The Morning Will Come

For a long time I have felt like I have had a specific call on my life. To speak to people and encourage them and share what God has done in my life. In my mind, what that looked like was traveling to different places, going up on a stage and talking to groups of people about what God has done in my life. An extraordinarily difficult task when taking into account the many obstacles standing in my way.

Fourteen years ago, I started to get sick. At first it seemed like simple spring allergies. Runny nose, sneezing and some nasal congestion. However, instead of fading like my seasonal allergies usually did, the symptoms got worse and worse. My sinus passages felt like they were swollen shut. But that didn’t stop them from pouring drainage by what felt like the gallon. The inside of my face felt like I had hives. I itched so bad. And we won’t even discuss the sneezing. Then I started coughing and wheezing. I struggled with near constant headaches and migraines.

Every single day was a struggle. Even single day I fought against the feelings of hopelessness and despair at how difficult it was to think, to focus, to function. Every day I had to remind myself of all of the reasons that I couldn’t die that day. Being able to travel and speak seemed an impossibility in the face of the near constant nose blowing and wracking cough. Not to mention the looks that people gave me in the grocery store. Taking steps back away from me. Likely believing me to be carrying some form of mysterious contagion.

Fast forward through nearly two years of doctors appointments and being told that my issues were ‘just allergies’, over and over; I was still getting worse. I couldn’t barely sleep. Waking up over in the night, coughing, blowing my constantly dripping nose, feeling like I was suffocating and unable to breath, my mouth as dry as the Sahara desert. Then one day I was working on changing the sheets and mattress pad on my bed when I saw that the mattress pad had mold growing on it. Carefully lifting up the corner of the pad, I could see that mold covered the surface of the mattress. A mattress that we had bought brand new just about two years earlier.

Two months of antifungals and a new mattress later, I had finally quit coughing at least. Just in time to find out that I had stage 2 breast cancer. Nine months after that I finished my final round of radiation, but I still wasn’t out of the woods. The sinus and allergy like symptoms were still really bad, although improved from what they had been. Instead of been absolutely horrible all of the time, now I had an occasional more tolerable day. I wasn’t bent over hacking up a lung anymore, but I was still barely functional. Still going through a box and a half of tissue almost every day.

Fast forward another seven and a half years. Still miserable. Still can’t hardly breathe through my nose. Still not able to sleep through the night without having to at least blow my nose a few times. Sometimes so bad that I would just get up, go out to my living room, sit in my chair and go through half a box of tissues in the course of a couple hours. Just going through them. One right after another, until the worst of the sinus ‘attack’ passed. Exhausted from the toll these constant attacks had on my body. I had been in and out of doctors offices over these years. I had had two surgeries done on my sinuses in an effort to try and fix the problem. I had been diagnosed with all kinds of things, but nothing that could really explain the intensity and severity of my symptoms. Symptoms that were not relieved by antihistamines. That summer I tried going to yet another new doctor in an effort to find some answers, some solutions to simply make my life more bearable, but unfortunately that wasn’t how my time there panned out. That doctor didn’t even believe me when I described the severity of my symptoms. He just thought I was crazy. Like certifiably crazy. He informed me that he was considering contacting the police to escort me to the local hospital for a 72 hour pysch evaluation.

I can’t even tell you what I felt like in that moment. To be so sick, to be struggling so much with it and then for this doctor to tell me straight out that ‘I wasn’t that sick.’ That ‘I just had some minor allergies.’ When I was fighting so hard to just keep on keeping on? Fighting so hard to find an answer. To find out what was wrong with me. To keep trusting God to bring me some kind of miracle here. And to have this person tell me that I was going to be sent to the hospital, not for real help, but as a prisoner? To be taken away against my will? Away from my children and my home? All because he didn’t believe I was sick. I was terrified. My fear made so much worse by the tiny little windowless room I had been placed in in the back of the office. Although just creepy when they first led me there, the fear of what could happen sent my level of panic skyrocketing.

Yanking out my phone, I quickly began searching for someone, somewhere, who could come to my rescue and stop me from being locked away against my will. At that time I was seeing a grief counselor following the loss of our oldest daughter a couple of years earlier. I quickly dialed her number and thanks be to God, she answered the phone. I explained what was going on and bless her heart, she quickly agreed to talk to the doctor, who grudgingly released me to go home.

Following that close call, I was absolutely terrified to go to another doctor. But I was so miserable. I didn’t want to run that risk again, but how could I continue living this way? I held out for as long as I could bear before continuing the search for a doctor. I can’t tell you how many times I walked away from looking because I was too afraid to trust someone else again. But God. He didn’t give up on me and, He didn’t let me give up on myself. When I sat back and said, I’m not doing this. He said, yes you can. When I said, I’m not calling this place. It’s not like they will be able to help me. He said, But what if they can? I even argued a little bit with God to be honest with you. I said, ‘But they won’t.’ And He said, ‘But what if they can.’ Just as I was about to continue with that argument, He brought to my mind a moment from a few months prior. I had been looking for some new blue jeans. I had looked at several places and just wasn’t finding what I was looking for. I needed a specific fit that hasn’t been ‘in style’ for quite awhile and trying to find something that would fit had rapidly become a nightmare. But on this one particular day I felt led to go to the mall. I hadn’t looked there before, but I was desperate.

