AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Bee See

The Gift of Pain

Father, for the many gifts that you have given us, we are ever grateful.

And we pray that as we reflect on your goodness and your love, you would be with us now.

My time is very short, so I just wanted to share some of the experiences that I've had in practice over the last year or so.

And it'll be more of a testimony than a devotional thought today.

Tanya was a four-year-old patient with dark, flashing bright eyes and an impish smile.

And her mom brought her into the National Leprosy Hospital in Louisiana, where she sat in the examination room, and there was a cloud of tension in the air that day.

Her mother on the other hand was a nervous ball of just anxiety and fear as to what was to happen next.

The doctor came into the room and he began to remove blood-soiled bandages from Tanya's four-year-old feet.

Testing her swollen left ankle, the doctor rotated it freely, noting that it was fully dislocated.

And he winced at the unnatural movement, but Tanya did not.

She did not flinch or whimper as the dressings were removed, many of them sticking and tearing at her skin.

She looked around the room with an expression of faint boredom.

An ulcerated sores existed on both soles of her feet and the doctor probed gently, looking at her eyes for some kind of reaction as the probe went deeper and deeper into necrotic tissue and touched the white bone underneath.

See, Tanya was not even 18 years old when her mother had realised that something was very wrong.

She was in the other room cooking 1 day when she heard some gleeful laughter where Tanya was playing in the neighbouring room and so she went in to see what delight her child had found.

She walked in to find her sitting on the floor of the playpen finger painting red swirls on the white floor of the playpen and she realized that she had bitten off the tip of her finger and was using her own blood to make these designs.

The toddler Tanya was laughing and so gleeful at the response that she drew from her mother.

And over the next few years, she would just laugh when she was spanked or chastised not to bite her fingers.

And slowly, wounds began to appear mysteriously on 1 finger after another.

As soon as she could walk, she would accidentally step on a nail or a thumbtack or something like that and not bother to pull it out.

And so at night, her mother would check her feet and discover a new sore and open wound every day.

If she would twist an ankle, she wouldn't limp or try to shift her weight to the other side.

And so then that placed this pressure on her joints that led to it being twisted again and again.

She would rip off the uncomfortable bandages of plaster cast that were placed on her limbs because they were uncomfortable and itchy.

And today, as she sat in this room of this doctor's office, The mother had a mixture of dread in her eyes and an ironic sense of hope that finally a diagnosis would be delivered.

She asked the doctor, I've heard that your leprosy patients have foot problems like this.

Tanya actually suffered from a rare congenital defect known as congenital indifference to pain.

Now I'm not a pediatrician nor a neurologist, so I'm not familiar with this area of medicine, but she was perfectly healthy in every respect but 1, and that was that she did not feel pain.

Nerves in her hands and feet transmitted proprioceptive and thermoregulative messages, but she wasn't able to feel anything more than a tingling sensation when she was to burn her hand or something like that.

And she rather enjoyed these tingling sensations.

And she liked the response that she would get, the dramatic response that she would get from those around her.

Fast forward 7 years, and Tanya, now 11 years old, was living in an institution.

She had lost both legs to amputation after refusing to wear proper shoes or protect her sprained ankles by shifting her weight and that had placed intolerable pressure on her joints.

Most of her fingers had been lost, and her elbows were constantly dislocated.

Her ulcerated hands and amputation stumps were chronically septic, and her tongue was lacerated because she had this nervous habit of always chewing it.

She, at 11 years old, was a metaphor of a life without pain.

The doctor that she had seen was Sir Paul Brand, a renowned surgeon who had devoted his life to leprosy patients both in India, where he was born, to medical missionary parents, and also in the United States.

He would later go on to receive the Surgeon General's medallion, the highest honor the Surgeon General of the United States can bestow on a civilian.

And as a Christian, he often sought the deeper meaning in life in his work and also the spiritual applications of the ailments that he would encounter on an everyday basis.

Due to the specificity of his work, he was dealing mainly with a subsector of patients who had the unfortunate experience of not being able to feel pain and therefore horrifying consequences that they suffered.

As a dentist who deals with pain on a daily basis, this is a very peculiar concept to me.

And if there is 1 constant that I can tell you I will face in my workday every day, that is pain.

It brings people to us, and unfortunately in my case, it sends people away, because they avoid me in fear of the pain that they think I might inflict.

I try to be as friendly and as smiley as I can when someone new comes into the office but Inevitably more than I am not greeted by this, people come in and they say to me, Hi, I've not met you before, my name is such and such, and no offence, but I don't like dentists.

It's often an anticipation of pain that keeps them away until that point when, with dread, they cannot keep away anymore and they present to our offices sheepishly with the very pain that they hoped to avoid in the first place.

Sometimes after days, and often nights of sleeplessness and ineffective analgesia, they'll ask me, can't you just take away my feeling?

