UPDATE-Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

R___ does not post here. She has Meniere's-like symptoms that appear to stem from a severe fall she took about six or eight months ago. She is dizzy and now her hearing is wavering. She is going to every health professional she can, and undergoing the best that all of them can offer. Until Thursday, I did not understand why she was as anxious about this condition as she has been. I found out why in an email in which she asked for my prayers. So knowing how many prayer warriors we have here, I ask for prayers for this outstanding young woman. With her permission, here is what she wrote me.

"The one thing that maybe you should know that you don't is that I lost
my vision about 15 years ago from a degenerative eye condition. It was a
difficult adjustment at first, but I never let it knock me down. I
fought back and accomplished many things after that.
Marriage...children...working my way up the corporate ladder, etc.
People have a lot of misconceptions about people with vision loss--like
they can't do anything for themselves.
I am independent and do all the things that other moms and wives do-
just with different adaptations.
So, now you may understand better why I am so afraid of losing my
hearing--any hearing. I rely on it heavily and its very precious to me.

"When my son was diagnosed with autism two years ago, I prayed and prayed
that God would provide me with the tools I needed to be a good mommy to
him. I knew how to parent my other children without vision, but I had no
idea how to with a child with autism. It was stressful and scary, but
I've been doing it and my son has been a blessing to me and our whole
family.

"But now with me being so sick and anxious, so much has fallen on the
shoulders of my husband. I keep praying for God to show me why he would
choose this for me right now. I know there is a reason as there is a
reason for everything. I just can't see it now and I would have to say
this has been the most trying time of my life.

"I don't want to lose my hearing,... I don't know how I would
function...take care of my children...continue to witness to others (I
also do inspirational speaking at churches, community groups, etc.).

"Sorry this is so long. I guess I am telling you this as a fellow
Christian who understands faith and how it is tested. I've been tested
in my past and I never doubted that God would get me through, but this
ear thing has brought me to my knees.

"Please pray I can get through this and that my faith will be
strengthened. God bless you."

Thank you all for your prayers.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Lady

prayers....

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Lady

Prayers going out to this marvelous young woman.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Lady

Prayers for this woman and all those God calls to help her.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

Prayers for "R". She is remarkable.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

Prayers for dear "R"

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

Prayers from here too and may God Bless Her extra.. she can take my blessings today.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

Prayers for healing for her going up. Bless her soul she is a amazing woman!

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

Thy will be done in Jesus name, amen. To have a witness this strong is awe inspiring indeed. I pray that Jesus steps forward to take her pain away and give her all she needs to keep her family and her faith strong. Bring her up from her knees and let her stand tall with your strength to hold her up. In Jesus' name, amen.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

I will pray for this courageous and faithful woman.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

I have been praying for a miracle for her since I read this post Hank. I was stunned by what this woman has had to deal with.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

She is a woman of true strong faith. These are times that test one's faith. When fear sets in, it does so by displacing faith.

Sometimes it happens to me too. At those times I am strengthened by the faith of those who have been dealt hands far worse than I can imagine. So I know that faith is contagious.

She knows that there are many faith hearty individuals here who are praying fervently for her. In those prayers, perhaps it would be good to pray that God increase her measure of faith. That would displace an equal measure of the fear that presently plagues her.

I expect her to recover and come here to tell her full story.

Thanks for your prayers. I will pass it on that you are doing so.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

Prayers and hugs

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

Prayers for this amazing person. Thanks for sharing Hank.

 

Re: Please Pray for this Amazing Young Woman

I have some good news concerning Rene. Remember, she is blind. For several months, I have been conversing with her and texting concerning her plight with various dizziness and vertigo symptoms. She had found me on this website and contacted me because out of all of the post she had read through, (she has special computer software for the blind), mine in the Database was the only positive post that she found. Frankly, many of the others she read terrified her. The thoughts of going deaf, while permenantly blind, and having an autistic son to take care of and a job to perform, and a husband and family, was more than even her strong faith could help her with at times.

