Sure, I'll let total strangers observe my humiliation. Why not?

I almost titled this blog post "Diagnostics and maintenance," but I didn't want anyone to think that I was going to write about cars. (Actually, I do have an idea to write about my car, but it might not make it here on my blog for quite a while.) So, I thought I'd continue with my question-mark-in-the-title trend and my really-disgusting-subject-matter trend for now. For this particular gross topic, for your sake and for my dignity's sake, I'm very glad that I don't have photos available for this post. I would like to blog about a story that I've told people in person. I was reminded of this incident today while I was performing routine maintenance on my cats. That is, once a month, I have to ambush -- I mean, uh... subtly approach my cats... and trim their nails, clean their ears, and apply heartworm-prevention medicine on their fur. So, on with my story, and please be forewarned that it's a graphic but hopefully humorous one.

About 10 years ago, I started a new job that was extremely stressful. I developed IBS-like symptoms and needed to call in sick and visit a medical clinic at least once. To add to the scariness, I didn't have health insurance at the time. One of the doctors explained to me that after the health insurance would kick in at my new job, they could "scope" me and investigate my condition further. After a short while, I was promoted to a less stressful position at work, and my symptoms improved. I wasn't sick anymore. I went back to the clinic for follow-up and testing, but later I was informed that a test yielded disturbing results. So, they scheduled me for my "scope" procedure -- a flexible sigmoidoscopy. This is a procedure where they basically stick a camera up your butt so that they can look at your intestines. This is similar to a colonoscopy, but the camera doesn't go up as far, and you're awake during the procedure.

So, after I prepared for the procedure by not eating solid foods for 24 hours, I arrived at the clinic for my flexible sigmoidoscopy, and I was told that they would also perform a procedure on me called a barium enema, whatever that was. So, I changed into a hospital-type gown and went into a room with a male doctor and a male nurse. The cheerful doctor asked me if I would allow some medical students (I think they were both female) to observe the procedure. I consented, and my reasoning was basically Sure, why not? I'm about to be humiliated, anyway.

I was told that the procedure would involve the nurse using a device to mechanically blast air up into my intestines, I think because my empty intestines needed to be blown up so that the scoping camera could take good photographs and that the medical staff could take a good look at exactly what was inside my intestines. I was warned that I would feel pressure and discomfort during the procedure. However, I was not warned that I had just been told a series of major understatements.

So, air-compressor noises were roaring behind me while air was painfully blasted up my butt while medical students were watching the whole thing and taking notes while the doctor made a joke, I guess to try to lighten the mood. I was in a buttload of cramping pain, and I was probably cringing and/or groaning, and the nurse was telling me to hold still or stop squirming or something. I don't remember exactly. I just know that it hurt.

When it was over, I was told that I would have some privacy while I could get dressed and that I might pass some gas. Another major understatement. I had intestines that were full of artificial air, so I artificially farted. A heck of a lot. Imagine the longest fart you've ever farted, multiply that by about 5, and voila, you've got an idea of what my supersonic, non-stinky farts were like.

The doctor gave me a good report: the only thing he detected during the procedure was a condition that I won't repeat on this blog post, but let's just say that some ways to treat this condition are eating a high-fiber diet, taking a fiber supplement, and using Preparation H.

I thought that I could go home right after this procedure, but I was reminded that I needed to drive to a nearby hospital for my next procedure: a barium enema. I was warned that this procedure would be somewhat similar to the last procedure. Instead of using an air compressor and a camera, the barium enema would fill my empty intestines with a substance that would allow my intestines to glow in the dark, so to speak, while medical staff would take X-rays. This procedure was uncomfortable, but it wasn't as humorous of a circus as the flexible sigmoidoscopy, and nobody was in the room with me while it was happening. It was a little bit scary lying there alone on the examination table while I was vulnerable and had a radioactive substance pumped into my butt while a machine took pictures of my posing-for-the-camera intestines, and I was being observed by people that I couldn't see. I actually ended up writing part of a worship song while I was lying there. The first lines went, "You will never leave me / Never forsake me."

Before I finally got to go home, the nurse warned me that since I had just been pumped with stuff, I would have white poop. I was like, Whatever. I didn't really believe her, until I got home and... OH, MY GOSH, IT'S WHITE!

I don't remember hearing back from the barium-enema doctor, so I think that means that my test results were normal. Ever since that day, I've tried to include more fiber in my diet. And I'm glad that I had those tests, because not knowing what's wrong is perhaps more scary than finding out the truth.

