14 ~ (April–December, 2001)
The Amalekites Defeated
Karis herself finally made the call to go to Indianapolis. She remembered the “oasis” times she had enjoyed following past surgeries—months or even years of freedom from illness--and hoped that could be true again.
“OK, Lord,” I prayed. “Here we go again. Last time we were in Indianapolis, you taught me a huge lesson. I want to honor you this time, even if it’s hard, even when I don’t understand what’s going on.” I called my friend Mary and asked for her help in prayer while I fought this battle for an attitude and perspective that could bring glory to God. Two other close friends, Marty and Anita, in my mind were like Aaron and Hur holding up Moses’ arms on the mountain while Joshua fought the Amalekites down in the valley. I knew that without their support, I would likely not succeed in fulfilling the vow I was making, to put into practice Psalm 145:2, “Every day I will praise you” (or, as expressed in a song with the text from the KJV, “Every day will I bless Thee”).
Keenly feeling Dr. G’s conviction that we were making the wrong decision, we scheduled appointments with Dr. F and with the surgeon he recommended, for April 24th, 2001. We flew to the US a few days earlier, so that Karis could first visit two colleges she was considering, Wheaton and Notre Dame. The deadline was fast approaching for making her choice. At that point, it was hard for her to imagine that she could be well enough to go to college at all. But she was counting on the idea that a surgery could help her enough to get at least halfway through college. Karis really, really, really wanted to live a “normal” life, and hoped the doctors in Indianapolis would help make that possible for her, at least for a while.
Wheaton told us what several east coast colleges had said: Karis could go to classes but would not be allowed to live in a dorm while on TPN. By then there were very few foods that Karis could eat with any confidence. Knowing how important shared meals were to social life on campus, she surveyed all that was offered in the celebrated Wheaton dining hall and came away saying there was nothing there that would work for her.
Our visit to the University of Notre Dame was entirely different. Folks there made Karis feel that they wanted her, and would do everything possible to help her be successful at college. At the dining hall she was told, “If there’s something you need that we don’t have, we’ll get it for you.” At the health center, nurses gave her a warm welcome and expressed their eagerness to help. Supervision by the ND health center staff would make it possible for Karis to live in the dorm on TPN, and if needed, South Bend hospitals were only five minutes from campus. All of this would make Karis’s situation much more manageable than if she were to do college from home in congested São Paulo, another option that we seriously considered.
There was still the question, though, of whether Karis could get well enough to make it worth trying to be a college student. In Indianapolis, Karis completed the required medical exams while the doctors evaluated those that Karis had brought with her from Brazil. In their minds, there was no question that Karis needed surgery to remove a section of her intestine that was not functioning well.
Operating room space was reserved for Karis on April 27th. Just before she was taken to the OR, Karis handed me her signed acceptance card for Notre Dame and asked me to mail it for her, an act of faith and of hope.
To my surprise, as I sat alone in the waiting room while Karis was in surgery, I suddenly saw my husband walk in! A friend in São Paulo had confronted him with the importance of being with us. Dave had prayed about it and then caught the next plane. Shortly after he arrived, we received another surprise: The surgeon came from the operating room to tell us that she had changed her mind about removing part of Karis’s intestine. She had found the suspect portion of intestine “trapped” in a tangle of adhesions, and she believed that could explain the dysfunction. She cleared out all of the adhesions, which took several hours, and then closed Karis’s incision. We were thrilled—it seemed that Dr. F and Dr. G were both right! Karis did indeed need surgery, but it seemed she did not need to have more of her intestine removed.
Every day will I bless Thee . . .
David stayed for the weekend and then returned to São Paulo. It was not, unfortunately, a totally happy visit. Dave had cancelled commitments and had spent a lot of money. He struggled with understanding the purpose or value of his having done so. I asked him never again to do something like that under pressure, and told him, resentfully, that I had given up all expectations that he would share with me in Karis’s care. If at any time he himself wanted to be part of it, he would be welcome, but only if he came with a free and willing heart. It was worse for me that he came and was unhappy than if he hadn’t come at all.