Rene has been to any number of doctors. Early on, her ENT suggested that she may have Meniere's. He had done the Epley maneuver and it did not work. So BPPV was out. So reading my post, she contacted me. Of course I sent her to a chiropractor. What was amazing was that her first adjustment met with a drastic lessening of her symptoms. I thought, hey, this will be an easy one. Not so. The symptoms came back. And she was complaining of acute ear pain??? A month or so ago, while talking about the ear pain, I learned that when she fell last October, she hit her jaw. I said, OK, TMJ could be causing the ear pain. So she asked her ENT about TMJ. The ENT seemed to think she did have that. If you look up all the symptoms attributable to TMJ, they include dizziness. But she also kept having these short bursts of vertigo, not Meniere's vertigo, but vertigo that would range from a second or two to a minute.

Over the months, I kept reassurring Rene that whatever she had, it was not Meniere's, that she was not going to lose her hearing. After all, she had no hearing loss. Still, she was deathly affraid of the diagnosis of Meniere's. I told her all the things I say about the diagnosis of Meniere's, but fear had taken hold and fear was dictating what Rene was believing. So this has been a spiritual journey, one that illustrates the power of the spirit of fear over us. Rene is a strong Christian. And while it might be easy for me, from my vantage point, to hold faith for her, being healthy as I am, the fear rooted in doubt and misinformation concerning what could be causing her symptoms was controlling Rene.

I kept telling her that God was going to see her through this. Rene's job is to teach others who are sight challenged to overcome their challenges. I told her that God wants her back to work to help all those folks, and that there was a cause for her symptoms, and that God would lead us to that cause. I kept telling her to stay in a relationship with God. I said when fear strikes, talk to God.

As an example of how talking to God helped, to rule out any cervical disc problems, her neurologist had set up a cervical MRI. Rene is fearful of the closeness of the equipment. She had almost had a breakdown in a previous MRI session. So she was not looking forward to that. I told her, while in there, just talk to God. All will be OK. She texted me as soon as it was over. All went fine. She said that the entire time she was in the MRI she prayed for others. Imagine that, with all the problems she was having, she was praying for others. I told her that in doing so, she had blessed herself through the MRI and that God would bless her. Easy for me to say once again. But I really never lost faith, truly. I never did.

Sunday night I texted Rene to see how she was. I knew that she had several appointments this week and I wanted to refresh my memory on the times and which appointments there were. A few minutes later she asked me to call her. That was odd. But I did. She had fallen on the deck, tripped over something. Ten minutes later, acute vertigo set in for about a minute or so. She was left with the dizziness again. She was very scared, shaking. Always reassuring, I told her she had probably wrenched her neck and fired the nerves up, but the God was still with her and would take care. Again, easy for me to say. She had a NUCCA appointment on Tuesday, TMJ doc on Thursday, which was yesterday. NUCCA came back negative, said she was in adjustment. That didn't help. Well, the hopes set in on the TMJ doc. All this time, for months, relentless dizziness had persisted, along with some discrete experiences of vertigo.

Wednesday evening, I spoke with Rene. We talked about going to a different chiropractic approach. Maybe another opinion would help. She kept thinking Meniere's. I kept saying, no, you do not have Meniere's. She didn't have the cycle, no fullness and no hearing loss. I asked her if I could pray with her over the phone, which of course she said yes. I prayed that God lead Rene to the person who could successfully treat her symptoms, in Jesus' name. Amen. That was it. I did not pray for any particular cure, merely that God send her to the right person to treat her symptoms.

Yesterday, Thursday, after the TMJ appointment I spoke with Rene. She came back postive for TMJ. Well, that is a start. He fit her for a mouth guard. I guess that is all he could do. But he sent her back to see the ENT again, the same lady who last week had told Rene that she had done all she knew to do for her. And here was Rene again in her office.

