Thankful for a major blessing

MICHELE MARR

I remember when I was a child hearing adults speak of “blessings in

disguise,” and thanking God “for all small favors.”

Most of God’s so-called small favors -- safe travel or a lost

wallet found for instance -- seemed huge to me, though. And I

couldn’t fathom at the time what kind of disguise a blessing might

choose to wear.

The older I grow the larger still the smallest of God’s favors

appears to me but I’ve come to grasp just how well disguised a

blessing can be.

For the past eight days, with Thanksgiving approaching, I have

spent nearly every waking hour in Hoag Hospital where my mother is

recovering from what her surgeon called “coronary artery bypass

surgery times six.”

While bypass surgery is one of the most common surgeries done

these days, it’s still scary -- for the patient and her loved ones. A

surgeon opens the patient’s chest and cuts through her breastbone to

expose her heart where he grafts veins taken from another part of her

body onto arteries that supply blood to her heart or lungs in order

to bypass one or more deadly arterial occlusions. In my mother’s

case, six.

The surgery went well -- very well -- taking scarcely five hours.

But her recuperation has been slowed by day after day of severe

post-operative nausea and vomiting that has eluded management and

treatment.

Movement as subtle as opening her eyes or sitting up in bed starts

my mother heaving. Forget walking, which is the ideal goal a mere 24

hours after surgery. Five days after surgery she still had not been

able to eat.

So as my sister and I have attended her comfort and care as best

we could, putting cold compresses on her forehead, rinsing pails and

spittoons and bedpans, I have had occasion I otherwise might not have

had to contemplate the things, immense and minor, for which I am

grateful.

At the top of the list is the fact that my mother is still with us

because of a sequence of God’s small favors that all added up to a

blessing in disguise.

A couple of months ago my mother was facing back surgery, a spinal

fusion to repair damage from arthritis and osteoporosis, which have

for the second time in three years disintegrated one of her

vertebrae. She’s in chronic pain, walking with a cane, lame in her

left foot and leg.

But before she could have the surgery that would stop her pain and

restore her gait her body had to pass the usual pre-operative tests:

an EKG, blood lab work and a chest x-ray.

Her blood tests were on par but her EKG was something short of

normal. So her primary care physician sent her for an echocardiogram,

which showed she was good to go. Until a chest x-ray revealed a

troubling spot on her left lung.

A CAT, ordered to determine just what the spot on her lung might

be, showed nothing at all, at least nothing on her lung. Instead, it

showed signs of calcification in a coronary artery, the artery of a

woman who had never once complained of a single symptom of coronary

artery disease.

But a Cardiolite stress test and an angiogram later, there it was.

Her left main coronary artery was 100% blocked; her right coronary

artery was 90% blocked; two others were more than 70% blocked. A

scope during surgery, prior to the grafts to bypass those four

blockages, revealed two more.

Bad news with a painful fix, but a fix that promises to extend her

life; a fix that will, we hope, in a few months, make a spinal fusion

survivable.

A nonlife-threatening infirmity led my mother to the tests that

uncovered a disease that could have easily taken her life.

My mother, her family and her friends are the grateful benefactors

of this blessing in disguise, a blessing rendered through what some

might call small favors from God, favors directed and bestowed by

human angels -- doctors, nurses, nurses’ assistants, respiratory and

physical therapists too numerous to name.

Today we are thanking God for each one of them.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@ soulfoodfiles.com.