Healed

"Huh" "Weird" "Odd" "Bizarre" and "I have no idea" are never words you would like to hear from any doctor, let alone two specialists that have been practicing medicine for ten years longer than I have been alive as well as two other well practiced doctors. This whole episode started on Wednesday morning around 8:30 when I felt a shooting pain in the back of my throat, it almost felt like I had tried to swallow a chip without chewing it first. I drank a few sips of water and went about my day. The pain came and went throughout the day, I wasn't all that alarmed by the pain, more by the fact that I had been spitting up a good amount of blood throughout the day as well. Being that it was a Wednesday I went to youth group and tried to forget about the pain, the blood and the fact that I felt like I had something lodged in my throat. It wasn't until late that night that I thought I should mention something to Phil, he looked in my throat with a flashlight and sounding quite alarmed said, "I actually think there is something pretty big back there!" I instantly started getting all freaked out... having something unidentifiable and large stuck in your throat moments before going to bed is never good! I stayed awake all night creating the worst possible outcomes in my mind, starting with the most realistic, what if I choke on it in the middle of the night and die. Most of my created horror stories ended with this thing somehow killing me. After a few hours of scattered and restless sleep I woke up to a text from Phil telling me to meet him and a family friend that is a doctor in the back parking lot of the church at 7:30am and the good doc would take a peak into my throat and give me his thoughts.

I arrived at the church, he looked in and honestly admitted that he had never seen anything quite like it and I should probably make a quick stop by the ER to have them take a better look at it. I drove down to Kaiser in Roseville and was quickly checked in to their ER. When you tell them that you have been spitting up blood for the last twenty-four hours and your breathing is a little labored they tend to look at you more quickly. The ER doctor took a look and poked around in my throat a little bit and then admitted that he had no idea what it was and more importantly he had no idea what to do about it. He then called up to the Head and Neck Surgeon that was on-call to tell him about it. He also hadn't ever heard of anything quite like it and said he wanted to see it. So after 2 hours in the ER I was discharged and sent across the way to different building where I waited to see a specialist. The specialist, Dr. Freeman, began poking around in my throat, looking at the mass with different mirrors and asking me a zillion questions. He was shocked by the sudden onset of it and the fact that I hadn't been eating anything before it happened. He then decided to take a look at where it was attached which meant he had to look at the top of it through a camera scope that was stuck up my nose and down my throat. They do numb your nose with a spray prior to sticking about a foot of thick wire up it but it still isn't pleasant. The pressure instantly makes your eyes water like you have been crying over losing a puppy or something else tragic. Once he had looked at it well enough to realize that he hadn't ever seen anything like it he stepped out to chat with the other specialists in the department about it. One was so curious that he had to see it for himself and that meant sticking the scope back up my nose. After he had had a sufficient look at it they described the mass to me as: black and blue like a purple grape, bleeding, teardrop shaped and about the size of a quarter. A quarter! No wonder I felt like something was lodged in my throat! They then decided that they wanted to see it through a CT scan, so off I went the the radiology department.

Once there I was injected with a contrast dye, that the technician warned me would make me feel all warm and like I had wet my pants. I didn't really believe him until all the sudden I felt like I had wet my pants, don't worry I hadn't. After the CT was finished we headed back to Dr. Freeman's office to wait for the results. It was now around 1:30 and they told us we could probably go grab something to eat since it may be a little while and I hadn't eaten all day. After a quick stop to Baja Fresh and a little cat nap in the truck, at this point I was utterly exhausted, we returned to the office. An hour later we had the results. The mass was quite large and looked to be embedded into my nasal pharynx wall pretty far. It luckily was at least an inch and a half from all major arteries in my neck, however it looked to have a good vascular source but how good was hard to tell. Because of this Dr. Freeman wanted to get an MRI to make sure that if he cut into it that they would be prepared for the amount of bleeding that could occur. He couldn't get me in for a MRI until 11:30 that night. At this point it was 4:30 and I was not super excited about coming back in the middle of the night. A few moments later while we were filling out all the consent forms for surgery he received a phone call from the other radiology center and they could take me right then. So off we went to a different building, after a bunch of confusion with the paperwork and multiple doctors having to ok the need to do the MRI on an emergency basis I was taken back into the MRI room. My head was smashed into this small cage thing and the hour and a half MRI started. Now if you have ever tried to lay still, without swallowing, while a jackhammer is going off right next to your head you have some idea how difficult a task this truly is. Halfway through the entire thing I was pulled out of the machine and injected with another contrast dye and then put back into the machine for another round. This was by far the worst part of my day. After it was finished we stopped by the lab for a quick blood test to make sure all my levels of everything were normal and then finally eleven hours later I was allowed to go home.

We made it home a little after 7pm and I took a shower, the only thing I had really wanted to do all day. Then we headed over to my parents house for some prayer and food. I had been told before I left that I would receive a phone call in the morning and they would tell me what time to be back at the hospital for surgery the next day. The surgery would be done by Dr. Freeman, he was going to remove what he could and then hopefully make some diagnosis or at the least send it out to be biopsied. During dinner and after we had recharged our dead phones I realized how many people had been praying for me. From the prayer chain at Sierra Reach, to both of my families, the friends that had heard about it, people in my own church, and an entire pastor's conference in Atlanta (my sister-in-law and her husband were there). Throughout this entire ordeal I had felt an odd peace the entire time, except for the fact that I really wanted to know what had been growing inside of me. After some food and prayer we returned home and I fell straight to sleep.

At 2:55 am I woke up and swallowed without any pain. I quickly ran to the bathroom mirror turned on all the lights and once my eyes adjusted started looking in my throat for the mass that I could no longer feel. My breathing was back to normal and all I felt was a little cold spot in the back of my throat. I woke Phil up and he couldn't find it either. So despite the fact that it was the wee hours of the morning we called his dad, who had woken up at 2:52am and started praying for me. It took a while before I could finally stop smiling and fall back to sleep. Around 9:30 this morning I called Dr. Freeman and told him it was gone. He was shocked and said that the MRI results showed that it is a solid mass and that it is impossible that it would just disappear. So of course he had to see it which meant another round with the nose scope. Once we arrived back at his office he first looked in with the mirrors and all he had to say was, "Oh my God," he then looked in with the scope and said that if it weren't for the scans proving that it had been there he would never have believed it. My throat looked as normal and perfect as it nothing had ever happened. He couldn't' explain how it had disappeared since I don't remember swallowing it and if I were to swallow something of that size it should have woken me up and I probably would have coughed it out. He decided to recheck my throat in month just to make sure, but for now the unidentifiable mass is gone without a trace.

I know Dr. Freeman and the multiple colleagues he told about it can't explain what caused this thing to grow and what caused it to disappear but I fully believe that through the power of prayer God removed it from my throat. I believe the little cold spot is where God has touched me with his healing hands.