August, 2014
Recently, my daughter Jamie was having severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, and such shortness of breath she could hardly sit up. Any physical activity, no matter how minor, exhausted her. Just folding a load of laundry made it difficult for her to breathe. She couldn’t seem to sit up for more than half an hour. And every day her symptoms got progressively worse. She got in with the doctor several times for her symptoms before she was finally forced to take some medical leave time from work.
The doctor didn’t know what was causing her symptoms, so she had no answers. With chest pain a chronic symptom, they ran all the usual tests to check her heart, but they all came back normal. It got so bad, and Jamie got so desperate, that one day she called me and asked if I would run her to the doctor. Her symptoms were so severe, she was no longer able to drive.
Of course, on such short notice the doctor wasn’t available, so she got in with the nurse practitioner. He had no problem coming to a logical diagnosis. “It’s anxiety. You’ve got to learn to relax and it will ease up.” Anxiety is the catch-all diagnosis for any and all symptoms that the doctor can’t readily explain when the inexpensive, more common tests come back negative.
Jamie refused to accept his diagnosis, patiently explaining why it wasn’t anxiety, but he didn’t really want to listen. So he assured her that it was, and she assured him that it wasn’t. In desperation to convince her that she was just dealing with anxiety, he turned to me and asked my thoughts on the subject. Up until then, I’d sat quietly. To his displeasure, I sided with Jamie.
Now I understand that stress and anxiety can cause all sorts of physical illnesses. I firmly believe that if we could help people overcome stress and anxiety, we’d clear out half the occupied hospital beds. But Jamie’s symptoms weren’t due to anxiety.
Forced to actually look for the cause, the NP finally ordered some tests that were less common and far more expensive. And as expected, the tests revealed absolutely nothing.
Sitting in church one morning, a thought hit me. Jamie is going to die. She has cancer or something. And the doctor is wasting so much time trying to prove it’s just anxiety that by the time they find it, it’ll be too late. That thought upset me so much that tears filled my eyes and I could not focus on the pastor’s message. Then it occurred to me…(Sorry, Pastor, all this happened during your message.)…God wouldn’t tell me something like that even if it were true. (That’s not how He operates.) Which meant that thought had come from Satan, and Satan is a liar. That gave me the peace I needed to get through the weekend and not worry about it.
After running every test they could think of, the doctor referred Jamie to a pulmonary specialist. Within ten minutes, he diagnosed her, and it wasn’t anxiety. Months earlier, her doctor had prescribed her a beta blocker to help control her migraines, and that beta blocker triggered an asthma attack. So at age 32, she developed asthma due to an underlying condition that was triggered by the beta blocker. And since Jamie was in her 30’s with no history of asthma, it stood to reason that her doctor wouldn’t even consider it.
Now, in our Wednesday night Bible study, the pastor has been talking about Satan and how to recognize his attacks. Satan is a liar. He’s deceptive. He often appears as an angel of light. And it’s important for believers to know how to defend themselves against his attacks. But it’s equally as important to understand how the Lord works. Because I had some understanding of how the Lord works, I was able to recognize the attack of the devil more easily. And once I recognized it, his lie lost all power.