Our Trip to the ER on Sunday

On Sunday morning I remarked that we had a nice open Sunday. We would be able to go to church and simply come home. In addition, we had a free Memorial Day as well. We all needed some down time.

Well, that was not to be.

Each Sunday a deacon opens the service with Scripture, a few thoughts, and prayer. Last Sunday was David’s turn. He’s done this many times before. Part way through, it became clear something wasn’t right. I (like other people) thought maybe he was getting choked up while he was reading since he was having trouble reading part way through, but Romans 1 isn’t a passage that generally moves someone to tears. He was clearly not himself. As his wife, I was certain it wasn’t just emotion.

He got through it with some difficulty and sat down with Caroline and me. I looked at him a few times and finally had him go out to the narthex with me. I asked him if he wanted to go home because he didn’t seem well. He mentioned numbness on the left side of his face, arm, foot, etc. As we talked, I said I thought we should leave and maybe even go to the med center that is half way between our church and home.

So we were searching for stroke symptoms on the phone while on the way to the med center. When I dropped David and Caroline off at the door, I told them to go straight to someone and tell them he thinks he might be having a stroke. I knew that would move things along tremendously.

They got him into a room before he had even finished registration. They ran some basic tests which were normal other than his heart rate being up. But given his age they thought he should go by ambulance downtown to the ER for immediate tests and not have to wait in the waiting room there. The only way to rule out a mini-stroke that might lead to a full stroke was to do more tests.

So that’s what we did.

The tests all came back fine. The discharging doctor (who was a delightful young woman) told him he has the heart and numbers of a twenty year old. She said she doesn’t often get to deliver good news so it was a nice change for her. She couldn’t tell us what happened, but it was nothing to do with his heart.

Our conclusion was that it was a spiritual attack or a trigger point that messed him up. A friend also suggested that he could have had a mini-stroke and the Lord healed it before the tests were done. Some might suggest it was a panic attack, but it wasn’t that.

I find it interesting that this happened right after I wrote the post about The Power of the Name of Jesus Christ.

In any case, he was perfectly fine the next day. Since it happened at church, Caroline kept two of her friends informed via texts and they shared the news with someone else who got a note to our pastor to announce what was going on before the service ended. (Things moved that quickly. We were already on our way to the ER before the service even ended.) Our church family was praying for us through the entire thing. We were grateful for that.

So now we will find out how Samaritan Ministries works on the other side. We’ve just started our fifth year with it and we’ve thankfully never had to submit a need to share. It is a blessing to send out a check each month to another Christian household and know that we are directly meeting a need in the body of Christ. Now we will be on the receiving end.

This was the first time we’ve had any interaction with corporate medicine since January 2020 when we took Caroline to her former pediatrician for a respiratory infection. I specifically remember asking the doctor what he thought of the covid stuff in the news and he said he didn’t think it would be any big deal. Interesting.

Everything felt normal at the hospital and almost everyone was very kind and pleasant. There were only two people we dealt with who were wearing masks and they were (ironically) the least pleasant people with whom we interacted. Otherwise we were blessed with very nice nurses and doctors, something I started praying about as soon as I knew we were heading to the ER. We remarked we were thankful  this didn’t happened in the previous few years because Caroline and I would have been forbidden to even enter the hospital with David since neither one of us could wear a mask. So we gave thanks for that.

The only other interesting bit had to do with the ambulance. David rode by himself because Caroline and I ran home to grab a few things before we drove downtown. One of the first things the woman asked David was if he had been vaccinated. He said he had not. She said, “Good for you. Don’t get it.” Take that for what it’s worth. If I had been in the ambulance with him, I would have peppered her with questions because I’m guessing she has some stories to tell. David, however, is not wired like me and he wasn’t feeling the best so he didn’t discuss it any further.

So that was how we spent our nice open Sunday. Not very relaxing, but we now know that David has an incredibly healthy heart. That’s good to know. We’re thankful he is fine and the Lord protected him from any further troubles, whatever it was that made him so ill.