In mid July 2009 on the island
of Kauai, Hawaii I became very sick. I had been healthy all my 63 years and
this was a new experience for me. After a week of high fever, aches and waking
up with the sweats I called my doctor friend in Montana. After hearing my
symptoms Dan said I needed to see a local doctor.
I did and he thought it was a
sinus infection. After a few days I started getting vertigo, and seeing double.
I decided if I didn’t feel better in the
morning I would go to the emergency room.
In the morning, still feeling
lousy, I took a cab from where I lived outside of Koloa to the hospital on
Kauai where I was admitted with what was originally thought to be double
pneumonia. It was not.
While my lungs sounded clear
x-rays revealed two white clouds. I was transferred by air taxi to the Staub
Medical Center in Honolulu. Here I tested positive for Wegener’s
granulomatosis, a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the organs of the body.
I my case it was the lungs.
I do not remember of lot of
the initial weeks in intensive care as I was drugged and in an induced coma. I
was not expected to live very long and my wife and three daughters were called.
They came from Montana to visit me for the last time. I did not know they were
even there.
My body weight went from 167
to 132. Massive doses of steroids were given me as part of my treatment. When I
awoke from the coma I was on a ventilator and had all sorts of tubes in my
body.
I was literally a rag doll and
could only move the muscles in my neck. An emergency button to call for help
was draped over my shoulder so I could press it with my neck.
I remember thinking. How am I
going to possibly come back from this. I believed I couldn’t and became totally
depressed.
The bed I was in was a special
physical therapy bed which could be set to do a wave like motion under the
body. It wasn’t suppose to be on for me but it was. The motion caused me to
move sideways and my body became lodged between the mattress and the sideboard.
I was being squeezed with my arms dangling helplessly over the side of the bed.
I could not move my head to press the call button. I was crying out “nurse
help…nurse help!”
Then a strange thing happened.
It was as if my spirit had left my body.
I was sitting on the edge of a small stream with tall wet grass along the
banks. A mist was rising from the water. I knew if I just lay down in the wet
grass it would be over. No more struggles. There would be peace. My spirit was
ready to totally give up.
Then a hand gripped my
shoulder. I “sprung back.”
A voice said, “Can I help
you?”
After getting me help I found
out that the man who touched my shoulder was the pastor at the hospital. He
told me that he received a call 30 minutes earlier from my friend Jim in White
Fish, Montana who asked that the Chaplain look me up.
From that moment on I never
had depression again. In fact, during the rest of my hospital stay I was even
joyful. My spirit was strong and I made dramatice progress physically. Within
two weeks I was completely off the ventilator and oxygen.
I still could not move a
muscle but my physical therapist thought my muscles were ‘firing’ and I believed
him. He began by massaging my muscles and moving my limbs.
I was moved from Intensive
Care to the sixth floor of the hospital where they put patients who are close
to being released. I worked hard and talked and joked with almost every aide
and nurse on that floor.
One day the doctors looked at
me and my progress and said “John you are a living miracle.” They suggested I
be transferred to a nursing home in Montana where I would be near friends and
my support system.
The Flying Nurses International flew
with me from Honolulu to Salt Lake City and onto Glacier International Airport
in Kalispell, Mt.
It wasn’t until I was back in
Montana that I learned that my doctor friend Dan and Jim, who I knew from my
appraisal business, had been meeting and
praying for me daily throughout my ordeal.
You see, the doctors were
right, I am a living miracle. And I was right, I could not come back on my own.
I have no doubt that God through His grace spared my life and used my friends
and that Chaplain to help me back.
John Woods
Kauai, Hawaii
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