Here is what David says about that event:
I prayed about it and felt it was the right decision, so bought the ticket and the rest is history. It makes sense to me that my mind and my emotions didn't all get in sync regarding that decision, but it definitely was my decision and not just because someone forced me into it. Nonetheless, my mixed feelings surfaced in our conversation and ended up being very hurtful. I definitely remember our conversation being hurtful and feeling so bad about it, but not knowing what to do at the time.
“Every day will I bless thee . . .”
David’s visit catalyzed and focused my personal struggle. We were fighting for Karis’s health, of course, but my own battle was with resentment, anger, lack of trust, fatigue, bitterness. And more: I had to face the fact that I wanted David to “take care of me,” more than I wanted to trust and depend on God. During the first few weeks of our time in Indianapolis, I struggled to come to terms with, and lay on the altar before God, my desire and attempts to change my husband, to make him into what I thought I needed. God showed me that I had more than enough to focus on in straightening out my own life, and that the bitterness I had nurtured was as wrong, and as damaging to myself and to everyone around me, as any faults I could see in Dave. Two concepts that we taught others in our ministry of emotional restoration stared me in the face: 1. You can only change yourself. 2. You are responsible for yourself, for your own needs, desires, feelings, choices. Passing off this responsibility to someone else does not work.
My bitterness against Dave was rooted in a sort of idolatry: expecting from him that which only God himself could do and be for me. As I admitted and submitted to God my anger, self-pity, and bitterness, I was able to truly “release” David from my long-held requirements and expectations, and take a giant step forward in giving up my emotional dependence on him, a dependence that, like a cancer, had grown out of proportion and needed to be cut out if we were ever to relate to one another in a healthy way.
At the same time, I needed to acknowledge the validity of my own needs, learn to express them, and give Dave a chance to respond, before resentfully pre-judging him as uncaring. Slowly I realized that I usually gave up too quickly in trying to communicate—while at the same time expecting him to be able to “guess” what I wanted, needed, or felt. I came to understand that my neediness and unhappiness themselves, seldom put into words but often communicated non-verbally, put great pressure on Dave and made it difficult for him to see and act clearly and freely.
God somehow (thanks to my prayer warriors, I think!) gave me the grace to turn my own needs over to God and look to him to provide for Karis and me in Indianapolis. And he did! Amazing people “showed up” at the hospital to help and encourage us, several of them from the same church. Times of worship at that church were like visiting an oasis in the midst of my desert. Friends even put on a full-scale 18th birthday party at the hospital for Karis, giving her more presents than she has ever received at one time, before or since!
One evening when I was feeling particularly lonely and discouraged, worried about Karis and missing my family in Brazil, a volunteer whom I didn’t even know at the Ronald McDonald House let me literally cry on his shoulder and left me greatly comforted. I am so grateful for each one of the people who were messengers of God’s grace to me during those weeks.
Karis had always recovered slowly from her surgeries, so we were not initially concerned when she passed the normal timeframe for recuperation milestones. Then our surgeon’s mother died and she left town, leaving us to the care of a fellow surgeon who seemed to have no understanding of Karis. He was arrogant, rude, and humorless –how he ended up in a children’s hospital I could not understand. One day Karis, hoping to “break the ice” with him, painted each of her toenails a different color and when we heard the doctors coming on rounds, put her feet on the pillow and her head under the blankets. The surgeon just stood there tapping his foot and said impatiently, “Karis, I haven’t got all day.”
“Every day will I bless thee . . .”
This surgeon declared that Karis was not getting better because she didn’t want to get better. He thought the solution was psychiatric care. I could not figure out how Karis would be capable of “choosing,” even unconsciously, to react with copious bilious vomiting when she tried to eat, nor psychosomatically create the degree of abdominal distension and pain she was experiencing. Something was wrong, and it didn’t seem to me that this “substitute surgeon” was going to bother figuring out what it was.
Finally I appealed to Dr. F for help. He immediately ordered new exams, and by the end of the day had documented on film that Karis had a bowel obstruction. Dr. F personally contacted our surgeon and asked whether she could return to care for Karis. The next day, May 18th, she operated on Karis again and removed the section of obstructed bowel. Then Karis started getting better!
