MedicalMoments in My Life

I have worked in the health care field since 1983. I started out working in the Medical School, Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. It was there that I learned how truly amazing the world is!I worked with doctors from every part of the world! It was a wonderful job. I made a few lifelong friends including my dear sweet buddy Bea who turns 80 this year! She is an amazing woman who never married or raised her own family but she has had some interesting jobs including school teacher, legal secretary, medical secretary and an assortment of wonderful jobs that took her to lot's of different cities in lots of different states in the USA. She has traveled the world too and I have always been amazed at her. I loved that first job in this big city. I am a small town girl from Pueblo which is 100 miles south of Denver. But the people I worked with at that first job took me in and cared for me.

I was working there for about 10 weeks when a gal rear-ended me and sent me into a lifetime of pain and suffering! I drove a 1972 canary yellow Dodge Swinger (Dart) and she was driving an army green 1970 Chevy Malibu. These cars were built like little tanks and she had her baby on the front seat. I think she was watching her kid when she sent me sailing. I received whip lash and as a result of it I was diagnosed with hydrocephalus. I ended up at the emergency room and it was there that my husband to be took exceptional care of me and six months later asked me to marry him! I was getting worse and worse with dizzy spells and headaches. Doctors ignored me and finally told me to get a psych consult!

A doctor I worked with, Dr. Cohen asked Bea and I to join him over at the hospital to visit his 16 year old daughter. Zoe had had a total hip replacement and she was going to be discharged the next day so we went to wish her well. I was wearing a white sundress with pretty eyelet cap sleeves . We were standing at Zoe's bedside chatting when I asked the doctor if it felt hot in there. The next thing I know I am in the emergency room getting 30 plus stitches in my head. When I fell, in slow motion, according to my doctor friend, I was chewing gum and he said I never missed a beat! I hit my head on the corner of the old metal closets that were int he patient rooms! A young doctor in the ER told me I had a beautiful skull because he was able to see clean inside of it! He stitched up my head and ordered a CT Scan. There is was water sitting on my brain! Three neuro-surgeries later I still suffer from migraine headaches and many frustrations that the cop that investigated our accident stated "no one was injured and car damage was minor!

I tell this story because I want to share my medical stories with you. Some funny, some heartbreaking and I will do that over a series of days.

But this story, my story, gave me the courage to love and trust my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! I tell you this because Easter is this week and I have had many personal encounters with the Lord and the one I had during my neuro surgery days is the one that set my life into motion and made me the trusting woman I am today!

I had one neurosurgery and then one year later a second one. Two months after that second one I had a third! Five months later I was sitting at work one day, just me and the Dept. Chair Dr. Pizer. I walked into his office and told him I think I am losing my mind! He made a quick phone call, got a wheelchair and personally took me across the bridge to the hospital, which was a huge walkway connecting the old medical school with the old hospital. My husband arrived shortly and a young, arrogant resident, Dr. Dim Wit I fondly called him, told me that it appeared my shunt was not functioning and more surgery would be necessary. I told him "we'd see about that!" and he chuckled as he saw me pick up my bible and start reading it. He laughed because he thought I was a silly girl trusting God and not science and medicine! He ordered am MRI and because that particular imaging does not have harmful radioactivity like CT Scans do my husband was allowed to go into the exam area with me. He held my feet and we prayed together as I was run through a series of more tests! When I came out of that MRI that resident doctor said to me "I'm not sure what happened, your shunt was not functioning at all when you went in to the MRI, but when you came out, it was fully functioning! He was as pale as a ghost! He was Jewish but I told him" you gotta live and Let God." "You ought to try Him sometime." I saw God work a true miracle in my life. I could not stand to undergo one more surgery, I had a newborn baby in the middle of all this and I lost my dad to a heart attack and saw my precious mom lose her younger sister Ann 8 days later to Lou Gehrig's disease! You may know me a bit now but anyone who knows me well knows that when that doctor announced I would have more surgery I argued with God! I told Him I was not going to do that, I probably could not survive the mental anguish of it all and if He loved me He would show that darn doctor up! God listens, when He wants me but He changed that doctors heart. That doctor told me "There is absolutely no medical reason why my shunt stopped working then started working again in such a short time frame. But you know what? God knows...