a nurse and she administered meds through my IV. They brought a small measure of relief but very quickly wore off.  He summoned the nurse again and explained that my level of pain was back to a '10'.  He asked if there was any way to relieve my suffering. Each time they administered drugs, the relief was negligible and the searing pain returned.

I mentioned that the pain also appeared to be coming from my left shoulder, but no one took notice and the afternoon dragged on. One by one, the other patients that were in the room for the same surgery were released to go home as they recovered suitably.

Finally, I was the only patient left, still in terrible pain, with no break in sight. The nurse, exasperated, said she had given me every form of pain meds available. If I needed anything stronger, I would need the doctor's approval.  They summoned the surgeon and he appeared. He was exhausted from a day of performing surgeries and a bit annoyed at being called. The nurse informed him of my pain level and their attempts to control it. "She says she's still at a 9 or 10. She wants something more. It doesn't make sense because we've given her high doses of meds all day and it doesn't appear to be helping at all."

"Give her whatever she needs, so she can go home," were the doctor's words. "She probably has a high tolerance to the medication since she's been dealing with chronic pain for years."  Finally, they administered straight morphine and my pain diminished to a dull roar. They finally felt I was stable enough and I was released to go home. By the time we arrived home, my pain had skyrocketed once again.

I had been taking Oxycontin for two months prior to my surgery, as my pain had escalated. Now, I increased my intake from every four hours to every two hours with morphine for breakthrough pain and still, I felt no real measure of relief.

This is where things get very foggy. The rest of the events, as I relate them in this chapter, are recalled to the best of my ability. I sat with Steve to help me remember how things transpired while I was in this black hole. It is still a blur, but I believe this is how things occurred.

Two days after surgery, Steve couldn't bear to see me in such agony and called the doctor's office to see if we could go in before my week follow-up appointment. He was reminded that the doctor was in Italy on vacation and we were scheduled to see him in two weeks, when he returned.  I had not slept since I got home from the hospital. I would drift off and awaken, sobbing with the pain. There was no position where I could find relief. I was literally overcome with mind-numbing pain, in my hand, my elbow and stabbing in my shoulder.

Within a couple days, I couldn’t bear it any longer. Steve called our own health provider and scheduled an appointment with the first doctor available. I had never seen her before and she really knew nothing of my condition prior to this, since it has been handled through Worker’s Comp. She was convinced that my pain was aggravated by depression, as I sat in her office like a zombie, barely able to raise my head or put two words together. She prescribed me an anti-depressant and scheduled me to see my regular doctor in a couple weeks.

I went to get my stitches removed, a week after surgery and the nurse asked me to turn my arm over so she could get at the stitches on the inside of my elbow. I could not raise or turn my arm and cried out every time she tried to manipulate it. She was very sympathetic and somewhat alarmed that I was still experiencing so much pain. She called in another doctor on duty to have him look at my arm.  Again, I expressed how the pain seemed to be focused on my shoulder more than the surgical sites. He had no answers for me and increased my Oxycontin intake significantly.

Finally, the surgeon returned and I went for my follow-up appointment. He was annoyed that I was still wearing my sling and said that I probably pulled a muscle in my shoulder when I was in surgery, because they had my hand over my head to get at the inside of my elbow. He insisted that I remove the sling and live without it, or I wouldn’t heal properly.

By this time I was on the highest dose of Oxycontin that the doctor could prescribe, taking it every 4-6 hours. I was taking morphine for break-through pain, anti-depressants, anti-seizure meds and God only knows what else.

I was drugged-up and messed up and begging for relief. I would lie in bed, crying and begging God to remove the pain or take me out of my misery. My prayers seemed to bounce off the ceiling. I moved from the bed to the sofa, constantly struggling to find a comfortable position, but there was none to be found. I prayed to die, since I knew I couldn’t continue to live like this.

Can't you see I'm black-and-blue,
beat up badly in bones and soul?
God, how long will it take
for you to let up?
I'm no good to you dead, am I?
I can't sing in your choir if I'm buried in some tomb!

I'm tired of all this—so tired. My bed
has been floating forty days and nights
On the flood of my tears.
My mattress is soaked, soggy with tears.
The sockets of my eyes are black holes;
nearly blind, I squint and grope.
Psalm 6: 2-3, 5-7 (MSG)

On July 4, I finally left the house. The whole family was going to my cousin’s house for a barbecue and fireworks and I didn’t want to disappoint the kids by staying home again. I knew I could escape to the back bedroom if things became unbearable.

I was walking across the family room when, suddenly, I tripped and fell forward. I reached with my right arm to catch myself on the coffee table. As I did so, I heard a loud pop and felt my shoulder jerk. I screamed in pain and thought, “I’ve done it now.” Whatever had been bothering my shoulder before, this certainly couldn’t be good.

Spikes or Nests?

Thanks to my brother Karl Vaters.  He is my guest blogger today and is pastor of Cornerstone Christian Fellowship in Fountain Valley.  I'm enjoying the break and a long weekend!
Karen


Hello Jenny and Pearl readers,

My sister has given me the extreme privilege of being a guest blogger. I don’t expect to do this anywhere near as well as she does, but I’ll give it my best shot. And I’m a preacher, so I’m likely to blog like one. You know what they say about old dogs…

We’re in the middle of a much-overdue renovation project at the church where I pastor. No this is not a plea for money (but if you had a little extra cash, I wouldn’t complain…).

