ankle"
and other tales
So I read that young Simon Ogg, teenage son of dedicated missionaries, broke his ankle. They say it was while mud-surfing after a rain, while his father was doing a final check of the translation of the Book of Acts, before beginning on Romans. I suspect, however, Simon's ankle turned away from the Sabbath at precisely Isaiah 58:13. Anyway, sufficient treatment was not available locally, and Simon was flown to Australia. Some months later, I am glad to find out that Simon's ankle is better.
Source: http://www.ntm.org/...
I am not so blessed as to have God my insurer, or a church my health care provider.
My suffering was not cast or cured by thousands, or one. I was alone on a mountain. Only a pair of circling crows sympathetic in their cries--because I had given crumbs to their campaign.
I twisted my ankle descending from an afternoon run up North Fortuna, a 1300' granite rise about ten miles due east of La Jolla, CA. A tolerable misfortune, or so I thought then. My unnatural hobbles back to the trailhead startled coyotes, mule deer, kicked a disemboweled horned lizard, and ticked off an unusually large Red Diamond rattlesnake--or was my ankle shooting visions? Are the Perseids more precise in recollection? Pain does not care to distinguish between accurate and false memory. It simply generates. Quickly swollen, ugly, bruised, distorted. I could not remove my shoe. I would have to cut it off later. It was Friday night of a three-day weekend and the emergency rooms would be crowded. I RICEd my ankle at home, drank wine, skittled a few Motrin, and somehow found a way to sleep. By morning, and it was early morning, well before the break of day, I was looking at a tapered leg of freshly slaughtered mutton, my skin the mottled pale fascia, already stamped with the blue ink of the USDA....
I make light of my self, and my own trivial sufferings, because I am alive, and healthy, and must jot down a tonic before thinking about loved ones who have no choice but to accept the sometimes sadistic care they receive.
A loved one recently survived the following:
"Imagine. You have been hospitalized three times in six months for the same pneumonia (which has never quite gone away due to inadequate initial treatment), only to be told that your breathing difficulty is due to pulmonary thrombosis, not pneumonia, and that due to a hospital mixup, you need to be quarantined in an overcrowded facility with folks who have come down with H1N1 Swine Flu! Then add to that a nurse that seems to take delight in forgetting to provide (for five days) your HIV meds and antibiotics, despite the fact that the Primary Care Physician and prescribing pharmacy faxed relevant medical documents (Here's an argument for digital record keeping) six days earlier, but she will offer Coumadin (pill) and an injection of clot-busting drugs into your abdomen. And then a different doctor comes in and tells you tuberculosis is hiding behind the blood clot (even though numerous earlier tests have resolved without a doubt the false positives)." I'll cut it short, though the terror went on.
And so I must act.