“Every day will I bless thee . . .”
By the time of Karis’s second surgery, I was exhausted from basically caring for her alone in the hospital for five weeks. She needed help to do everything, even to turn in bed. It seemed that the nurses were constantly interrupting her rest, and we were both getting grumpy. I said to myself, “The next person who walks in here better watch out! I’m likely to bite his or her head off.”
Just then there was a knock at the door, but it wasn’t a nurse. It was someone I didn’t know, who had learned about Karis’s situation through her church’s prayer chain and, amazingly enough, through her husband’s parents who knew my husband’s parents! She handed me a paper bag and said “This is your lunch. Go back to Ronald McDonald House, eat, and sleep until you wake up. Don’t set an alarm. I have no agenda, and I’ve brought lots of things for Karis and me to do together.”
I had imagined biting the head off of an angel of the Lord!!
On June 4th, Karis and I flew out of Indianapolis, back to São Paulo, back home, back to Dr. G’s care. Karis was able to graduate with her high school class on June 9th. Surprised by a standing ovation, she was initially overcome with stage fright and panic. Then, she says, she realized that people were clapping not for her, but for God, who had preserved her life. She relaxed and smiled and started clapping too, expressing her gratitude to God for his faithfulness.
For me, that spontaneous time of praise was wholehearted. Our time in Indianapolis had taken me through a deep valley of personal struggle, but God had been faithful to the prayers of my intercessors and had brought me through to a much better place.
Karis didn’t feel that she “deserved” to graduate, because she had missed so much school and had completed such a small percentage of class assignments. She expected to spend the rest of her vacation time making up the work that she had missed. The high school administrators, however, had decided to grade her on what she had been able to complete, and forgive the rest. They said that the quality of her work all through her high school experience had been so high that they had no question she was ready for college.
It took Karis some time to accept this generosity on the part of PACA, because she didn’t want to be treated differently from other students just because she had been sick. But it turned out to be a tremendous blessing. In the exertion required for participating in the graduation ceremonies, Karis split open her incision, which became infected, and she had to spend the next four weeks on bed rest. She was still on TPN, and soon had to be hospitalized with yet another line infection. As the time to sort her things and pack for college drew closer, we were not at all sure that she was going to be strong enough to do it. By the grace of God she gradually improved, and before she left for the US was able to have her central line removed, because she was eating enough not to need TPN.
Karis received yet another encouraging surprise before she left for her first semester at Notre Dame: a notice that she had been chosen to be part of the honors program! She had been invited to apply for the honors program, but was still too debilitated from surgery to complete the application in time for the deadline. Despite this, the University had decided to include her in the small number of students who comprised this special group. What a difference it made to her, transitioning from a high school of one hundred students to a university of eight thousand, to be part of a small, intimate group of sixty. Their acceptance and camaraderie gave her the confidence to flourish at Notre Dame. As a freshman, Karis won second place in a university-wide essay competition. At the awards dinner, a professor predicted that Karis would publish her first novel before she graduated. (Had circumstances been different, who knows?)
God so very graciously granted Karis’s wish for several months of good health. When she came home for Christmas after her first semester of college, a painful place in our hearts was healed when we heard Dr. G tell us, amazed at how well she was, that he thought she had made the right decision in going to the US for surgery! Blessed be the name of the Lord!
Blessed be your name in the land that is plentiful
Where your streams of abundance flow
Blessed be your name.
Blessed be your name when I’m found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed be your name.
Every blessing you pour out I’ll turn back to praise.
When the darkness closes in, Lord, still I will say
Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name.
Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your glorious name.
Blessed be your name when the sun’s shining down on me
When the world’s all as it should be
Blessed be your name.
Blessed be your name on the road marked with suffering
Though there’s pain in the offering
Blessed be your name.
You give and take away, you give and take away.
My heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be your name.
Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name.
Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your glorious name.
Matt and Beth Redman
2002, Thank You Music, CCLI License #590416
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