Prayers

Well, a few prayers answered today and a few a little less so… pretty par for the course in, well, life in general I guess!  For me it is always an answered prayer when someone that I had given an appointment to on an earlier trip does show up again for her surgery, which today was our patient Encarnacion.  She came referred from the Fickers in May for uterine prolapse but we had some other bleeding concerns that we needed to work up first.  She has had all of that done now between us and Tom, so we will operate on her Tuesday! 

The “less answered” prayers category basically means that ALL of our patients today had complete uterine prolapse concerns.  The translation of this is that they all need vaginal surgery and therefore will not be a very good surgical experience for Jared.  I am still hopeful that we will get some good abdominal cases that he can scrub with us on, though.  God is in control!  I had to remind myself a lot of that today…

The coolest part of the day, though, was when He reminded me of that through our first patient.  We spent a long time talking to her about the surgery that she needed and the logistics and all, and then we prayed for her before she left.  She had her husband translating for her since she doesn’t speak Spanish, and at the end of the prayer she was crying.  I was really worried because I thought she was scared, so I was asking why she was crying.  She was embarrassed about it and didn’t want to tell me at first, but she finally confided that she had just had an overwhelming sense of the presence of The Lord as we were praying that made her emotional.  So then we all cried, of course, which got the clinic off to a slow—but lovely!—start for the day.

We ended up only seeing nine patients and scheduling three surgeries today, but again, God is in control and He will send us the patients we need to minister to this week.  Please pray especially for  Juana, Magdalena, and Encarnacion who we will be operating on this week.  They all are Christians, actually, which is a fairly rare way to start out the week down here.  Please also pray especially for Manuela who is not a Christian and who is struggling with infertility that we likely can not help with.  And for Rosario, a sweet lady who came in today feeling that she needed a good check-up since she has been worried about damage that could have been done when she was raped while in the United States several years ago.  We heard a lot of sad stories today, and are all going to bed thankful for our loving homes and families and our comfy beds, full bellies, and warm showers.

The pictures above (I do not have enough patience with this slow internet connection to figure out how to get them to not be in the middle of the post; sorry!) are the very first patient who made us all cry, the team (as promised from yesterday--Tana, Sandy, Jared, me/Heidi, and Kelley), most of the team with one of the patients that we are hoping to operate on in the future (we diagnosed her diabetes today), and Tana and I with sweet Encarnacion, which we promise we didn't take JUST to make ourselves feel tall!