Pain Management

I look at the calendar and think, "There's nothing like the possibility of your own mortality," to remind you about the fragility of life. Living with a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer puts a lot of things into perspective. So, as the remaining 46 days until I have a mastectomy, taunt me from that calendar -- I have and probably will continue, to contemplate all that I've learned on my journey through life.

Now, I view religion, religious beliefs, spirituality, and the like as an intensely personal part of life. Those beliefs that we all have in one form or another, are as individual as we are. So, I normally don't share in such a public manner on some topics -- preferring that be something that is shared one-on-one, when the opportunity or need arises. Free will being what it is, it's just not right to impose your own belief systems on others. That's not the same as sharing those beliefs, when others ask or are receptive.

Today's an exception, as my mind is on a woman I once met. I only know her first name, Elizabeth. Elizabeth was someone who left an indelible mark on my memories and I think she had something valuable to share -- valuable enough to share with others who must endure physical pain.

Always hardheaded, the question of how I realized I needed Divine intervention might be more of having to recognize what God can do, repeatedly. Depending on which decade of my life was being discussed, would determine my answers. I think the answer to the question is an on-going discovery, sometimes almost daily, that without a doubt, for me, I recognize that - I need God's ever-present help.

With the gift of hindsight in my personal spiritual growth, I think about those special times, some of them, the hardest times. As a woman, particularly tender is the spiritual awareness of how much I needed God, when my children were born and throughout their childhood. Those were some of the days when I called out to Jesus, as vertically often, as most of us are on our cell phones today.

However, my first experience in perceiving that I actually needed help came back in the early 1970s. After five miscarriages, my first husband and I feared we would never have children. Then, it was discovered that I had a birth defect that involved my female organs. I was given the opportunity to have corrective surgery in a military hospital. At the time, I was the third woman in the U.S. to have that procedure. Unfortunately, that surgery resulted in complications. The end result was that I spent many weeks hospitalized at Andrews AFB 79th Medical Wing.

Back then, they had open wards and I was placed in a room with eight other women on the maternity floor. I was in a lot of physical pain and literally lived for the "next shot" of morphine. I was nearly three thousand miles away from my own family, with only my mother-in-law and husband to visit a few days a week. I was scared and felt quite alone.

In one corner of that room, there was a woman who had undergone surgery and was receiving chemotherapy treatments for ovarian cancer. Shortly after she was admitted, the doctors quietly told her that there was little hope for her survival.

She spent days crying and pleading with the doctors to stop all chemo treatment and let her go home to her young children. Back then, children could not visit the ward. She kept saying, "Let me die in peace at home where I belong." When she wasn't crying, she was often vomiting from the chemotherapy side effects. Sometimes, she was pleading aloud to God, not to end her life before she could kiss her babies once again, over and over at the top of her lungs.

In the opposite corner, a young woman was admitted who was only about five months pregnant. I don't know the reason she was having her pregnancy terminated at such a late stage, but the doctor had prematurely induced labor.

She was quite uneducated. She was also given to loudly vocalizing her opinions about the impending loss of her unborn child. When her labor pains finally began, she screamed and cursed, almost as much as the women we could hear in the nearby delivery rooms. After the delivery, she was tied to her bed. She had tried to climb out on to the window ledge from our fifth floor room, wanting to jump to her death.

One particular night, the dramas of these two women, combined with the noise of visitors to others in the room - added so much to my own fears and physical pain. Sleep was impossible. I became increasingly anxious, scared for those women, and feeling sorry for myself. The more agitated I became, the more my physical pain increased. The once welcomed pain shots no longer seemed to help.

Sometime later that night, another young woman was admitted to our ward. Her bed was placed directly across from mine. She was there because after having been in remission for a couple of years, her cancer had returned.

The first thing she did when they placed her in the bed, was to ask them to put her three-year-old son's picture on the stand. She wanted to see him at all times. The second thing she did, was to ask a nurse to retrieve her Bible from her belongings and immediately began to read, paying no attention to the chaos around us.

Almost at once, in all that madness, I was acutely aware that this attractive young woman had a glow of peace. In my spiritually immature mind at the time, this seemed odd. After several hours, she must have noticed that I stared at her a lot. She looked up from her Bible directly at me, smiled and whispered, "Reading God's word will help you to not feel your pain. In times like this, I need God more than ever and so do you."

That was the end of the conversation, she never spoke to me again. She seemed to always be sleeping, and oddly no one came to visit her. One morning, two days later she died. Within hours, so did the other woman, the one who never got to say good-bye to her little boy.

Each bed cart had a Bible inside it's drawer. It was my habit to read a small amount each day, not study, not memorize anything, just light reading. Shaken by both of their deaths and still in immense physical pain, I read and prayed without ceasing that entire day.

What I discovered was the more I lifted my pain and sorrow, the less I had. Indeed, it was even possible to "block" physical pain, by becoming completely engaged in the word of God. Back then, pain management was limited to morphine and other medicated solutions.

Seldom have I told anyone about that experience. For the longest time, everything that happened during those long months that I was hospitalized fighting complications from an earlier surgery haunted me. Later, when my only daughter was born, I gave her the middle name "Elizabeth."

Somewhere there is a little boy who grew up without his mother. I hope that those who cared for him, let him know how special she was. Seldom have I met anyone with more dignity and grace as Elizabeth conveyed just by simply being.

I suppose to this day, her father and paternal grandmother have wondered why I did that. In their minds, this would had been an odd choice. My husband had previously been engaged to a woman named Elizabeth. I no longer remember what excuses I gave them when they questioned me on that.

That was more than thirty-seven years ago, yet I remember it like it was yesterday. Back then, I was afraid of being ridiculed for naming our daughter in part, after a woman I only knew for a few short hours, as "Elizabeth" - for it was she who showed me, just how much I needed our Lord. She also taught me that pain management often comes from within, going way beyond pain management medication.