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Monthly Archives: July 2020

Living Water

30 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by Becky Taylor Haas in Jesus, Pandemic, sickness

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Last week I told the physical affects of ailments I’ve had recently.

But what about the non-physical?

There we were several weeks ago, a full three months into COVID sheltering at home, having navigated post-operative doctor visits and an emergency room visit, both for Dear Husband. I was hoping I could get through this pandemic with minimal needs for healthcare.

Just that week we had learned hospitals were allowing immediate family to accompany patients in the ER. So in a moment of extreme pain I agreed to go to the hospital.

Making that decision gave me permission to feel all my pain. With my high pain tolerance it’s like I have a barrier between me and pain, and I’m pushing with every bit of strength to keep it from breaking through and overwhelming me.

But it did.

By the time I was in a room I heard bits of what was said, but not all the substance.

After initial questions and decisions on what tests they would run, we were left alone. In the quiet my thoughts were wandering from trying to remember what they’d just told me, to what day was it (late Tuesday/early Wednesday), and the topic I wanted to explore in my blog that week (that never happened.)

Now, after getting back my energy (one step forward, two steps back for weeks), I’m amazed at my planner entries for that Wednesday following our wee hours return from the ER.

“strawberries began!” and “8 qt.”

See, strawberries are a big deal in our house. Last year I only put up five batches of jam, none in the freezer.

So that first day I processed those 8 quarts for the freezer.

And after a couple pain-free days getting an ultrasound and talking to a surgeon in case the results of the scan pointed me to surgery, my entry for Saturday was 10 more quarts that also got frozen.

Then early Sunday, a return trip to the ER with hallucinations. Side effects from the drugs.

Again, I knew the answer in my head. Quit taking them. But the fear of the pain returning after I’d had several “normal” and productive days?

It was enough to convince me. I needed to know what to do if the pain came back.

In the ER, I heard the same opening line.

“You’re severely dehydrated.”

Why did that sound familiar? Oh yeah, they said the same thing a few days before, but it didn’t sink in.

Over the next week my life revolved around how many ounces of Gatorade I managed to get into my body.

And while I vegged out I spoke very little.

But I thought a lot.

Then there was the mental agony of the poison ivy reaction I was having.

There is a deep, painful, unquenchable itch that is poison ivy. Seven weeks after exposure I still have bruises from the intensity of the scratching that needed to happen to deal with this demonic itch.

I spent a lot of my in-and-out-of-coherent-thought time sipping the nastiness that is Gatorade, pondering the importance of water.

You see, I only started with the Gatorade because the discharge papers from both ER visits, and my primary care, told me it was the fastest way to rehydrate my body.

And I so badly needed to replenish those fluids.

At first the thought of drinking anything, after coming off almost a week of nausea, was unpleasant.

And in my in-and-out state of mind, I kept going back to a passage in John 4. The one where Jesus sits down by a well, and asks a woman who comes to draw water for a drink.

Even people who have read little or none of the Bible have possibly heard the reference John 3:16. Seen it on a piece of cardboard at a sporting event, heard it at a rare occasion in a church, maybe a funeral or a wedding or something else not really church related.

So in that famous verse we learn that Jesus is a gift. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” To us. For us. Because of our great need for him.

Yet in the next chapter he’s asking for water. He had a physical need, a thirst, and it needed quenched.

It’s a universal need.

Jesus listens as the woman questions him, and he sees the great need she has for true, soul refreshment.

She lays it out for him, the reasons she can’t believe he’s asking her for water.

He’s a Jew, she’s a Samaritan. Jews don’t speak to Samaritans.

He’s a man, she’s a woman. Men don’t ask women for help.

And if anyone saw them? It just wasn’t done.

And here’s a part of the story that I’ve heard dissected many times.

They are there alone, a traveler whose companions have gone into the town looking for food. And a woman who doesn’t feel free to come and draw water when other women are there drawing theirs.

