About the third week of July this year I got a cold. My
sleeping habits weren’t awesome, I’d been exposed to the cold virus earlier that week from others around me, and I hiked Lone Peak which pretty
much took all my energy and left my immune system pretty depressed. The cold
itself was surprisingly quite mild, but about four days into the cold I started
coughing. That’s nothing new. If there is a possibility of coughing, it will
happen to me! What I didn’t expect was that I’d still be coughing nearly three
weeks later when I was scheduled to travel to Canada with my sister Amanda
Ashton and her family (husband Curtis and 4 kids), so I thought it would be
good to finally seek some medical advice.
I saw my pulmonologist a few days before leaving and got some
antibiotics for a sinus infection, so I was positive that I would be out of the
woods and finally done with the cough. Saturday, the night before we left for
Canada, I was up all night coughing, barfing, gagging, dying. Not to overstate
this, but I actually kind of wanted to die – understand that I was not going to
do that to myself, but I just wanted my body to give it up because I was in an
absolute state of misery. I called the hospital twice, first at 2:30am and again
4:30am, hoping to get help from the pulmonary doctor on call. According to the operator,
my own doctor wanted to be the one they called. At 2:30 in the morning? I saw
no reason to wake him up over a cough. (At this point I was too exhausted to recognize that this "cough" was actually a full-blown asthma attack and that I probably should have let the hospital call my doctor.) So by 6:30am Sunday morning I called a third time and
finally asked to have my doctor call me back. Shortly thereafter I got a call, but it ended up being from
the doctor on call after all that. He called in a prescription for me, which for some
reason never came through by the time I left for Canada later that morning. I
was still on the antibiotics so I was certain that even without that drug this whole
cough thing would get better. Pipe dreams.
While in Canada the cough got super nasty to the point of
major asthma attacks multiple times a day, barfing, coughing, no sleep, etc. It
was pretty much not so fun at all. I wasn’t actually sick anymore, so I had a
lot of energy and stamina to enjoy our activities so that was good, but the
COUGH!! Ugh. During the next few days I stayed in constant communication with
my doctor’s office but there wasn't anything they could do while l was out of
the country short of encouraging me to keep up on the OTCs, and other things I
could do without prescription drugs. (The drugs they needed to put me on were
not of the kind that they could call in over a country border.) This was as
frustrating for them as it was for me. I could have gone to a Canadian clinic
or hospital but the paperwork and everything just didn’t seem worth it to me
when I was going to be back in the US in a few days.
So fast-forward to the end of the week. Friday morning was
our departure day with Helena as our planned destination for the night. Beginning
at 6:30 that morning I was in full-blown asthma attack mode for about 90
minutes. I had no idea how to stop it or how it was going to be for us driving
home. It somehow finally calmed down enough that I thought I’d for sure make it
to Helena that night without a problem. As we traveled home we stopped at a
park in Lethbridge, Canada for a little break. During that stop my cough had
come back and gotten so bad that we almost just had to take me to the hospital.
While I was in this park coughing my guts out for almost an hour straight
Curtis was on the phone with my doctor’s office (I couldn't talk or even
breathe enough to get in a word), but again, they couldn't do anything until we
got to Helena that night.
It quickly became very clear to me that the only direct help (and life) line I had at that very moment was Heavenly Father. Unable
to breathe and with tears running down my face I prayed and felt that it would
be good to ask Curtis for a blessing. Curtis and Amanda were across the parking
lot having the same discussion at that moment. So right there in the park Curtis
offered a powerful blessing. It didn't make the cough go away, but it made it
possible for me to bravely suppress it just enough for the next few hours in
the car to finally get to Helena where the doctor had called in the really strong
and important meds for me at the pharmacy by our hotel. FINALLY! Relief! I
slept uninterrupted for the first time that night in over a week. It was a
miracle! During our second day of travels home on Saturday I don’t think I
coughed even once.
I returned to the doctor a few days after we returned from
Canada and declared myself cured. Yay! But…yeah, not so fast. Within a week of
that visit things started going downhill again. The asthma that I thought was
getting better got totally out of control again. On a particular Wednesday,
about 10 or so days after my latest visit to the doctor, the coughing and
asthma got so bad that my co-workers thought I was going to die or had
pneumonia or TB or something really terrible. I didn’t have any of the above, but
you know, it wasn't really pleasant for them to hear me coughing and gagging
like that. And it was no good for me. I had been thinking about contacting my
doctor again, but I was just feeling kind of dumb at this point that I had been
making so many visits to the doctor when I kept thinking I was all better, and that
this would be the third time to his office in 4 weeks. However, after going
through that work day on Wednesday I felt a very strong prompting that despite
my pride or embarrassment or whatever, I needed to contact the doctor before
his office closed for the day, so I quickly sent
an email to the doctor to give an update on how things were going and see if
there was something I should be doing differently.
