Mending Bodies and Healing Hearts

A happy baby boy whose anus is functioning very well hence his smile under that blanket Okay We're going to talk about poop. Let's be real... not being able to poop is terrible. We have all been there. Now imagine being born without the ability to poop. Yep...it's horrible.  Did you know that you could have been born with one of two congenital defects resulting in it being impossible for you to poop? It's true!   One condition is called Hirschsprung disease when you actually lack the muscles to expel your poop so it just stays in there and builds up over time ... well you can imagine what happens. It is not pleasant. This usually  results in a permanent colostomy and much relief.  The more common condition is that you are actually born without an anus. Just imagine that. In this case you would get a colostomy at birth. If you are blessed to live in America, you would possibly have the surgery to create a hole, have months of dilation of that new hole, an...

  I have to honestly say that I'm so glad that God has called me to be a nurse and not a doctor. As a nurse, I do whatever the doctors tell me to do. The doc writes the order and I carry it out. Give Benadryl to this patient. Give IV fluids to that patient. Even though throughout my 8 year nursing career I have developed some level of autonomy, I always have doctors supervising me. I never have to call the shots on my own. I like it that way. I'm glad that they are always there and always know more than I do. It's comforting. I never have to make life or death decisions for anyone. The doctors do that.  The warmer set up to resuscitate the baby I have the amazing God-given privilege of working with some of the most amazing doctors in the world who have also their families and homes behind to follow God's calling to care for the physically and spiritually broken in another country. They work an insane number of hours every week and when they are not working, t...

Well, it has been exactly a week since I have arrived back at Hospital Loma de Luz after my 5 week long support raising trip. I have officially survived the week. It has been an eventful one to say the least. It started with my arrival at my cozy apartment that smelled of horrible, eye watering, stomach churning, rotting chicken which took three days to clean out. Then, the power being out in the middle of the night resulted in me breaking my nose by running into the concrete corner wall in my bathroom when responding to a "Code Blue". And today I am sick in bed with some sort of stomach bug. Normally I would say that I would take a cold over the stomach bug any day but the fact that it is quite painful to blow my poor nose, this one time I am thankful that it is the stomach bug. God is indeed good!  Yesterday was having lunch with some other fellow missionaries at our founding surgeon's family's house when the topic of our conversation changed to our crazy travel st...

Close your eyes and take a slow deep breath in through your nose and then out through your mouth. Now do it again. That air that you're breathing, that's oxygen. Most of us go through our day not giving one thought about what we're breathing. Here at Hospital Loma de Luz we think about it ALL the time. As you have probably figured out, being a mission hospital in a rural part of Northern Honduras means that everything is just automatically more challenging. Hospitals in America have oxygen systems built right into the wall by the patient's beds. Just connect the readily available oxygen tubing to the regulator on the wall, turn the valve on, and voila! you have oxygen. So simple. Here it is not so simple.  oxygen tanks lined in the hallway waiting for use Here, in Honduras, we have to go into La Ceiba, which is the nearest city to us, pick up huge tanks of oxygen in the back of a truck (not exactly the safest idea since these huge tanks, which ironically resemble...

It had been about a few days since I had arrived at Hospital Loma de Luz when I was visiting long time missionary Iain in his office in June of 2016. Sweat was pouring down my face and my back. The humidity was suffocating. "I really think that I'm going to die!" I exclaimed. "I don't know how I'm going to survive two years in this heat!"  "Two years is going to fly by! You're going to blink and it is going be gone already." was Iain's response. I kind of half-heartedly agreed with him all the while thinking he was a little crazy.  W ell that crazy old Scottish guy was right. It has been almost two years. Twenty one months to be exact.  Time is strange here. The days and weeks are long but the months and years are short. I think I've blinked a few more times than once but those two years are almost up.  I've spent the past 6 months praying about the future, about what the Lord wants me to do next. Do I stay at Hospital Lo...

The other night I was lying in bed reading the Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew. The part towards the end of the book when Digory, Polly, and Fledge are sent by Aslan to look for the secret garden. Upon finding the garden, Digory slowly opens the gate when the wicked Witch suddenly jumps over the wall into the garden startling Digory. Suddenly my bed violently began to shake, moving over an inch or two, and my mirror rippled from the bottom corner to the top. It sounded like a train was going to crash through my apartment building. "That was weird," I thought. It wasn't until the shaking started a second time a few seconds later that I realized what was going on. Earthquake! The floor was trembling when my feet hit it as I made a run for the front door. It felt like the apartments were going to fall down. The shaking had stopped by the time I had reached the front door. It was surprisingly peaceful outside. Nothing was disturbed.  My phone started vibratin...