Holy Unhappiness by Amanda Held Opelt

Author:Amanda Held Opelt [Opelt, Amanda Held]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worthy
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

BODY

(Serve with All Your Strength)

In the summer of 2002, I was eighteen years old and two months away from going off to college. I was excited. My bedroom was piled high with suitcases stuffed with new clothes and boxes packed with sentimental trinkets, family photos, and poetry books. I was enrolled at a Christian liberal arts school just thirty miles north of New York City. This small-town, East Tennessee girl was ready to spread her wings and fly, ready to see the big, wide world.

But then, one afternoon, I developed an ache in my stomach. That ache, over the course of just a few hours, intensified into body-shaking cramps. Searing waves of pain shot through my abdomen and around my back. Around midnight, the bleeding started, and my parents rushed me to the hospital.

I don’t remember much from my time at the hospital, only that I was delirious from the pain and weak from dehydration. Doctors urgently ordered blood work, scans, and scopes. These tests revealed the source of my sickness. My colon had become spontaneously inflamed. The walls of my digestive organs looked like they’d been sliced up with a razor blade. In the words of my nurse, “I’ve never seen angrier intestines in my entire life.”

It was the medical emergency I never saw coming. I’d been perfectly healthy, working outside as a groundskeeper every day, hiking with my friends, serving at church, and packing and prepping for my new life at school. I was immediately given a high dose of steroids, painkillers, and anti-inflammatories. Various consultants and specialists came to my room to examine me. One of my only memories from the hospital is waking up from anesthesia after a test, throwing my arms around my father, and telling him, “Dad, I’m scared.”

Eventually the bleeding stopped, and the pain subsided enough for me to be sent home. I left the hospital with bags of pills and no clear diagnosis. Crohn’s disease perhaps, or severe ulcerative colitis? The doctor told my parents, “Your daughter will likely be sick the rest of her life.”

The weight of that statement never really sank in. Those first few days home from the hospital, I was living hour to hour, coming off the haze of painkillers, learning my new meds schedule, and eating dry toast to try to regain my strength. My parents attempted to encourage me, but I saw in their eyes that grave look of worry and fear for my future. Would I be able to go to college? Would I be spending my life in bed, in and out of hospitals? How long could I survive with this mysterious disease?

My dad did the only thing he knew to do. Every night, after I’d drifted off to sleep, he’d come into my room, kneel by my bed, and pray for a miracle. He asked God to heal me.

And, as fate—or Providence, I suppose—would have it, God did heal me.

This was not a slow, progressive miracle. It was not realized gradually over time as health and vitality eventually set in.

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