All that week leading up to that Wednesday as things got
worse I'd been praying a lot asking Heavenly Father to help me to have the fullness
of the healing blessings Curtis blessed me with back in Lethbridge. That
Wednesday night I explained to Heavenly Father in my evening prayer that I had
been doing all I could but that it obviously just wasn’t enough on my end, that
I needed Him, and that I had faith that He could help me. I finally fell asleep
without any further cough drama.
But then I woke up even worse at like 4:30am Thursday
morning. I was again having a major asthma attack with non-stop coughing and
barfing for 4 hours straight. Around 7:30am (too early to call the doctor’s
office) and without any hesitation this time I immediately wrote my doctor back
again and opened my message with "I think I'm in trouble." I explained
what was happening even as I was writing that email. I further noted that I was
on my way out of town in two days to visit family in Texas. I was so frustrated
because I thought God wasn't really helping me after the blessing and the
subsequent heartfelt prayers I’d been offering. After I finished my email to
the doctor I even wrote down a little song for myself (apologies to Lambchop):
This is the cough that doesn't
end
It just goes on and on my friend
Susannah started coughing and
does not know what to do,
So she'll continue coughing on
forever just because . . .
Well, about an hour after their office opened for the day,
the doctor called me in immediately for breathing treatments, and
then we talked a lot about what was going on and what to do about it. I may
have had some hesitation to go see him on earlier occasions during the past few
weeks, but I could not get into the office fast enough that morning. It was a really
good visit. So I'm back on some pretty strong meds that are totally helping
again, and I survived the hot humidity of Texas, which would NOT have happened
without that visit to the doctor.
Another amazing thing happened during that visit. I
learned that my doctor was leaving for Europe the next day. That information
just stopped me in my tracks because I suddenly realized that it was a HUGE HUGE
blessing that my health had deteriorated so badly that very day that I was basically
compelled to contact him immediately without any hesitation, that I caught
him right before he left for Europe, and that I was able to get the exact
treatments and drugs I needed in order to get through the following week in
Texas. I’ve been thinking about this even now many weeks later, that God WAS
hearing me loud and clear the whole time. If I hadn’t been sick enough to
contact my doctor, I would have been stuck in a really bad place with my doctor
in Europe and me dying in Texas. So, um, yeah, I feel more than a little bad
that I was being so impatient with God because he was exactly answering my
prayers in the best way possible to help me get better.
So this story isn’t over yet, and maybe it won’t ever be.
I returned for another visit to the doctor after he returned from Europe and I
from Texas, and we have devised a long-term plan. He also gave me his home and
cell number and then lectured me (in a kind but stern way) about not hesitating to
call him even if it is 2:30am and that I should never let a night like what happened
before I went to Canada go by like that again without calling him. He said that asthma attacks typically are the worst between the hours of 2:30 and 4:30am (Susannah: duly noted) and that as a pulmonologist he has willingly accepted those early morning wakeup calls as part of his job. He emphasized that people die from these things, and so he pretty much made me look him in the eye and promise that I would call if this ever happened again even in the early morning hours. So for now, thanks to being back on the strong
drugs, the asthma is under control. The doctor would like me to have a whole
year of this control, and I’m only weeks into that (maybe), so we shall see.
But even with that uncertainty still hanging over me, I am certain that through
the blessing Curtis gave me and my ongoing prayers God in His perfect wisdom has
blessed me and will continue to bless me and my doctors as we work through this
together now as a team – all of us, including God.
To conclude this post, I just want to share a really important truth I learned that day in
Lethbridge: When all else fails, the power of the priesthood will never fail.
It may not necessarily cure you, but it will help you get through whatever is
going on until you can get the proper help you need, and those blessings really
are eternal. The blessings that Curtis pronounced on me that day back in
Lethbridge were definitely being realized this whole time, and still are, and the reality is that I will probably feel the effects of that blessing for the rest of my life. So I
just have a huge testimony of that and am daily filled with so much gratitude
that I was able to have Curtis help me. God really hears us, He perfectly knows
every detail of our sicknesses and afflictions and whatever else is going on in
our lives, and even when it doesn’t make sense or seem like it at the moment,
He always knows the best way to help us.
