by Alexis Orth
Most of the time, I feel invincible. I’ve fought diabetes, heart attack, asthma, chronic nausea, broken limbs, hyper-extended knees, and the list goes on; but, “Ha ha devil, you can’t have me…!”
I threw up so many times as a kid that I always had to have a barf bucket in our truck. Until I was five, I got sick every other time I got into a moving vehicle. There was no technical diagnosis. I just heaved my guts a lot. There were “well kids”, and then there was me.
I fought sickness constantly as a child and missed many days of school. Nasty tasting medicines, expensive medicines that I would snort up my nose, an army of steroid inhalants–these were all a way of life for my family and I. Asthma is diagnosed so freely now; it took the doctors a long time to figure out what was wrong before the eighties. As a regular attendee of the emergency room, my mom knew just when I needed breathing treatments for my lungs. But asthma bothered me less and less as I grew up. When puberty hit, that asthma had little strength in my life. When I started smoking in college (stupid, stupid, stupid) I began earning this disease back, begging for it to come back to my body with each pack. God amazes me with His mercy in that He helped me quit smoking, and when I did, the lingering asthma attacks stopped. His grace is amazing too–I haven’t had lungs full of fluid or used an inhaler for years; breathing is easy.
As a pre-teen, my knees used to be really weak, but strength training in many ballet classes helped my body get the muscles aligned the way they needed to be. I took allergy shots once a week, for seven years. SEVEN YEARS. God made sure that I had every opportunity growing up that I needed to be a strong adult.
I’ve broken my arms, my legs, my toes, my wrists, even my tailbone! In high school, I broke both of my wrists at the same time! But, we are so finely created, that bones come back together after we mistreat them. What can I say? My life is full of adventure and I’m grateful to God that bones knit.
In my twenties I noticed that the throwing up without explanation had left me. I just stopped feeling carsick with every ride. What a good God! He is my miracle worker, even when I forget to ask.
Here I stand. My God has seen to it that I’ve been protected. I was diagnosed with diabetes at eleven. I’m thirty-one now, and I don’t show any long term signs of having diabetes. All the usual curses that accompany this disease: eye damage, kidney failure, and loss of circulation, have not touched me. After fighting this disease for so long, I’ve watched friends go blind, lose limbs, and worse. But God has made it so that this disease has not had full power over my body. I show virtually no signs of a twenty-year fight with this disease. Praise God!
I’ve even suffered a heart attack. Why? God knows. We’re always taught to recognize the male symptoms of heart attack. Who out there knows that the female signs of heart attack are a rolling pain across the chest and arms and serious vomiting? Well, I didn’t know what was happening when the attack came. The day before, I had been to a miraculous prayer event; I had fasted all day, and my insulin usage was way off. My blood sugar was okay, but my body just didn’t feel right. The next day, I was in church, not feeling well by any means, and when the pain started, I thought it was something to do with my diabetes. I decided to laugh at the attack, to laugh through the pain, to remember how much Jesus loved me.
A visiting minister was there that week, and she came into the bathroom with me. We prayed, and I looked in the mirror and told myself “I am a child of God.” Everyone around me was praying, commanding the pain to leave in Jesus’ name. The pain left after about 15 minutes. I lay down in the nursery; I didn’t want to go to the hospital and was just grateful to God it was over. We cancelled our plans for the day, and my husband and I took our six-month old baby home, where I lay down. That is the last thing I remember of that day. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital, joking with one of the nurses who was fixing my IV. My blood sugar was 1500, and how I was still talking, no one could figure out.
After running extensive tests and getting my blood sugar back in control, they told me I had experienced a very mild heart attack because of “Post Partum Cardio Miopathy”. It had whacked out every system in my body, and I would need a week in the hospital, two weeks of bed rest, and some time off of work. I had to take drugs that would prohibit me from breast feeding, but my daughter was a champ and took to bottles and formula without issue. I felt like an idiot. A heart attack at twenty-nine? What was God doing? What was I doing? I had quit everything, (smoking, drugs, and drinking) that I used to do well over a year before all this mess. The more the doctors tested me, the less reason they could find that this attack had happened to me.
