Posted on 02/16/2015 11:29:19 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Mark Twain
Hello, Freepalicious friends, this will have been your first and probably your last communication from me until Christ our God grants a better body/brain recovery. But I wanted to write what I can before it all disappears down the Memory Hole.
Collapsed on Jan 19, septic shock from UTI. EMT's say BP fell to something like 40. Dead.
Cardiac arrest. And again. And again. Dead, dead, dead.
No bright tunnel of light, no golden escalator with old Fleetwood Mac mix tapes, no exclusive book and movie rights. I even forgot that I'd promised, if I were ever in dramatic straits, to ask for the intercession of Elizabeth Anscombe, one of God's noblewomen, who just needs a teeny-tiny documentable miracle in order to be beatified. I even blew THAT. I wasn't only nearly dead, I was really most sincerely dead.
Teams of people, however, were darting me with epis and drilling holes in my face, neck and groin to pump in corpse-warmer concoctions faster than my baffled body could tolerate them. They forced the issue, Lord love 'em all. I was on a ventilator for fifteen days.
Prayer groups started double and triple teaming me, which opened up spaces even in the Enemy's territory where grace could operate. Dozens of St Mary's people came tumbling into the Med Center ICU with their hand-knotted rosaries and their Divine Mercy prayers, with sweet trust bordering on obstinacy.
Was it before or after my airway collapsed that a Greek Orthodox priest friend anointed me with sweet oil from a myrrh-bearing icon of St. Anne? Was it before the Two Specialists started staring at the CT and MRI results and muttering “Look at the size of that obstruction. Christ Almighty, what a mess!”--- that my pastor came and gave me the precious Viaticum –- a transfusion from the veins of Jesus Christ Our Lord?
Lord have mercy 12 x. Lord have mercy 40 x. Lord have mercy Women's Plus Size XXL with elastic waistband.
Was it before or after I started hallucinating, that the “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, Chant-o-Matic” was being dialed up to Max right there in the Med Center atrium? Yes, dearest Baptist friends, Catholics do chant. (And OK, Orthodox buddies, we do mumble.) Anyway, a skeptical world could see how Catholics come fully armed and ready to rumble.
If you're laughing a bit, here's where it stops.
I was given a vision of evil.
I am not writing this because I want you to think, “Oh woo-woo, Mrs Don-o must be holy, she has these Mystical Experiences TM” or even (closer to the truth) “Is there nothing this proud, ignorant, hypocritical woman will not say for 15 minutes of fame?” I haven't the strength in my shaking hands to waste on dubious claims of “God told me,” nor breath in my body to argue about these things, nor (this is the important point) do I understand what I saw. God (!) told (!) me (!), “You're not going to understand but zero-point-one percent of this,” and behold, all-y'all, the fact is, I don't understand it.
I saw evil.
I saw the mouth of evil.
I know that, trembling hands or not, I'll have to explain about the “mouth,” –- though I can't. But I'll try.
It was not large. It was about an inch square, no bigger than a typical chessboard square. It was not a lewd, loose-lipped, lolling Miley Cyrus mouth, nor a thin-lipped Atheist Medical Ethicist mouth with moustache attached, like a cheap movie Mephistopheles.
In fact, there was no face attached. It was a mouth. It had one single snaggle tooth, barbed and recurved on itself like the kind of fish hook that, when the fool fish tries to back off, just digs in deeper. On the tip of the snaggle tooth was a single drop of green venom sufficient, I thought, to destroy life on all inhabited planets.
And the mouth was inside-out.
How you can tell a “mouth” is "inside-out" I do not know, except that it seems I read somewhere about some odious marine parasite that chomps down on some part of its intended victim and then turns itself inside-out, so that the victim is enveloped and slowly digested by the writhing, now-exterior intestines. Holiness? Heaven? People speak of near-death experiences glowing with consolation and beatitude; my NDE was more involved with Homicide and Hell.
I saw a RN I despised, a sort of pontillist-Catholic as it happens, one who got passive-aggressive with me when I was experiencing anguish and terror. She had disputed with me for hours, contemptuously, dismissively, over whether I could have a freaking mouth swab.
