This morning while helping a friend work on a talk she’ll be giving at a retreat I received a phone call from my doctor’s office. It was the nurse and she asked me if I had my Rheumatoid Arthritis doctor’s fax number so she could fax her my test results. I had failed to write the number down when I tried to call for an appointment a few days ago so I went to my computer to try and look it up again but as I did this I couldn’t help but ask her what my results were.
She said my ANA factor was positive (which is basically what tells you that I am positive for an autoimmune, most typically it’s just reaffirming, that yes, I do have Rheumatoid Arthritis. But it doesn’t tell you if you are ‘active’ in the disease or not.) I asked her what my numbers were and she didn’t have that information. She then told me I was normal on a few things I never heard of (she never told me my cholesterol count or any of those levels I thought I was getting base lines for) and said I had a particular number for another level that was out of my realm. She said it showed I could have another particular disease (that after reading up on it I think spins off of a few autoimmune diseases, in particular RA) and that is why they need to make sure I see the RA specialist so I can get more testing done to address this main issue. I asked her more about this disease and she admitted she didn’t know too much about it so she spelled it for me and said, “Now, MD Web can be great in getting information but it can also make you crazy reading all the symptoms, etc. Don’t get caught up in it,” she warned. I told her I’d been down this rode a few times and I would be fine.
So I told my friend what was said and we looked it up. I’d give you the name but I don’t want to do that until I meet with my RA doctor and have some better answers (more solid answers) before I go getting anyone else looking it up and then spreading that I have this. I won’t even go into the symptoms, etc.
All I could do was laugh. Laugh at the absurdity if this were to be true! I made it one entire year without having some kind of medical drama about me and I thought I was out of the woods. I’m so sick of hospitals and doctors. Ugh, see I don’t even want to go there. 🙁 All I did was do the right thing by getting a blood work up. I should have known the enemy would find some way to sneak in and make me a bit crazy with some (probably) false or worthless diagnosis.
This morning in the My Daily Bread it keeps talking about how to stay clear of temptations. For the past five days it keeps giving ways in which we fall to these temptations, how to battle that seduction of the enemy, how we need to recognize the draw to sin and squelch it before you get snagged. That we sometimes just want to have a little bit of the fun before we walk away and then we don’t even realize that by having that ‘little bit of fun’ we have been entangled in a spiders web and then it makes it harder to get away from that sin.
I’ll admit, I try very hard to watch out for those ‘early’ signs. But I fall just like everyone else. But I think the enemy knows that I’m working hard to ward him off on those ‘types’ of sins…so he tries to beat me down and get me weak and tired with physical ailments. Call me crazy…but just ask me one day about all my spiritual ‘God’ stories from being in the hospital and nearly ‘put down’. I’ll probably write about them in this next book.
At any rate, if it comes out that I have something else to contend with above and beyond the RA then I’ll deal with it by the grace of God because I know that God will only allow it if it brings forth even more of His light and love and I’ll get to laugh the enemy away.
Can I get an AMEN?? 😉
Blessings
Shannon