There comes a time in your life when you just have to decide to travel the path alone. You must let go of the desire for praise and acceptance from family and friends and/or of their continued scorn because the path you chose to follow
seems so illogical to them. Is it easy? No. But God will be with you every step of the way to give you all that you need to stay on the path, mentoring you, strengthening you, and granting you peace and joy in the midst of it all.
JUST DON'T ACT LIKE A VICTIM! At the end you will be VICTORIOUS as you share your story with others. God will use every experience you have had as long as you are willing to share each of them in order to help others in ways you can't possibly
imagine right now. I don't know how long your journey will be, but don't worry about that.
Just focus on God. Allow Him to trade your sorrows for JOY, as He desires to do (Jeremiah 31:13). Don't hold on to the
pain, shame or guilt any longer. God did not intend mourning and pain to last forever. He wants to USE your story to bring hope and comfort to others who are going through the same experience as you have and experienced God's presence,
peace and joy.
I'd like to share a small part of my story with you. If you want to hear it, read on.
There's a lot
of experiences I could share, but this blog post is only going to focus on one aspect, which is the reason why I chose to not ever use pharmaceutical drugs again or go to be treated by mainstream doctors, unless I'm in an accident and they
need to fix up my bones or whatever, like what happened when I broke my wrists. (I don't hate doctors, they are just not as necessary in our every day lives as we have been led to believe)
This story
is about my mom, who left this earth almost three years ago. She had served for many years as a missionary in Colombia, where she met my dad, and then they served there together for about 40 years. Then they retired from that mission field,
but not from serving God. They moved to Latvia, until my dad died and was buried by my uncle, who had died 3 months before he did. That is a story for another time....
After my dad was buried, my brothers and I brought my mom back to the
States, where we live. She found her place of service in an elderly community from July of 2012 until April of 2016, when my brother called the ambulance to trasport her to a hospital because he thought they would be able to treat her cough and other ailments
better there.
Allow me to explain.... My mom had gone through eye surgery a few months before (in November of 2015), which probably, looking back, was one that had not been necessary. My mom and I had just wanted some yellow
bags under her eyes checked out and the eye specialist in Irvine immediately said she needed surgery, without considering the fact that she had been diagnosed with a blood cancer disease called myeloma a couple of years before; he didn't think that her medical
history would affect her surgery in any way.
They sent her home right after the surgery took place, and the next day she had to go through emergency surgery, after laying for an hour or two in a bed at the ER. She bled a lot, but finally after about
an hour they got it it under the control. The doctor that treated her during this surgery commented to me, "I've never seen anyone bleed so much!". The was the beginning of the end.... We took her home and she was to apply an antibioitic creme to her eye and
keep it covered for a few weeks. Her eye was healing, but her life was never the same after that.
Her health got worse. This once strong, very independent woman, became less and less able to
take care of herself and that was extremely hard for her to come to terms with because, in her own words, she never wanted to be a burden to her family. She was admitted into the hospital after falling one night as she got up to go to the bathroom,
where she got weaker and weaker for several days, and then was transported to St Elizabeth for recovery. She was placed on many medications, along with a medication that she had been injecting in her stomach once a week for several years now. Her medication
went up, including more powerful oral antibiotics, and her health spiraled down. She did regain the ability to walk, though slowly and with a walker, and was beginning to regain continence of her bowels, and therefore she was allowed to go back home to live
on her own on Thursday of Holy Week that year. She felt very weak though, and would not exercise or eat much - she had no energy whatsoever, she explained to us.
She still wanted to live independently, so we hired someone to be with her, but she just
kept getting worse and eventually needed 24/7 care, which was eating up her finances, of course. Her whole body got extremely inflamed, and she lost her ability to control her bowels almost completely, yet her body kept tyring to get rid of the toxins and
she was up all night trying to get to the bathroom with the aid. It was a nightmare for her night after night for many nights, I'm sure! Her immune system was getting weaker and weaker and therefore her ability to recover was lessened as the days went by.
On as Sunday in April of 2016, the day-aid taking care of her called my brother in the evening and let him know she had slept all day and had developed a cough. He let my brother and me know and rushed over there. By the time I got there,
he had called 911. I came in and applied some Eucalyptus oil on her chest and back. By the time the paramedics arrived and they strapped her to a moving bed, she was sitting up wondering what was going on. After about 5 minutes they said she was doing better,
and wondered if we still wanted her to go to the hospital to be checked out. My brother said yes, and my mom and I went along with that decision. That was the beginning of the end.
At the hospital she was not treated well. The workers
just treated her like another patient to take care of out of the thousands. When they went to clean her, they turned her over without any care and she felt so scared and sad. I could tell from her face reactions and her cringing. It was so hard to see. She
slowly kept going down not only physically but emotionally. Two days after being there, my mom said she had a dream. In it, she was in the bottom of a dump filled with used things, and she heard a voice from above say "You have been CHOSEN to live". She looked
up and exclaimed in horror, "Why?" and then she must have woken up because she just looked away from me as if she was transported to some other world. I knew then and there that she didn't want to live here anymore. That night, I got a call from the oncologist
who had been treating her and said that when he saw her on his rounds she looked so weak and frail. He didn't know what else to do, he explained, so he gave her an injection of the medicine she had been using to give her white blood cells a boost. She ordered
it to be given to her three times a week now, instead of twice a week, which had already been up from once a week.
