I would love to say that after that first surgery, my life just went on like normal, and I never had any more issues, but that isn’t true.
My first surgery took place in April 1988.
My second surgery was in early September 1990.
The repairs that were made to my spine in my first surgery didn’t last. The bone that they chipped out of my spinal cord had grown back. So it needed to be removed again. In addition, my cord had tethered, and the fluid pocket had returned. So basically, I needed maintenance surgery to correct everything again.
They say it’s easier to do something when you don’t know what to expect, and I would have to agree.
With all of its unknowns, the first surgery was scary, but going in a second time, knowing all the pain and uncertainty involved, was probably even more frightening.
I didn’t want to do it all again. But I didn’t have a choice. There was, yet again, a bone growing through my spinal cord, and that’s not something you can just leave.
So, we scheduled the surgery, and there was no turning back.
I honestly don’t remember much about that surgery. It’s all a blur.
It lasted just as long as the first one. It had the same number of risks as well. I had no idea if I would be paralyzed when I woke up, but I also knew that without the surgery, I would definitely be paralyzed.
I do remember the heavy feelings surrounding it.
This wasn’t long after everything fell apart at my childhood church. The very same church that stopped on a Sunday morning to pray for me had, by this time, essentially turned on my dad. You can read more about this in some of my very first blog posts. It was a heavy time.
My great-grandfather passed away earlier that year. My uncle was killed in a tragic car accident a few months later. Things blew up at the church, and I had surgery that fall.
I felt like I was being punished. I didn’t know what I had done to anger God so much, but I was convinced I had done something. This was when I came to the conclusion that I had obviously taken the Lord’s Supper, at some point, with some unconfessed sin, and God was punishing me.
Although I don’t remember much about my hospital stay during my second surgery, I remember almost everything about my third one.
After I recovered from my second surgery that September, I went back to see my orthopedic surgeon. This was the orthopedic surgeon from Arkansas Children’s Hospital who started finding all my spinal issues. The one whose office I stepped into, and my life changed back in 1988.
He had been following my case and was watching my scoliosis as it progressed. He tried putting me in a brace to correct the curve, but that didn’t work.
As luck would have it, when I went in for my next office visit and x-ray, they found that my curve had progressed aggressively in the previous few months. Where the curve was around 40 degrees at the earlier appointment, at this appointment, it had progressed to a 68-degree curve.
The doctor explained that my spinal curvature was what they called an S-shaped curve. I had a slight curve at the top of my spine, but towards the center was where the curve measured 68 degrees. This was a twisting curve, causing my body to twist on itself and subsequently crush my heart and lungs. Since the curve was progressing so rapidly, I needed immediate surgery to avoid major, life-threatening complications.
But the catch was that my body hadn’t sufficiently recovered from the neurosurgery I had just a few weeks earlier.
The surgery to fix my curve was very complicated, and I needed to be in better shape physically before they could do such a major surgery again. But in the same breath, the doctor said I needed this surgery to fix the curve as soon as possible.
So we were in a conundrum. I needed time to heal, but I also needed immediate surgery.
The orthopedic surgeon prescribed intense physical therapy to rebuild my muscles. We began to drive to Arkansas Children’s Hospital three days a week for physical therapy. Because I was still technically recovering from surgery, I couldn’t do any kind of therapy that was high-impact. Pool exercise was what I needed most, and Arkansas Children’s Hospital had a therapy pool in its physical therapy department.
I swam laps, did water aerobics, and worked on all the muscles I needed to have ready for this next surgery.
I spent three months rebuilding my body to have it operated on once again in late December of 1990.
This surgery would be complicated.
Because of the two previous neurosurgeries, scar tissue had developed in many of the areas the orthopedic surgeon needed to work. This would complicate things and increase my chances of being paralyzed.
The orthopedic surgeon came to my hospital room the night before surgery to discuss the options.
He planned to cut me open on my left side from my pelvic bone around my body to my shoulder blade. Then, he would remove a rib that would be crushed and used to hold the screws and rods in place for the second part of the surgery. While he had me open, he would try a relatively new procedure placing the screws and rods in front of my spine. He would leave the slight curve at the top of my spine if this procedure worked and only correct the massive curve in the center part of my spine. To try this procedure, he would first need to deflate my lung and then access the spine from the front. He wasn’t very optimistic that there would be enough room to correct the curve from the front, but he wanted to try.