She has come at noon, when everyone else is busy.

And Jesus knows why. He knows everything about her, including her greatest needs.

But before he lets on that he gets everything about her, he makes an outrageous statement: “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

It’s quite the conversation that follows. You should read it for yourself.

Or better yet, have the conversation with Jesus.

As I sat, unable to do much more than refill my glass and hope I could produce some saliva soon, and enough urine to reassure me that my kidneys were getting back to normal, I thought a lot about water.

The liquid kind, and the Jesus kind.

I had let myself get so desperate for water that I couldn’t yet stand to take in much of it. I had to turn to a substitute, a concoction that would technically keep me alive, but did nothing to relieve my deep thirst.

A thirst as deep in my body as the itching was in my skin.

I longed for water, but had to settle for electrolytes and sugar. Thankfully for only a short time.

And that poor woman in John 4? She saw something in Jesus that she hadn’t found in her other efforts to satisfy her own thirsts.

He had told her that everyone who drank from that well would be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water he gives them will never thirst. His living water would become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Her answer was one I really related to. “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Then Jesus revealed that he was already seeing her deeper need, not just for a drink, but for the quenching of her soul-sized thirst for love and acceptance.

He told her the ways she had tried to satisfy those needs with inferior things and relationships, that seemed to hit the spot for a while, but were not lasting.

I was so happy the day I could stop drinking Gatorade and switched to all water all the time! After weeks of an inferior substitute, one I could not possibly keep up for much longer, that kept me alive but didn’t satisfy my real thirst, didn’t cleanse my mouth, didn’t refresh me, I was eager to refill my water glass again and again.

And as I thought about the living water Jesus offers me, and the things I used to try to quench my soul-deep thirst with, I’ll never go back to the old substitutes.

Not when I have a spring welling up in me that will never leave my soul thirsty again.

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Water is Life

23 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by Becky Taylor Haas in sickness

≈ Leave a comment

I’m back!

For those of you who have checked in at all in the past six weeks, thanks for your persistence. I am offering a huge apology for this long silence.

After regular Thursday posts for the last 20 months, until mid-June, it’s reasonable to expect a weekly edition.

If you were moved to pray for me when all went quiet, thank you! I had great need of prayers.

I finally figured out my tummy troubles since spring.

Gallbladder.

It took me about 6 weeks of on and off intense pain to finally pinpoint the source!

Unfortunately the light dawned during a two-day onslaught of constant cramps and nausea that landed me in the emergency room.

Let me back up a little.

For weeks certain foods had been bothering me. I would avoid those foods, but then something new would cause pain.

Then one day I was finally feeling great. I pulled weeds and finished planting flowers in one bed, and decided to tackle another that had been let go since last year.

Well. I’m a person who likes to get my hands in the dirt. I plop down, lean in, and start digging. I like the satisfaction of wrapping those viny weeds around my fingers and pulling them up by the roots.

Except those viny weeds turned out to be poison ivy.

After a good half hour of plunging into that bed, and carrying two big armloads of debris over to throw in the corner of the field, I had a sinking feeling that those leaves of three I was now able to see looking down on them were not my friends.

I did all the things you are supposed to do. I tried not to touch anything, got in the house, washed my hands and arms as thoroughly as I could, then jumped right in the shower. I had just washed my hair the night before so I only wet it. Not my brightest moment.

It took three days before the itching started. My sinking feeling was justified.

Not glad to be right!

Also on that day of whirlwind weeding I found another food that bothered me, and was miserable from dinner on. And days later when the itching started I couldn’t decide which to give my attention to, my stomach or most of the skin on my body.

Two more days in bed yet too itchy to sleep made me willing to say yes when Dear Husband asked if I wanted to go to the emergency room to get checked out.

I had been “handling” things my way. For almost a week all I had eaten was half a banana. And by then nausea had set in. So I also didn’t feel like drinking anything.