The hospital’s chief heart doctor was assigned to my case, and he gave me the best medicines and approved of me going to my parents” house, where my mom was able to take time off of work to help me lay low and get better. The day after being discharged, my face looked gray, and I was so tired. I called the advice nurse who told me to call 911 and I landed my butt right back in the hospital. “Hello, God?” He answered me, and I knew my job was to share God’s love in that place. My roommate was a lady who had heart and lung issues–she was eighty. She was delighted for me to read the Bible to her. I remember her saying “Wow, the way you read that–you really sound like you mean it.” We laughed hard at our situations, and I shared Christ’s love with her and to every doctor and nurse that walked into that room. After three days I was discharged with a slight change in medicine, and my roommate let me pray for her on my way out. I am confident that I will see her someday in heaven.
I had a lot of “get well” cards and calls, and I had FIVE churches praying for me at this point. After two weeks I went to my main cardiologist for my follow-up appointment. He ran a gauntlet of tests and came back to me amazed. He told me I had experienced one years worth of healing in two weeks. The pictures he took of my heart showed no leaks, no damage, no sign of ever having anything wrong. I told him it was God. He wrote in the report “possible divine intervention” as he shook his head in wonder. He discarded my previous diagnosis–the one that said I would be on a stricter diet, a heavier regiment of medicines and that having any more children was unwise. He re-diagnosed me as having experienced a “transient heart depression event”. He took me off of all the heart medicines that I had expected to take for the rest of my life. He said after a year, I could get pregnant safely. It was the best follow-up appointment I ever had.
I went out to my car and burst into tears. I felt like a freed prisoner! I heard the Lord ask me, “Do you believe in prayer or not? Do you know how many people were praying for you?” I told Him, “Jesus, You can heal me however You want to.”
Many life lessons have come from these physical maladies. I’ve learned not to call sickness “mine”. I’m not claiming, “my disease”, “my soreness”, not even “my headache”. None of it’s mine. It’s Jesus’, because He promises me in His word that He’s taken it. He holds the keys to death and hell–those two categories include every physical thing I’ve been through. I’ve learned that my family would go to any lengths to help me–from waiting in an allergy clinic for a half hour every week for seven years in a row, to completely changing everyone’s way of eating in our house to help me not to “cheat” on a strict low-sugar diet. And even when I think they’ll be mad at me, or that I should hide what’s going on, I know I should just tell them what’s really going on. In my darkest moments, they love me no matter what, and they’re praying for me. I learned that God’s ways are higher than my ways. I don’t understand everything I’ve been through, and I won’t until I get to heaven.
I hate taking shots four times a day, and I hate watching my blood sugar, but I know God’s going to use this for something. I know diabetes helped to keep me from being a full-blown drunk in college–but that’s… another story. I know how to never, NEVER tap dance on slick linoleum (this is how both wrists were broken). God can heal my broken “anything”, from bones to heart. I know that He’s never left my side. God’s been in every pitfall, every car, and every hospital room I’ve ever had to go in. When I talk to Him, He’s always ready to listen. And when I listen, He talks back to me. I know I’ve really been praying when I get something from God. I know He’s my Maker, and my Healer, and I feel His joy when I look at the miracles in my life.
In some of the difficulties I’ve experienced, I know that God has seen my confession of faith, and my total trust in Him, and He has taken me through the difficulties. When Jesus was in the boat with the disciples, He was asleep and they were freaked out by the storm. Jesus was expecting the boat to sail all the way through the storm. God has taught me that even in the worst situations, my job is not to figure out who is to blame or find someone to question. Questioning “Why is this happening to me?” never turns out to be a good use of my time. I’m determined to ride through the storm and praise God. I am in His grip, and all of the effects of any storms in my life, He is washing away. This world isn’t even my home.
Alexis Orth is the team leader of prop design for WYSIWYG’s next feature film “Gravity.”