I got to the mall and started going from store to store. Nothing. After going to several stores, I was ready to give up. I started heading back to the exit when I felt a little nudge in my spirit. ‘What if the jeans were at the next store?’ To which my mind responded, ‘But they won’t be.’ Again the gentle nudge. ‘But what if they were?’ And I just stood there, in the middle of the mall and argued in my heart with the Lord. Finally, I said to myself, ‘Fine. I will go to the next store and prove that they don’t have the right pants.’ I marched myself right back to the next store, walked inside and told one of the ladies there what I was looking for. She walked right over to a shelf and pulled off a pair of jeans. Turned out, they fit maybe better than just about any pair of jeans I have ever owned.

With this reminder in my head of how God does in fact know what He is doing and talking about, I called the doctors office that I had kept coming back to in my search. A doctors office that not only did the allergy stuff but was also an ENT. They took my insurance and got me in not long after.

The morning of that appointment I headed out the door, got in my vehicle and set out for the doctors office. About ten minutes later, I sneezed and then I sneezed again. By the time I actually got to their office, I couldn’t breathe out of my nose at all, I was pouring drainage like a sieve, and just felt like my entire face was going to explode while itching like I had a head full of hives. I remember thinking, ‘Well, at least they won’t be able to say they didn’t see any symptoms.’

I had taken every bit of paperwork that I could find with me. Anything and everything detailing the testing and treatments that had already been tried. I gave it to the nurse and sat down to wait. It wasn’t long before the doctor came in. I knew I was in the right place when I commented about doctors telling me that I ‘only’ had allergies and she responded, ‘Well I wouldn’t say it’s ‘just’ allergies.’ In a way that told me that she knew how devastating allergies can be. But after looking me and the paperwork over, she sat down, looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I think you have type two inflammation.’ ….to which I was like, O.K. I have no idea what that is. (In a nutshell, this is what it is. My immune system is out to get me. And it does that by attacking me or anything that I am exposed to whenever it gets bored. which, apparently, is all the time.)

She then told me what I had been waiting years to hear. ‘There is a treatment.’ And sweetened the deal by telling me that all of the hoops that I would have had to jump through for my insurance have already been done. All the bloodwork. All the scans. The surgeries to try and treat the issues. I had already had done. I was ready to be a candidate for treatment. All we had to do was send the info to the insurance and get approval.

It still took a couple of weeks before I got the insurance approval. By the time I received the first dose it was December of 2022. Over ten years that I had spent sick, struggling and suffering. But was the end in sight?

That was over two years ago now. The medicine wasn’t an instant cure, or even a complete one. But now, most days I only go through a couple of tissues, antihistamines actually work (who knew? I thought those things were just garbage.) I don’t usually cough, unless I’m sick or having an asthma attack, and a single sneeze no longer sends me into a panic attack. Thank You Jesus.

About six months before I got a diagnosis, I was talking to my Ma and I had told her that I still felt like God was calling me into this speaking roll and she said, ‘How do you think you are going to do that with all of your allergies? You can’t even go to the grocery store or wherever with everything that is going on in your body.’ And in that moment, in my heart of hearts I felt conviction, a solid truth rise up inside of me and I told her, ‘That if that is what God is calling me to do; then HE WILL find a way to bring it to pass.’ I felt those words wrap their truth around me. It was an impossible dream. At that time I couldn’t see any chance for a change or improvement. I was getting worse and worse it seemed like.

I KNEW, God had not forsaken me.

But in my soul, it was like I KNEW, God had not forsaken me. That HE would bring His plan to pass. That He was able to heal me, even though that seemed impossible. But He is the God of the impossible. He truly makes the impossible possible.

Now, even as I sit here, maybe still not able to go out, travel places and speak what God has done for me from the highest mountaintops, I can still attest to what God is doing in my life. Over the last couple of years He has been working to make the impossible things in my life possible. Even technology is making impossible things possible in my life as I am able to speak to all of you right here, right now. I can breathe, I don’t feel like I have hives inside of my face, which means that I can think a whole lot better, I don’t need a box or two of tissue to get me through a single day. Every day I am seeing God work through my circumstance. I am seeing how He is able to bring miracles to pass in my own life. I may not have made it all the way to traveling and speaking right now, but I am speaking, and trusting that the God who has brought me this far will continue to fulfill the call He has placed upon my life.

If you too, feel like God has laid an impossible dream upon your heart, don’t give up. God’s plans may not come to pass in our timing, but they will in His timing. So claim the dreams that He has laid on your heart. Speak them out from the rooftops if you can. Or just to one person. But claim the life God has for you. No matter how impossible it may seem. Believe that if that’s what God has for you; He will bring it to pass. Some way. Somehow. No matter how dark the night, the morning will come.