Can't you just do something about those nerves?

You see, pain is designed to convey some sort of damage in our body.

And if we were to go to a concert and clap our hands, We all know, going back to those physiology lectures in first year, that the contact of our hands would cause those pitunian corpuscles, remember that funny term, pitunian corpuscles to compress and tell us that there is some sort of pressure occurring.

But if we were to do this for another 10 minutes, we start to feel discomfort, even though the contact of our claps are no heavier than they were when we first started.

And that's because our hands are now red and swollen, indicating tissue damage, and the nerves that perceive that are able to tell us that there is danger in addition to the pressure.

I recently, about a year ago, I returned from living overseas for some time, and When I came back to Australia, I found myself spiritually restless and looking for ways to grow both professionally, personally and spiritually as well.

When I came back, 1 of my patients from work, a very upstanding, very socially conscious lady, told me that she had started an initiative working with women in the judiciary system.

These were women that had been charged with crimes, but with the support of notable women in the society, she paired them up with people that would mentor them.

And the hope was that this mentorship would help them navigate situations of domestic violence, addiction, chronic illness, and other issues that had caused them to commit these crimes in the first place, and combined with community service, ultimately keep them out of jail.

She asked if I would be willing to volunteer some of my services pro bono for some of her neediest clients, and I agreed.

I wasn't sure, to be honest, that they would turn up, because my experiences with pro bono patients in the past has been unreliable at best.

Sometimes they turn up, sometimes they turn up 40 minutes late, sometimes they turn up a few days later.

And they usually have unrealistic expectations of what would be completed.

But I thought as I prayed, I had this sense that this was something that I should do, and this was a way in which God would have me grow in my walk with him.

So I was somewhat surprised When my first pro bono client, as this lady called them, turned up, and let's call her Kelly.

Kelly walked in, and she was emaciated, she had tangled hair, she looked like she hadn't slept in 5 days.

And she looked me up and down, and I look smaller than most of the staff and nurses in my clinic.

And she said, you can look at my teeth, but you ain't touching them.

I gave her a silent sigh in my head, and I said, this is going to be a long day.

Unsurprisingly, she had many broken teeth, she had severe gum disease, she had numerous abscesses, and eventually, she didn't say much that first time I met her, but eventually she let us make a plan to put to put together some fillings and so forth for her over the next few weeks.

However, she refused to have any teeth extracted, even if they were so broken down that you couldn't even see them below the gums anymore, or if there was pus coming out from where they had been broken for years.

She would come in every few weeks, and I would gently request, after a nice filling had been done, if maybe 1 day she would let me tackle that 1 at the very back that had pus oozing from it.

And her response was always, Absolutely not.

1 time, she walked in about 15 minutes late for the hour appointment that we had set aside for her, and she looked utterly exhausted and worn out, more so than she did normally.

My nurses were not in the room, they were still getting stuff ready and so I asked her, you look really exhausted today Kelly, is everything okay?

She burst into tears and explained that her mom had just passed away the day before.

And for the next 20 minutes, mostly in silence, because my nurses realised something, dentistry was not happening today, and so they left us in privacy, and I prayed for the right words to speak.

And I realized that throughout all her disappointments in life, Kelly's mom had been the 1 person who had never given up hope.

She was so delighted that Kelly had been given a way out, a second chance at life through this mentorship program.

And she told me how that day that we had fixed her front teeth and given her a new smile, the first person she had gone to show was her mom.

And her mom had smiled as wide as she had.

Kelly had thought to bail on today's appointment actually after the tragedy of the previous day but she knew that her mother had wanted to get her life back on track and so she came.

I had never experienced tragedy like that in my life and I wasn't really sure what to say.

But as I said a silent prayer, God brought to my mind a quote that I had read by the evangelist Beth Moore a few days before.

And it was that, and I shared it with her and I said, Kelly, you know, I read something the other day.

Someone very wise said that as a mother, you are only as happy as your saddest child.

And the love of a mother is something really special, isn't it?

She nodded at me and she was, you know, she couldn't say very much, but she did say, yeah, I don't know how she still loved me, even after everything I did.

I said, well, I'm not a mother yet, but I have only known 1 other person that loves in the same way that your mother did.

My faith tells me, and I was paraphrasing Romans 5 8 and in the interest of time we won't turn there today, but you guys know the verse well, and I told her my faith tells me that despite everything we did there was someone that was willing not only to love us but to die for us as well.

I'm not sure if your mother was a woman of faith, but I have a suspicion that every mother is given just a little foretaste of that love.

She left that day, and I wasn't sure if I would ever see her again.

And knowing the trend of how these pro bono services usually go, I didn't think that I would ever see her.

But I was left uneasy when I went home that night, because I felt very inadequate.

My upbringing as an Adventist, an Adventist in a fairly conservative family was very simple, but it was blessed.

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The Gift of Pain

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