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Just a short report today, my friends, as I am somewhat tired. (Make that very tired). At 8 p.m. last night everything seemed fine. By 8:30 I was calling my daughter to hurry over to my house stat. She took one look at me and immediately called 911, which in this case, I myself would have done if she had not been available.
I will skip all the play-by-play over the next many hours with the paramedics first, and then in a local hospital ER. But needles to say (a little pun there, needless), my arms and hands look like pin cushions, as the kindly and competent staff tried to find a location where they could extract sufficient blood for the multiple tests they did.
(My daughter was assuring the ER medical staff that if Dad is joking around, he is feeling fine, or at least much better.)
Fortunately (or not), while I was sitting in a wheelchair in the ER and they were doing preliminary tests, I suffered the second episode. The concern on their faces was evident as they immediately put me on a gurney and wheeled me back to a private room in the ER, and then brought my daughter back because she had witnessed the attack.
Some readers with experience will probably already guess the diagnosis. Here are two major clues for you. Extreme discomfort in the belly area (“discomfort” being the common euphemism nowadays for PAIN!). Along with that, sudden and profuse sweating, head to toe.
I had no dizziness, no fever, blood sugar normal, blood pressure normal, EKG normal. By 1 a.m. this morning, I was having my first experience with a CAT scan. A few hours later, it was determined that I had had gallstone attacks.
I had the first episode at home and by the time the good folks of our fire department first responders and the EMS folks left my house, I was feeling pretty much back to normal.
They were very insistent, however—and my daughter was even more insistent—that I go to the ER and get examined as they would have many more tools to figure out what was wrong with me. I chose to decline the ambulance ride and have my daughter take me instead.
With all the tests they ran, they concluded I was pretty healthy, with no tumors/cancer, the head/brain area showed no tumors or sign of stroke, no heart and cardiovascular issues, no diabetes, nothing except the one “fairly large” gallstone.
It was quite an expensive and painful way to get an “annual” checkup. But in my case, I had never had annual checkups to the best of my memory.
My back pain issue of over 13 years ago resulted in a trip to a pain clinic, not a hospital, and yep, that showed up in the medical records that the hospital was able to access last night.
Generally, I try to stay as healthy as possible with diet and exercise and avoid Babylonian medicine as much as possible. The only drug I received last night was an iodine infusion for contrast purposes during the CAT scan of my midsection.
At the same time, I am very thankful to our Father that He has provided our U. S. medical system with still probably the greatest emergency and acute care in the world.
The staff that worked on me were all kind and skilled, and I am happy to receive what I would consider to be a clean bill of health except for that one stone in my temple that the builders should be rejecting.
I won’t go into any speculations on the spiritual implications of this although I know there are (there always are) some. For example, there is the “gall of bitterness;” am I bitter about something? Not to my conscious knowledge.
I am posting this account here because I simply don’t have the time to call all the many of you who are close friends and fill you in on all the details, which I would like to do, but it is simply and wholly impractical. I simply ask for (1) your prayers for my healing.
The ER doctor, of course, referred me to a medical group so I could have a personal physician (have not ever had one, that I can recall), and she also referred me to a surgeon to have the stone removed.
She admitted that if it were kidney stones, they could zap them with a laser; but that there was no known way (to the orthodox medical community) to dissolve gall stones.
I will bet, however, that some of you readers know of some natural alternatives that may do the job. So (2) my second request is that if you do, then please send your suggestions on how to rid my temple of this unwanted stone(s) in a natural way to my email address: StoneKingdom@charter.net.
Put “gall” in the subject line so I can easily find them in the flocks of emails I receive daily.
Many thanks in advance for your help on both.
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