If the procedure to correct the curve from the front didn’t work, they would sew me up, turn me over and cut me from my neck to my tailbone, and from that point, proceed with the more common scoliosis correction procedure.
Regardless of which surgery worked, I would spend at least two nights in ICU.
I went to bed that night with so much on my mind. None of what I heard sounded like something I wanted to do. I was terrified. But I didn’t want anyone to know. So, when the doctor asked me if I had any questions, instead of asking him everything that was going on inside my 12-year-old mind, I asked him if the new rod in my spine would cause me to beep at the airport. This made everyone chuckle, alleviated the tension in the room, and helped us think happier thoughts. I’ve always been pretty good at hiding what is happening within myself. I tend to push through the hard stuff and just keep a lot of things inside. I did this even when I was twelve years old.
The good news is that placing the rod and screws on the front part of my spine worked. However, I woke up with an incision wrapping around my body, a chest tube coming out of me, and pain as I had never felt before in my young life. This surgery was much more painful than the previous two had been.
This was when morphine pumps were pretty new. Instead of pushing a button to request a nurse, I could press a button and administer my own morphine when I was in pain. But, I learned what it sounded like when it really administered medicine and what it sounded like when it didn’t. I pushed that button as many times as possible but never got any real relief. The pain was unlike anything I had experienced.
The doctor ordered daily X-rays to ensure the rods and screws hadn’t shifted. Being moved around after a surgery like that was more than I could handle. I would scream in pain when the radiologists came to x-ray me in ICU.
The chest tube is something I never want to experience again. The doctors and nurses would “milk” it several times daily to remove the fluid from my lungs, and the pain was indescribable.
I spent two nights in ICU. The only way I could go to a regular room was to have the chest tube removed first. The doctor said we could remove the tube one of two ways. He could put me to sleep and remove it, or I could hold my breath, and he would yank it out. I chose the second option because I didn’t want to be put to sleep again. That was a mistake. Even as I write this, I can clearly remember that pain as the doctor pulled the chest tube out of my body. I screamed. It felt like they ripped my entire insides out of me.
I spent my 13th birthday in the hospital. That’s not exactly a thirteen-year-olds biggest dream for a 13th birthday.
I couldn’t leave the hospital until the orthotic lab built a brace. I couldn’t stand up until I had a brace to support me.
I would need to wear this brace for six months as the rib they crushed and used to place around the rods and screws grew together to form the needed support for my spine.
I left the hospital that time in tremendous pain and a recovery that looked grim to a 13-year-old girl.
I was in 7th grade…That time in life when how you looked made all the difference.
When I returned to school, I would be wearing a brace that went from my neck down over my hips. I would be about three sizes larger than I really was. The brace would stick out and cause me to look like a hunchback. It was a new teenager’s worst nightmare.
I couldn’t take this brace off at all, not even to shower or wash my hair. So for several weeks, I had to have sponge baths. Then, when I was finally allowed to shower, I had to step inside the shower, and my mom would gently remove the brace. My mom then had to bathe me while I stood perfectly still.
All of that was bad, but it didn’t even compare to what it was like at school. The kids were brutal. I became known as broke back.
They would laugh at me when I walked down the hall. It was horrible. It’s something I will never forget. It was one of the most challenging times in my life.
I was relieved when the doctor allowed me to remove the brace a few weeks early. Finally, I could finish out the school year being a semi-normal 13-year-old.
I weighed 65 pounds without the brace and wore a size 10 slim. I was tiny.
My recovery had been hard.
I struggled during my recovery to eat and therefore was severely underweight. But I didn’t care. I would take anything over having to wear the brace.
However, I had to start seeing a nutritionist to gain weight, which seems like a dream to a now pre-menopausal woman who would love to lose a few unwanted pounds.
If you are putting the pieces together by now, this all happened when we moved to the new church. The one where I met Jeremy. I wrote about this previously. How he carried me over that mud puddle, and though I was so embarrassed by the brace I was wearing, he said he didn’t care.