A few months ago, during the design stage of the project, we had one of those thousand little decisions you have to make when you’re building something. This decision concerned a three-foot high wall that will enclose the brand-new patio on one side, and border a brand-new skateboard park on the other.

The contractor was expressing concern that people would be tempted to sit, not just on the seats inside the wall toward the patio, but on the wall itself to face the skate park. He was wondering how to design the top of the wall to keep people from sitting on it.

My response surprised him. I told him to add a ledge to make the top of the wall wider and to make sure the wall was strong enough to hold people’s weight. I think my exact words were “They’re gonna sit there anyway. Might as well make it comfortable and safe for them.”

I know what you’re thinking. “Compelling story, Karl. So when does your sister get back?” But hear me out.

I responded the way I did because of a change the Lord made in my heart several years ago. And it had to do with the very kids (well, a previous generation of those kids, anyway) that we’re building our new skate park for.

I’ve pastored two churches where we’ve had what many consider the “problem” of teenagers hanging around the property looking for something to do. In the first church, over twenty years ago, we were right next to a high school. The school had passed a zero tolerance rule for smoking, which sounds great on paper, but what that meant was that the kids who smoked didn’t stay on campus during their lunch break. Instead, a whole lot of them congregated – you guessed it – in our church parking lot.

The first day they showed up I was shocked and offended. “How dare they do that here!” I thought. “Don’t they know what kind of building this is?!” So I pumped myself full of self-righteous indignation as I marched out of my office to teach these kids some manners.

As I was about to open the door, it was as though a presence stopped me in my tracks and a small voice in my head said, “You know what, Karl? They don’t know what kind of a building this is. But the moment you open your mouth, they will.”

Ouch.

I pulled myself away from the door and walked back to my office where I wrestled with God, my conscience and my self-righteousness for quite a while. To make a long story short, instead of shooing them off the property, I approached the church members and the nearby Bible college about the opportunity we had. In less than a month, and for the rest of the time I pastored that church, once a week there was a group of Christian students and student leaders who set out ashtrays, gave away free pizza and hung out with a growing group of high school smokers in our church parking lot.

I wish I could tell you stories about transformed lives, salvations and broken addictions that resulted from Pizza Thursdays, but I can’t. I don’t know of any. But I do know this: if those former high school kids have ever, in the last twenty years had occasion to think about God, Jesus or the church in a negative way, it wasn’t because of us. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a thirty-something adult out there now whose life has been changed by Christ, and when we get to heaven we’ll find out that it was partly because, instead of yelling at them or putting up “no smoking” signs, a pastor made sure they got free pizza and had a chat with a friendly face.

So what does that have to do with turning a low wall into a seat for skater wanna-bes at the church today? At Cornerstone, where I’ve been privileged to pastor for almost eighteen years now, we had kids hanging around too. But they weren’t smokers, they were skateboarders.

Instead of shooing them away or putting up signs to keep them out, we welcomed them and built skateboard ramps. And sold pizza for fifty cents a slice. And at this church, after more than ten years of welcoming skaters, their friends and their families, we do have some life-transformation stories. Dozens of them. Every year.

The principle is the same for the new wall.

We all want to control the way people enter or stay in our lives. And no one is worse at this than church people. Jesus welcomed the sinner. We shoo away the smoker and the skateboarder. We tell people “this is a church, behave the way I do” or “this is a wall, it’s not for sitting” much like we put spikes on the top of walls, statues and crosses to keep birds from building nests in them and pooping on them.

I don’t think Jesus was a spike-planter. I think he was a nest-builder, even though he knew better than anyone the mess it would cause. He just thought that having people in his life was worth the mess.

And I figure if people want to sit on a wall, we ought to make it comfortable and safe for them. It’s a pretty low price of admission for having more people in our lives.

Every day of our lives you and I face similar decisions, and not just at church. Will we accept people the way they come in to our lives, along with both the mess and the love that they bring? Or will we keep demanding that they come in the way we want, and have less mess, but less love too? By our attitudes, are we putting up signs or ramps? Walls or seats? Spikes or nests?

I don’t want anyone else erecting signs, walls or spikes when I want to be a part of their life. So I’m learning to build ramps, seats and nests when they want to be a part of mine – and maybe if I serve them a little pizza they’ll stick around a while.

I think the mess is worth it.

I Heart Summer

Many of you have commented on some of the pictures in my posts.  I have to confess, the best of them were taken by my daughter Rachel.  She has a real artist's eye and I love her perspective when she takes photographs.

So, in celebration of this season, here is her summer picture portfolio.  Enjoy!

I Heart Summer

Beach Days

Summer Beauty

The Nights of Summer

Back to the Beach

Our House is a Zoo!

Hot days, Hard work and Horses - a week at Calicinto Ranch

Having a Ball!

Seal it with a Heart

Oh, how sweet the light of day, And how wonderful to live in the sunshine! Even if you live a long time, don't take a single day for granted. Take delight in each light-filled hour...
Ecclesiastes 11:7 (MSG)