The next day, she was transported to another rehabilitation facility. She woke up and saw that all her children and their
families were there, and that her youngest sister had flown in from Africa (where she was serving as a missionary) to see her. She was so happy as she exclaimed, "I'm having a family reunion!" She spent a week with her sister coming in to visit and reminisce
old memories. She seemed to be getting better, but her bedsores were getting slowly worse and her inflammation had increased even more than when she went in! The manager of the facility, instead of having compassion, said that she had gained an incredible
amount of weight and we needed to purchase new clothes for her because it wasn't good for her to go out in public looking the way she did. I don't know why I never reported him for that insensitive statement....
She was having rehabilitation
exercises on her legs, though needed lots of assistance. I would roll on some immune-boosting essential oils on her feet and massage them in the mornings when I visited her. She loved that treatement and amazingly the inflammation in her legs started to go
down! However, it was all happening so quickly that her skin opened up. Though the nurse in charge knew that it was the fact that she was detoxing quickly and that is why it opened up, she decided it best to wrap up her legs so that nobody could massage them
and she could have them treated once a day with a triple-antibiotic creme after they scraped off what they thought was unnecessary. Sadly, this treatment completely warranted her legs unusable because all the nerve endings were scraped off. She felt no pain
anymore, but she could no longer use them or move them at all. They were completely bruised and in terrible condition when they would take off the bandage. It was horrifying! I mentioned that it seemed the treatment was not working, and they simply stated
that it was but that her body was not responding. That made absolutely no sense to me, but my mom and my brothers wanted to continue the treatments and so they continued.
My mom used to love showers, now she wanted to part of them.
The reason was that it took so long for them to get her up and into a special chair, then they would wheel her out as quickly as possible, spray her down, apply some soap quickly and then spray her down again. They did that once, and after that my mom just
wanted bed baths. One of the morning aids there, Rocio, was incredibly nice, and she and I would do that each morning, when she was working, and would get her dressed. After that, my mom would go back to sleep. She was grateful that I would let her just rest,
though it meant we didn't get to talk much. She no longer wanted to go to ther rehabilitation time nor wanted to do exercises in bed. She just enjoyed her breathing treatments with some medicated gas they put over her nose and mouth and she would drift off
into lala land, where everything was peaceful.
She no longer wanted any visitors. She wanted no part of activities that kept her mind awake, like Scrabble, which had been her favorite game. She just wanted everyone to just leave
her alone in her misery. We tried to get a place for her to live in after the rehab center since we had closed down her apartment a week after she went in to this last rehab place because she felt it was time to "close up shop", but it was all in vain. Nobody
would take her because her bed sores were at a stage 3, moving to 4. My mom wasn't devastated about that. She simply replied, "that's okay. I just want to go to heaven.". One night as we prayed - I normally was not there at night, but stayed to get her ready
for bed after I had gone over with my brother, his wife, and a couple of her friends who had been missionaries with her in Colombia - she said "Lord, if you want to take me home tonight, I'm ready". I asked her, "Do you want to go to heaven, mom?" She
replied, "Yes. I feel it would so much better if I did. No more dealing with all of this."
I think it was the day after that incident that the doctors said it would be best if my mom was on hospice. They said they felt the medication
that was being shot into her to boost her white blood cells seemed to be causing all those bad side effects. I was amazed and thankful they said that because I had been researching that medication and trying to convince my mom to get off of it because I had
read all about these side effects and they were exactly all that she was going through! My mom didn't want to get off of it, though, and my brothers wanted to keep her on it as well. Now was the time to get her off of it! The drug company called my sister
in law and said it was time to renew the prescription for this drug and my mom decided to refuse it. My aunt said I had to realize that this would speed up her death, but I was fine with that. My brother that lived in California said in a text, "Ive been with
my mom all this time and see that the current treatment is not working. We should try something else." He asked what my recommendation was and I said she needed nutrients and we should get a nutritioninst.
Well, a nutrtionist services
was never gotten since I did not have one readily available. A few days later, on a Tuesday, she left this world; my brother who lives in California was with her at the time. She was on no medications anymore and she just lay there peacefully. He thanked her
for all she had done while she was with us and said, "Just rest, mom", which is what she did.
I wanted to share this story because I want others to realize that pharmaceutical drugs have a lot of
bad side effects when taken long term. I firmly believe that many of the side-effects that my mom experienced could have been prevented at the end of her days, but I know God allowed her to experience all she went through this so that others
can have this experience to fall back on when considering taking drugs.
I am more convinced than ever that healing only comes from God and that He gives us the wisdom to know what
to do so we do not just heal, but actually stay well. He wants us to turn away from (repent of) bad habits that are making us and keeping us sick physically and emotionally, and are creating
financial stress as well because it's extremely expensive to stay on these drugs, even if we have insurance. He also wants us to renew our mindset from wrong beliefs and commit to adopting and maintaining healthy habits that will lead to fitness and health
in every area of our life - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and even financial. The journey may be very long, depending on how much damage has been done to our body and mind already, but it's worth it! The sooner we start, the better off we will be.