In a three day period I think I only ingested one can of Vernor’s.

For the poison ivy I was using expired prescription cream from a reaction I’d had two summers ago.

So when I got to the emergency room the first thing they said was, “You’re dehydrated.”

Well yes, but what about my stomach? Do you think it’s my gallbladder? I’m not feverish so I don’t think it’s an emergency to get to surgery, but is there some way you can check?

Of course there is. The definitive test is ultrasound. But we had waited so late to head to the er that there was no longer a tech there to do the test. We could get that the next day. But that didn’t stop them from doing a CT scan. With contrast.

Which is really hard on your kidneys.

During the briefest of exams the doctor said, “Do you know what is causing this rash all over your stomach?”

Well, yes, but that’s not why I’m here.

So after tests and waiting, I got a whole laundry list of the things the CT showed. Actually most of them were very encouraging. Some things to watch, and no obstruction or bursting of my gallbladder.

And when they sent me home they mentioned that, by the way, I had acute renal failure. Have a nice night.

The ultrasound done the next day showed I have an abundance of gallstones. Problem identified.

The next couple of days I took meds they prescribed for my pain and nausea, and the stomach pain went away. Yeah! It actually hasn’t come back since!

And a couple days later I felt good enough to look at the discharge papers. Which told me I needed to drink lots of Gatorade and water.

I still couldn’t eat, because when you are dehydrated you don’t produce normal fluids. So in addition to not being able to urinate much, I also had no saliva for two weeks. I couldn’t eat or taste. So I tried to drink Gatorade but couldn’t handle much for the first few days. I felt like it sucked any residual moisture out of my mouth.

After following helpline nurse suggestions for relief from the poison ivy to try Gold Bond powder and calamine lotion and cool baths with various things to soak in, I was desperate for relief.

And as a lovely side effect of no saliva, I could only taste the powders, lotions and creams all over my skin! Yum.

I now know what a hot mess really feels like!

So what else could happen? Yes, a drug interaction.

Over the last year I’ve identified two drug allergies, one life-threatening. Now I have at least one more.

Either the pain killer or the nausea med or both suddenly made me start hallucinating.

It began with not being able to focus (which actually has taken weeks to get over), and needing to tilt my head to feel balanced.

Then I sat at my dining room table trying to research drug side effects in the middle of the night four days after my er visit, and the words were hard to see. They kept moving around. I looked up to an ordinary, rectangular box on top of our buffet and it grew feathery projections and started heaving up and moving.

I woke Dear Husband and said, “Let’s go back to the er.”

On the way there I saw someone’s nicely landscaped yard swoop out into the road right in front of us. Good thing I wasn’t driving!

So there I was, still badly dehydrated. And of course they did another CT. With contrast! To make sure I wasn’t having a stroke or aneurysm in my head.

As if my kidneys needed the extra assault.

Well, over the last year I’ve had three CT’s, covering my head, chest and abdomen. At least I know everything else is in pretty good shape!

Hindsight.

I’m six weeks out, and I’m hoping I’ve learned a really big lesson about the importance of something so basic, yet so vital for life.

Plain old water.

If I could go back, you bet I would. I would have made myself sip on a glass of good old room temperature well water all day every day, even if it wouldn’t stay down for long.

(Confession time: just typing that reminded me that now at noon I hadn’t gotten my first glass of water today, so I stopped and got one.)

If I could have made myself decide months ago that even if I didn’t feel like drinking, my body needed it, and would thank me later, the contrast with those CT scans wouldn’t have been able to devastate my kidneys so easily.

The meds I was taking would have been flushed out of my system better and maybe wouldn’t have had such a dramatic effect on me.

Even the foods that were bothering me might have digested better if I’d tried diluting them from the start.

I will never know if drinking water regularly, all day long, would have lessened or let me avoid some of the things I’ve been through over the last six weeks.

But now I have no excuse.

Ahhh! That long drink of water is just what I needed.

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