Chaplain’s Blog Stardate May 2024
The last six weeks has been an interesting journey (to put it mildly) beginning with a haemorrhagic stroke in the last week of March and the first of two short stays in phoenix Ward in Treliske Hospital. The second stay was a little over a week later with a mild seizure apparently caused by the stroke! The result was an interesting array of pills, a number of scans and tests, a sheaf of paperwork from the DVLA and instructions about surrendering my driving license and how I can re-apply in six months time. On Monday 13th I have to report for an MRI scan which means I will not be hosting Readers in conversation on ZOOM and some time after that a chat with the consultant.
In that time praying has been tricky and I have felt carried by the prayer of many others for which I am very grateful. My recovery has been relatively quick as these things go and I am back leading our house group, Morning Prayer on Zoom and seeing various folk for things like spiritual direction….. I am also back to clocking up ten thousand steps a day with the dog although I am a bit slower than before and have to stop every now and then to do some physio!
The prayer time gets longer by the day, as does the desire to be more active and the frustration of discovering that the energy required to do things, including writing things like a blog, is limited!
Now I am not a person who thinks that ‘everything happens for a reason’ – rather, I am a person who believes in the philosophy of “stuff or s**t just happens.” God does not want me to have a stroke- and I could probably have insisted that the doctor should have upped my blood pressure medication. What I do hold onto is that trough the tricky things we face God helps us through. That help might well teach us a lesson or two, it might give us an encouraging healing (as it has for me thus far), but for others it might not! I went for my last MRI scan several years ago – going in worried and very nervous and leaving at the end of 40 minutes of counting clicking magnets calm and spiritually refreshed- I hope the scan next week will go as smoothly!
In the meantime, although restricted to lifts and public transport, I am pretty much back to normal and looking forward to being able to contribute more as the weeks go on.
In my prayers are the patients and staff on Phoenix ward and the wonderful paramedics I met over the last month.
It is ironic that I have been writing “visit the carwash!” on nearly every to-do list through february and March, the car getting ever green with moss and road dirt only to have to wash the beast by hand in the driveway yesterday because I am not allowed to drive to the carwash. The chauffeur was garening and i did not want to disturb her! Those little inconveniences remeing me of how fortunate I have been, whether lucky or blessed and give thanks for all the prayers, good wishes, genral enquiries and especially to the folks who have filled in while I have been away from my duties.