I don’t doubt that moving to that new church probably saved my life. It gave me new friends and a new outlook on life in a very hard time.
Our time at that church ended badly, but it began wonderfully. It gave me a place to belong and friends that loved me despite my physical issues. It shined a light into some of the darkest days of my life.
I eventually fully recovered from that surgery, well as fully as you can recover from something like that. There were many miracles involved in that surgery as well. I wasn’t paralyzed; the simpler surgery worked, the doctors repaired the curve, and my organs weren’t crushed. I have some leftover side effects from that surgery, but mostly it was a success… a true miracle.
As I mentioned last week, everything about the church in my life hasn’t been bad. There are many good things woven into the bad stuff. It has taken me a few years of healing to be able to remember the good stuff again.
The little country church carried us through that first surgery. They prayed for a miracle, and God sent one. But unfortunately, it wasn’t too long afterward that things began to fall apart at that church. And maybe that’s why it hurt so bad. How can someone love you so much yet turn around and treat you like dirt? I don’t pretend to understand that to this day.
Living in this community was hard for many years. People didn’t know what to say or how to act around us. We couldn’t exactly just up and move away. We are farmers, and you can’t move farmland. So, we were forced to stay and endure some uncomfortable times. But time does heal many things. The majority of those relationships have been restored. Some more than others, but God has worked miracles. We love our neighbors and our community. The things of the past rarely creep back into our minds.
And if you really think about it, I’ve mentioned this before…
God knew it would take a catalyst to make us move. He knew where we needed to be, and we wouldn’t just leave the church my grandparents built and my dad had grown up in…The church where my parents went right after they married… the only church I had ever known and had attended since birth, and my brother as well.
God knew we were there to stay, and He wanted us to move.
Looking back, I can see God’s hand all over everything that happened. He took what the enemy meant for evil and turned it for good.
The same logic also works with what happened at my husband’s childhood church. The things that happened were so very painful, but many of those relationships were also restored. Recently a few have been unhappy that I’ve told the story of what happened, and I’m afraid those relationships have been damaged again. But overall, things are good between us and most of those people.
In that instance, God knew we needed to move to Tree Town, and He knew it would take a catalyst to make that happen.
And it did.
As I mentioned last week, the happenings at Tree Town are fresh. Those wounds are beginning to scab over, but they are still there. Sometimes they still hurt, but mostly now, they’re just crusted over and uncomfortable. I hope that one day restoration can also be made in some of those relationships.
I don’t really know why all of these things happened. And maybe I choose to look at things through that lens to survive. I have to find the good to be able to go on in life.
I think it’s important to tell these stories for people who may be walking through the same kind of thing and think they are going crazy. It’s important to point out and call out abuse in an organization that was never intended to be something that hurt people.
I’ve seen God work miracles in my life. And I have more to tell you about next week. He has protected me during surgeries. He allowed me to walk when by all human understanding, I shouldn’t be able to do.
He has brought me through so many things, and I’m thankful.
Maybe one of the biggest miracles in my life would be that I have been able to separate what people have turned the church into and what God actually meant for it to be. I am continually amazed that I can even step foot inside a church or trust a pastor.
I can see Jesus for who He is, and separate His goodness from all the ugly stuff.
What the enemy meant for evil, He definitely turned for good.
If you’ve walked away from church because of something a pastor or another church member has done to you… If you’ve been hurt by an organization… If you never want to walk into a church again… I understand… because it took a miracle for me to be able to do it… But God is still working miracles, so there is hope.
I find myself feeling grateful that even though it’s hard, I can see not only what others have done to hurt me but also what I’ve done to hurt others. I’m not perfect, and I’ve tried to be diligent in saying that. I have hurt people. I have said things I shouldn’t have said and talked about people when I should have been praying for them instead. This whole process has made me look deep inside myself and examine the changes that I need to make. I don’t want to do things the same as I have before. I want to be a part of the change. I want to be an activist for Jesus.
There’s Hope that the church can be restored to what God intended for it to be and Hope that spiritual abuse and abuse of authority in churches can end… I’m praying for a miracle.
Until Next Time,
Whitney