Survival by Prayer

Let me explain: I have started a prayer roll for friends and family who feel the need for extra prayers. I'm doing this because I believe that prayer makes a huge difference in our lives and I wish to be more practiced at it. To this end, I am sharing stories from my own life about how prayer made a big difference. Some are short. This one is long. And I'd LOVE to hear yours in the comments. Prayer matters.

Part 1 - Yea, humble yourselves, and continue in prayer unto him. (Alma 34:19)

I was approaching my 4lst birthday, and things weren't looking good AT ALL. A little less than one year earlier, I'd had my gall bladder removed. For some folks, that's a fairly easy peasy event, as far as surgery goes. But the fact that I had been cut wide open earlier (that tale begins here) meant the simpler surgery was impossible with all of the scar tissue in the way. So this became a several nights' stay in the hospital.

As I was being wheeled out of the recovery room, I said to my husband, "That pain in my back is still there!" The doctor believed it was a gall stone, but they had checked during the surgery and none was found outside of my gallbladder. Turns out it was a pinched nerve that had nothing whatsoever to do with my gallbladder.

Let's get something straight right off the bat here: I am NOT a fan of surgery, AT ALL.

I've watched my father have adverse reactions, including a staph infection, a poorly healed bowel resection  that later resulted in a colostomy, other infections, and the inability to "go" when nature called. He has been miserable every time. I seemed to have inherited that from him. I love my dad, but this he could have kept to himself. :-)

I was trying to do everything I should to heal from that surgery, but something wasn't right. I told one doctor, I told another doctor, and yet another. All would concur that nothing could be seen or felt and that everything was fine. But, it was not fine.

Not only did something feel really strange inside my belly, but my body was now so out of balance (maybe because I'm "allergic" to surgery?) that my long ago troubles with endometriosis kicked back in. Only this time, it was also in the nerve shaft. OUCH! I was struggling big time. I'm not a pill popper, but I was taking every pain med a doctor would toss my way. Eventually none of those pills would help enough for me to be functional. I was in serious pain and spending most of my days in bed.

My explorations of natural medicine were in the fetal stages. I knew very little, although I was very interested. I just didn't know anyone to get help from. I grew up in an "even chiropractors are quacks" environment, and I was on my own to figure it all out. I saw one holistic-minded doctor that agreed with the mainstream docs that a hysterectomy was probably the best thing for me to do. I had been resisting that, believing in some small way that there could be other methods for healing my particular troubles, but with her recommendation, I thought that must be my only way out of this. (I have since learned otherwise.)

In April of 2001, I had a gynecology surgical specialist remove my uterus, ovaries, appendix, and make the discovery that my transverse colon had flipped over and adhered by scar tissue to my stomach. Yep, that "odd" feeling that I described was actually real, I wasn't making things up.

For a week following the surgery, I didn't have any of the endometriosis pain. Hurray! But I wasn't recovering very well, I had thrush in my mouth, I wasn't able to eat much and I wasn't regaining my strength very quickly. The doc had prescribed estrogen patches, and it was those that eventually caused the return of the pain in my nerve shafts. All of this horror for nothing?

to be continued . . .  Mainline feeding tube, prayer, forgotten covenants, off to Mayo