Not that I could speak much beyond “ungh, ungh.” But I could point to the mouth swabs which were an inch beyond my reach, and point to my mouth where everything was stuck together like Crazy Glue, and make the classic Praying Hands gesture, and she would say, “You had swab 32 minutes ago, thang Q!” and then walk away.
I couldn't make out her accent but she had evidently trained in someplace where they told her that it is the ultimate in American professional courtesy to end every sentence with “Thank you,” regardless of context. Thus:
“Do not bite tongue, thang Q!”
“Do not move finger, thang Q!”
“Stop breathing, thang Q!”
“You are not thirsty. You had swab 44 minutes ago, thang Q!”
He face right next to mine (and she smelled like Citrusy-Fresh Floor Disinfectant) “You are not thirsty. You had swab only 55 minutes ago, thang Q!”
I was left sweltering in my own sweat for hours in an underground claustrophobic corridor between the CT unit and the ICU. Nurse DeeDee attempted no gesture of consolation, offered nothing, disappeared for hours without explanation, would pop back round the corner with,
“I SAID, Do not bite tongue, thang Q!”
Bad nurse. Nurse Ratched. Motto: Service to Subumanity. DeeDee, Destroyer of Worlds.
If I had a choice between Jesus Christ or a filet knife, I would have chosen the knife. I could do more damage with it. If I had a choice between Jesus Christ or pushing this despicable woman through a window, my dying words would have been, “Ah, bloody plate glass.”
Then I saw the Mouth of Evil open up to swallow me and the entire world. And the entire world. And I heard an intense warning:
“Forgive her.”
“I can't, Lord. Can't You see my mind is disintegrating?”
“Forgive her.”
“Are YOU freaking crazy, too? I'm being destroyed by this stupid disease and I'm laying in this stupid lithotomy position at the mercy of this stupid odious DeeDee, my mind is being shattered under the hammer-blows of pain and fear. I can't chose anything, can't calculate anything, can't desire anything ...”
“I didn't say anything about 'Calculate.”
“I can't forgive her.”
“Of course you can't. Your pulmonary, cardiac and renal function are failing. Your brain function is disintegrating. YOU can't forgive her. How right you are. Ask Me to forgive her.”
“How long do I have to decide?”
“You moron! There is no more time! Do it now!”
I was well and truly freaked. “Oh, Dear Lord...?”
“Yes?”
“Dear Lord, forgive DeeDee...”
“And?”
“And wash away her iniquities, or whatever it is You do...”
“And?”
“And don't hold her offenses against her. And help her to become the kind of RN and the kind of good Catholic woman she ought to be.”
Forgive your DeeDee's.
:o)
:o)
Glad you are on the mend. We need you here.
Prayers up!
I had no idea what you’ve been through. God bless you.
An infected kidney stone. How perfect. What an acute sense of humor our Lord has, who never taught except in parables.
:^}
I have not read this post carefully enough to be able to really understand it. And I’m short of sleep because of getting up early to attend a morning Presanctified Liturgy. So perhaps I cannot read it carefully enough until I make up my sleep deficit.
In that Liturgy, we indeed prayed the Prayer of St. Ephraim several times—with prostrations. And there were several other times for prostrating, too. And we received the Presanctified Holy Communion, which was a blessing indeed!
The REAL marathon of prostrations (which I sometimes refer to as “Orthodox yoga”) is the Rite of Forgiveness, on the Sunday before the Great Fast starts.
http://orthodoxwiki.org/Forgiveness_Sunday
http://www.schmemann.org/byhim/forgivenesssunday.html
Something like this service might be helpful in Lutheran parishes, too, since there are resentments and indifference to each other in every parish of every church body. But it is possible that like much else, the rite will only work in the context of the Holy Orthodox Church.
That was done three times in my former parish, but on Maundy Thursday and without prostrations.
The first time there as nearly 100% paricitipation, even from the Zwinglian LINOs who otherwise fled from anything remotely tactile and sacramental.
The second time some of the Zwinglian LINOs sat like bumps on a log in their pews.
The last time a was similar...IIRC some of the LINOs just stayed home.
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