God is Faithful

Zack and I shared at church on Sunday about God's faithfulness shown through our story of the past 3 years. Here is what I shared:
In January of 2010, right after our 1 year anniversary, I started feeling a little sick. That weekend, while friends were over making dinner, I developed pain so severe they had to carry me to the car so we could go to the ER. That day was the beginning of a 6 week hospital stay during which my organs were failing and my body was filling with fluid. After 5 weeks of scans, tests, spinal taps, bone marrow biopsies, and multiple teams of doctors visiting me daily, I was diagnosed with HLH, a rare and aggressive immune disorder with a high mortality rate.

My mom and Zack made me promise not to look up my disease online because of its frightening statistics. I only told a few people the actual name of my disorder because I didn’t want them to look it up and treat me like someone who was dying.

I began intensive treatment that caused side effects like suicidal thoughts, intense insomnia, dangerously high blood pressure, anxiety, and depression. My weight dropped to 85 pounds and I had to be fed through an IV. When I tried to go back to work as a teacher, I couldn’t. In the middle of teaching a lesson one day, I had to leave and collapsed outside from high blood pressure and anxiety. I felt like my entire world and self had fallen apart. I didn’t know who I was, who God was, or what he wanted for my life anymore. Every day brought fear and pain.

Yet during all of this, I was surrounded by relationships: Zack stayed with me every night in the hospital and even slept on the floor beside me at home when I couldn’t sleep. My parents came over every day bringing food, talking to my doctors, and staying with me late into the night. Zack’s parents, our relatives, our friends, and even my doctors and nurses were a constant source of support. So many of you brought us meals, visited us in the hospital, stayed with me at home, and faithfully prayed for us. Even though many of our prayers for my health weren’t yet answered, we could see God’s faithfulness to us through all the people he brought into our lives.

Four months after my diagnosis, I relapsed and became even sicker than before, with another month-long hospital stay and kidney dialysis. I remember that each time I had dialysis, I felt like I was dying. My depression and apathy grew, to the point that I considered suicide. I questioned and hated God. Yet even in our darkest hour, God was with us. I was released from the hospital still on dialysis, and my doctors expected me to continue it for four months. Instead, my kidneys recovered within 2 weeks, which astounded the doctors.

I began the next stage of treatment, which was chemotherapy. My hair fell out and I had to stop working at my school because of the risk of getting sick from the children. Even with chemotherapy, my doctors were afraid that I would relapse again unless I had a bone marrow transplant. I knew what a transplant entailed and I was terrified. Another 6 week hospital stay with pain and nausea, isolation for 3 months, and avoiding all public places for a year. This was a turning point in my relationship with God, because finally I turned to him with all my heart. I prayed every day that God would make it clear what path to take and that I would only have a transplant if it was a cure. When we met with the transplant team at Lucile Packard, we found out that they had just added to their team a doctor who had trained with the leading world expert on HLH. She was familiar with administering the type of transplant I would need for HLH, which had never before been done at Lucile Packard. We were again amazed by God’s faithfulness. I knew God was telling me that even though I was about to go through another intense trial, he would be by my side, taking care of me.

 

Proverbs 24:16

The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again.
    But one disaster is enough to overthrow the wicked.

Many times throughout the past 3 years I felt like I had just fallen seven times in a row: For example, I had 12 hospital stays the year after my transplant. During the same year, I developed a bone condition from my steroid treatments that meant I would need both knees and both hips replaced before the age of 30. 

In the world, this would ruin most people’s lives. But with faith in God, you can recover from anything. There is always hope, because you know that not only will God never leave you, but he will develop your character and bring good out of your suffering.

Before HLH, I had a lot of dreams. Dreams to be a teacher, run marathons, and change the lives of young people. Joseph in the Bible also had a lot of dreams, but he went through a lot of suffering as well. As God brought him through a near-death experience, abandonment by his brothers, and undeserved prison time, he was developing Joseph into an incredible leader who would save the lives of his entire family and their descendants.

Genesis 41:50-52 MSG

^50-52 Joseph had two sons born to him before the years of famine came... Joseph named the firstborn Manasseh (Forget), saying, “God made me forget all my hardships and my parental home.” He named his second son Ephraim (Double Prosperity), saying, “God has prospered me in the land of my sorrow.”

God fulfilled Joseph’s dreams, but in a completely different way than Joseph ever would have imagined. Instead of growing bitter because of all his suffering, Joseph remained faithful to God and kept believing in God’s goodness.

When you believe God is faithful, you don’t grow bitter because you’re looking forward to the rewards that will come from your suffering.

God has brought so much good out of our suffering. Some of the greatest things are that my sister became a Christian in Seattle and is now marrying a Christian next month. And recently, I worked with several psychiatrists at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, who I met during my bone marrow transplant, to start a leadership and support group for teenagers and young adults with serious illness. We’ve had two meetings so far and over 15 people in attendance at each meeting. You can see people’s faces light up in the meeting because they finally don’t feel alone, and they are gaining hope that they can overcome the challenges in their lives.

