WHILE
WORKING ON MY BOOK, because of a stroke I’d recovered from, I’ve recently
adapted to a limited memory by setting a notebook open and ready on my kitchen
table, pen poised to be picked up.
I can’t
be sure how the scribes of old were inspired to write down the words that were
later compiled into the Bible we cherish today, but since I’ve dedicated myself
to this literary project to promote the faith, my mind is like a fax machine
that’s always on and receiving memories and other new material that feels
important enough to share.
Rather
than losing a thought that pops into my head, now I can jot it down. Once I can
recall the gist of the idea, I fire up my trusty Samsung with voice transcription,
dictate the story, and send it off to my editor as a text email.
In the
2014 film, The Theory of Everything, Stephen
Hawking slowly succumbed to ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, loosing
muscle coordination and eventually his ability to speak. I fully expected to
lose my ability to see which is why I was learning to use my Samsung to
communicate.
During a
recent seven-year period my eyes kept getting worse and worse as a result of a
rare and incurable disease. I went to doctor after doctor and no one could
offer me any hope that over time my sight would improve.
This
really didn’t surprise me because all my life I’ve had trouble seeing. When
they saw me squinting in school I was tested and needed glasses. Of course, I
never told my mother because she couldn’t have cared less, so I just sat in the
front of the classroom to see the chalk board better. My eyes finally got some
much-needed attention when I married.
My backup
guardian angel, my husband, saw to it that I got glasses right away. My sight
was much better for years until 2005 when I began feeling a gritty, sandy substance
painfully irritating my eyes. After a few weeks of constant pain, I sucked it
up and headed to en eye doctor.
Besides
the obvious dry-eye syndrome, I had two infections. Eye drops didn’t help, so
two weeks later I was back in his office. Next, he had me try a series of antibiotics,
and still no results. In a bold and somewhat desperate move, he filled my eyes
with an antibiotic and sewed my lids shut so the medication would take—first
one, then the other. I hated needles, so this was a real pain.
After
going through all that, the infection did not clear up. Next, it was on to a
specialist when things finally got so bad you’d have thought I had Ebola or something,
with blood oozing out of my eyes. He saw my condition as dire and indicated I
should have my eyeball removed from my eye socket in order to stop the
infection from spreading.
Instead
of taking that drastic step, they tested the infection again and decided on a
special antibiotic that they would dispense at the clinic over a two-week period.
There was some improvement, but after visiting five specialists over the course
of two years and trying their remedies, the infection persisted.
Finally,
a Chicago
specialist isolated the rare bacterium and was able to identify the disease. My
prognosis was not good—no cure and permanent eyesight loss. When I asked him
how I could have picked up such a nasty bacteria, he said that the eye
infection was rare, but the bacteria I could have picked up off of a doorknob.
More
antibiotics, no effect, my eyesight was getting worse and worse and now I’m
worried that I’m going blind. By May of 2006 my left eye was sightless. Now, I
couldn’t drive which made things even worse. A frantic search was on for a cure
before my other eye went blind. More drugs, more procedures, still no cure.
Then, it happened.
A year to
the day after my left eye went blind, I woke up, walked into the kitchen, and I
could see the gray shadow of my husband’s outline through my left eye!
“I can
see you!” I yelled, excited beyond measure.
“What, honey
. . . you know that’s impossible!”
We were
told by the foremost expert in the field that once lost, blindness was
permanent. To be sure I wasn’t imagining things, he waved his arms, and I could
see the movement! As the day went on my sight got better and better until it
was completely back to normal.
I’d been
the beneficiary of many impossible miracles during my life, so I recognized
this as a Miracle of the Divine Kind, got
on my knees, and thanked God for the mercy of a healing against all medical odds.
Calling
the doctor the next day, he insisted what I described was impossible and that
my good eye was compensating, making it seem like my blind eye was seeing. He
asked me to come in so he could run some tests. When they showed my blind eye
could indeed see, he said he’d never heard of that kind of spontaneous regeneration
before. Even he declared that it had to be some kind of miracle and made sure I
realized just how fortunate I was.
Though my
sight had returned, the eye infections were still there so several more years
of trial-and-error medications. By 2011 a cutting-edge procedure was tried.
It was a
tailor-made cocktail based on a blood sample from me that was sent to California, mixed up, and returned to the Midwest. Finally, by 2012, exactly seven years after my
ordeal started, the infection began to fade, then, went away completely!
I have to
wear glasses, my eyes are hypersensitive to laser light, but I can drive again
and I CAN SEE!!
At the beginning of my
ordeal, though my eyesight was failing, the Lord picked me to become a
Hopelifter, turning my apparent weakness into the Holy Spirit’s strength.
