God’s Mysterious Ways

My walk with the Lord recently has taken on the feeling He blindfolded me, and took my hand to take me to a place of complete surrender to His will. I did not understand it when it began at the end of summer and early fall with a battle with cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, which kept recurring excision after excision. There seemed to be no answer to my prayers begging my Lord to bring me closer to Him no matter how and what method He chose. The silence was deafening. The wait was excruciating at times.

Yet, I knew there would be an answer. I didn’t know when. But I knew while I was waiting I needed to immerse myself in His word and be still and let Him keep waking me up each morning and sharing “Scripture for Today” on my blog for everyone who also needed it.

Christmas was coming and I chose mostly the red letter version of the New King James Bible. In choosing to try to glorify Him, I never knew my answer was was coming soon. I never knew I’d begin to hear Isaiah 55: 8-9 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are My ways your ways, ” says the Lord. 9)”For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

Then as New Year’s weekend approached, my whole life seemed to spin out of control ( Literally):

On Thursday, December 30, 2021, I noticed the way I walked was askew. If anyone were watching me in the neighborhood I just knew they would think I had suddenly taken to drinking. When I went inside the house, I began to feel an aura come over me and suddenly my head was spinning, causing me to grab walls or whatever was near. It was terribly annoying, but I believed it was simply the benign proximal vertigo I had experience years ago, which had been relieved by physical therapy adjusting head and neck movement to return a piece of calcium which had fallen into they labyrinth of my left ear and into the fluid which balances equilibrium. However I never realized what would happen in the coming days.

On Friday the episodes increased and the stress began to effect my blood pressure and pulse. I started believing I might be experiencing something different like orthostatic hypotension, which is a drop in blood pressure from lying to sitting to standing up. This caused me, as a retired nurse, to keep a close eye on my vital signs. As I suspected, my blood pressure’s upper number was dropping by over 20 points when I stood up.

But this drastically changed to hypertension (high blood pressure) with unrelenting and worsening spinning out of control which lasted most of Saturday. I rested as much as I could on Sunday, but the slightest movement brought on more violence to the motion. My blood pressure and pulse kept escalating higher and higher. By about 8 pm it was 180/118 and my pulse was 130. I knew I was in stroke or heart attack territory, so I called an ambulance.

When they arrived my EKG showed some abnormalities and my blood pressure was 211/110 with a pulse of 150. They immediately started giving me medicines to bring down my vitals. Soon the pressure and pain I had in my chest began to become alleviated.

A strikingly beautiful female, native Russian, doctor took over my care and ordered a battery of test to determine my cardiac condition. After an abnormal chemical stress test, she determined what medications would control the heart reaction from the violent rotational vertigo, and those that would help stabilize my equilibrium. She called the condition Menier’s disease. It can be debilitating. She said, “As a matter of fact, I suffer from it as well. Though there is no cure, there are treatments to control it.”

It took several hours through Monday, which I mostly slept through, to realize the vertigo was lasting only minutes instead of hours. I had spent 40 hours by Tuesday afternoon in the ER because of lack of beds in the hospital. I asked if it was Covid and the answer was no it was just the time of year and the holiday combination which caused the overflow.

The cardiologist told me I needed to have and angioplasty to address several blockages I appeared to have. Several years ago I had 2 stents placed in my right coronary artery.

My good friends the Burris’s brought me home. I still was having the vertigo but more controlled by the antivert I was prescribed. Soon, the cardiologist’s office called to schedule my procedure. I will have the procedure on January, 18th.

Soon, I was standing in my kitchen praising the Lord I was still here, when the answer finally came. He made me understand if He hadn’t allowed the debilitating vertigo and the fear and pain it caused, most probably I would have suffered a stroke or heart attack soon which might have been fatal. I thanked Him for His mysterious ways.