God has brought us through so many hardships in the past 3 years, and we are better and stronger for it. He has been faithful to us, and we are determined to be faithful to him.

Back to Work

Today was my first day back to work since my hip surgery over two months ago, and it was a good day. I was greeted by calls of “Welcome back, Mrs. Mariscal!” and my heart was seriously warmed when one student announced, “Mrs. Mariscal’s back!” to every student who walked down the hallway before school started. Trying to be proactive, I had gone to my classroom after school yesterday to do some last minute lesson planning, unintentionally ruining the surprise of the huge sign that read “WELCOME BACK MRS. MARISCAL!” along the wall. So as I walked through the classroom door this morning, I had to pretend to be surprised yet again, making sure to let out several “oohs” and “aahs” to express my amazement.

After greeting me, my students immediately began to interrogate me about how I spent my time off from work. Since our school is year-round, perhaps they simply can’t fathom the idea of having 2 ½ months of no school. They were shocked that I didn’t play video games in my time off and assumed I therefore must have been extremely bored. I assured them that I was not, since boredom is a condition restricted to childhood, but I thanked them for their concern. :)

Constipation and Drug Hookups: The True Story of Rehab

For part 2 of my hip recovery saga, here is a list of some noteworthy moments in rehab.

1) On my first day at rehab, I looked around and found that I was one of three patients in the entire facility under retirement age. 
2) For the first few days in rehab, I was bedridden without someone helping to lift my legs off the bed, putting my bathroom needs at the mercy of my nursing assistants. One nursing assistant liked to wait 20 minutes to answer my call button and then severely chastise me for trying to get out of bed on my own.
3) Though the occupational therapist and I spent about 20 minutes covering my bandages before my shower, our efforts proved to be in vain when I discovered huge wet spots covering the butt of my pants during a group therapy session. What made matters worse is my nurse almost had a heart attack because she thought the wet spots were drainage from my wounds.  
4) During a therapy session, I noticed that the clock on the wall was noticeably crooked. As I walked over and adjusted it, another therapist noticed and asked, “You’re anal, aren’t you?” Considering almost everyone in the facility was on heavy narcotics and experiencing the well-known bathroom side effects, I didn’t think “anal” was the best choice of words...
5) There was nothing quite like waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of the woman throwing up in the room across from me. Perhaps more disturbing was the nurse asking the woman, “Are you ok?” Wouldn’t “How can I help?” be a more appropriate question?
6) The faulty automatic hand sanitizer dispenser mounted on my wall kept releasing a stream of sanitizer every time I walked by. I worried the entire visit about falling flat on my newly operated hips after slipping on a pile of sanitized goop.
7) I’m convinced that physical therapists learn a secret language before they are certified and then use the language to make everyone else feel inferior (not really). Here is the encrypted message the PT wrote on my whiteboard under “Today’s Plan”:

-ModIc FWW in unit

-13 LE WBAT

How can I follow the instructions if I can’t even read them?
8) After only a few hours in rehab, I soon compiled a list of essential devices after hip surgery. #1 is a “scratching stick,” which in my case happened to be a $2 back scratcher from Walgreens that served the much greater purpose of scratching those hard-to-reach areas, which is pretty much everywhere after you’ve had hip surgery.
9) During one physical therapy group session, we played a ball game in which we were supposed to call out a group member’s name and then bounce the ball to him or her. The game ended up being more like a round of dodgeball: 2 people didn’t call out names, 1 kept calling out the wrong name and hitting whomever he threw the ball to, and others threw like they were trying to make a covert pass. One man kept nodding off during the exercises, prompting the physical therapist to loudly call out his name, and another man had bad hearing so you had to shout his name or risk smacking him in the face with the ball. The funniest person was an old Asian woman who never called out anyone’s name and laughed whenever she hit someone. Fortunately for her, she was too cute for anyone to get mad. Including me, 9 out of 10 of the people in the group couldn’t bend down, so unless the ball came directly to us, we just stared at the ball on the floor until the therapist came to pick it up.
10) On one of my last nights in rehab, I dreamed I incorrectly spelled my last name “Mastical” and couldn’t remember how to spell it correctly because of my pain meds. I woke up in a scared sweat.
11) Before getting discharged, the doctor discussed my drugs with me and we made a list of the ones I would need to pick up. I was a little taken aback when the doctor asked me if I had a “good place to get drugs,” and my shock increased when he proceeded to lean in and tell me he had “a place.” Images of Ponzi schemes and backdoor drug hookups flashed through my mind, and I was glad my friend was there to witness that I refused the hookup in case this ever went to court. I had to hold back my laughter when he named the hookup: Costco.

I hope this all helps to prove a very important lesson: if you’re ever in need of a good laugh, go to rehab.