Last evening, I got a text from Rene. After we spoke earlier, the ENT tried the Epley again, same procedure she had tried months ago, but at that time with no success. Yesterday though, the first time she tried it the procedure, it induced wild vertigo. So she tried it again. It worked. All dizziness left Rene in one moment. To varying degrees she had been dizzy for months. She had lived with fear controlling her all that time. In her mind she had imagined living both blind and deaf for the rest of her life, trying to get a grip on that, trying to understand how she could even take care of her family, much less an autistic child. Last week she had texted me the question, asking why God would allow her to have these problems knowing that she had an autistic child to take care of. I told her that sickness does not come from God; that God is not sick and therefore God cannot make you sick. I told her that we live in a fallen world and that there are other forces at work here that try to control us and bring us to a place far from God. But I said that in no way did God give her this sickness and that God would use this experience to bolster her faith so that she could inspire others who will find themselves in a similar situation.

So now, with that one simple maneuver, one that had been tried months ago unsuccessfully, everything changed. It really is mind boggling to think. Moments before, Rene had nothing but gut-wrenching anguish trying to understand how it might be to live with these symptoms the rest of her life, and blindness too, with all she has to take care of. The next moment, the symptoms just go away. Gone. So this story has a wonderful ending. I have told Rene of all the wonderful folks who have been praying for her at Menieres.org, for which she would always extend her sincere appreciation, and for which I express thanks to everyone again now. When I heard the news last evening, I responded in my text that it did not matter how she got well, whether chiropractic, Epley, it really doesn't matter. All that matters is the result. She is well and thank God for it.

And so now, after a month's leave of absence, Rene will soon go back to her job helping blind folks deal with their challenges, just as I had told her so many times before that she would, telling her that God undoubtedly willed her to be well in order to help all those that she needs to help. I still cannot get out of my mind the thought of this woman, deathly fearful of the MRI, who had all of these symptoms and nothing on the horizon to remedy them, and all she could do is pray for others. Wow!

I have been blessed to know Rene. And right now, the most profound lesson that comes to my mind is that the best way to bless one's self is to bless others. And so the best way to help one's self is to help others. And I hope folks who have doubts in their minds about God and what God wants for them in this life, by reading this, will step just one step further along the path that leads to knowing God. That lesson about helping others is the lesson that Jesus gave to the world. He said to love God with all our hearts and love others as ourselves. This story about Rene is just another in an increasingly long line of these kinds of experiences that I have had in my life, and that serve only to confirm that what Jesus Christ told the world is exactly true, that God will take care of us and that healing does come through faith in God.

UPDATE:

Rene says she woke up a little queezy this morning, neck ache from sleeping with head up all night. Prayers that all stays stable.

 

Thanks Hank for the good news and a reminder of the power of prayer and the goodness of God.

 

prayers

 

Rene is a most remarkable woman and thank you very much Hank for update.

God is always there for us.


God Bless Rene and also you Hank.


Ruth

 

Over the weekend, Rene started back with positional vertigo/dizziness. She will call the ENT lady this morning to ask about another round of Epleys. I told her that she is at least better off this week than last at this time, because she now has an understanding of what is causing the symptoms.

Stay with prayers. I will continue with updates.

 

Rene had a very unsettled week. I have never experienced BPPV symptoms, but the crystals that are supposedly loose in her inner ear seem to have a mind of their own. It's like there is a sort of mechanical action happening that allows them to get stuck in a certain position. Sometimes a head rotation with body horizontal will induce vertigo, as one would expect from BPPV. But sometimes it does not. All week, Rene has felt extreme dizziness punctuated by certain instances of momentary vertigo. Thursday the ENT performed another Epley but could not induce vertigo. Last Thursday she could. So it's like the crystals are stuck. ENT says give it a couple of weeks. I don't know about that.

So back to prayers for this wonderful young lady. All prayers are appreciated. I will continue with updates.