"You are my hiding place; You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. Selah I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you. Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you." (Psalm 32:7-9)

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." (Proverbs 13:12)

When I say things like "God, I want to be free, and I don't care what it looks like" or "Lord, please do whatever You want with me" or "This really hurts; please heal my wound" or "I don't want crap; I want You," He takes me up on it. I don't think He usually uses anesthesia. He pretty much just tells me that He's about to slice me open and perform a spiritual/emotional procedure, and He goes for it. If I kick and scream, He reminds me that I need to hold still and stop squirming. He's serious about operating on my heart. He's serious about restoring my soul. He's serious about my emotional healing and well-being. He doesn't want my heart to be sick, and I don't want it to be sick, either. I want Him to keep digging deep inside me and removing anything that isn't supposed to be there, including any infections or scar tissue or parasites that may have been leftover from past procedures that were ended prematurely or from procedures that He wasn't performing or from whatever out-of-whack thing that has been lurking inside me and just needs to be removed. If my symptoms improve, I want Him to keep operating and preventing any kind of disease.

So, while I was performing maintenance today on my cats, I was reminded of a blog post that I wrote awhile back. If my cats don't let me trim their nails on a regular basis, their claws could grow dangerously long and scratch me or curve around and fuse onto their paws. If my cats don't let me clean their ears on a regular basis, their ears could become so dirty that an infection could develop. If my cats don't let me give them their heartworm-prevention medicine on a regular basis, they could become very sick. These are all procedures that my cats often resist, sometimes ferociously. It's something that needs to be done, and it would be over a lot faster if they would just cooperate and let me be their catmama. After years of performing this maintenance (with lots of trial, error, and getting a talking-to from a vet), I've developed a technique that seems to work (at least for now). I'll wait until it's their morning snacktime, during a weekend when I've got plenty of time, and they're ready to launch into their scheduled napping slumber, and their bellies are almost empty, and I'll begin the maintenance routine. They'll offer little resistance because they're sleepy and hungry, and since they depend on me to feed them, they're pretty much at my mercy. I'll usually affirm them during the procedures, too: "Good boy. You're my girl. I love you. You're my kitty."

I'm pretty sure it's the same way with me and God. "Are you ready?" "Sure, I-- AAAGH! THIS HURTS!" "It's OK. Almost done. Hold still." "Oy vey!" The God of all comfort knows what He's doing. I need to just let Him do it. And I don't think He'll leave me alone in a strange room during a procedure that He's conducting and then neglect to contact me afterwards. He's a good Daddymama who counsels me and helps me through the whole thing. And that's no major understatement.

Can you tell the difference?

This is a photo of my two thumbs. My left thumb (which is on your right) is a bit pointier than the other one (probably because my entire left hand is a tiny bit leaner than my right), and it also has a funky guitar callus that juts out on the joint. But I'd like to bring your attention to the fingerprint area. Without a microscope, can you see any difference between these two thumbs? Do they appear identical? Does my left thumb show any evidence of any past trauma? Years ago, I got a second-degree burn on my left thumb. It's been completely healed for a long time, but that experience was so crazy that I'm going to blog about it and the healing process.

Before I continue, I'd like to offer a tiny disclaimer. I've noticed that I've been blogging lately about things that are gross. But grossness is sometimes a natural, necessary part of life. Take snot, for example. Where would we be without snot? It's a substance that runs out of our noses while carrying away infections. It's nasty and beautiful simultaneously. Thank you, reader, for bearing with my nasty descriptions, and I apologize in advance if any of my writing grosses you out to the point of nausea. I'll try to warn you before you read anything that's extremely gross.

Here's the story about the second-degree burn that I got on my left thumb. One Sunday evening about four years ago, I was cooking dinner. (Or depending on how you look at it, I was defrosting dinner. The leftovers from that evening would be my dinner for the rest of the week.) Back then, it was routine for me to boil some rice, microwave some frozen veggies, and warm up some frozen fish fillets in the oven. When it was time for me to turn over the fillets about halfway through their cooking time, I opened the oven door and removed the baking sheet. What actually happened here is kind of vague in my memory. I think I used a potholder to remove the baking sheet from the oven like I usually did, but the potholder must have slipped, or maybe I just forgot to use a potholder altogether, because my left thumb wrapped around the baking sheet that had been cooking at about 375 degrees. What I do remember clearly is shouting in pain, tossing the baking sheet onto the stove, and running my thumb under cold water. I think I remember my thumb having indented red marks that were shaped like the baking sheet, but I mostly remember the white blisters. One of the blisters was so big that it covered most of the fingerprint area of my thumb.

The hour that followed the burn was pretty scary. My thumb felt like it was on fire. The only things that kept it from feeling like it was on fire were running it under cold water or smashing it against an ice cube. The pain was so bad that I was groaning out loud. I couldn't even function. All I could do was run my thumb under cold water or smash it against an ice cube and try to stop hurting. It was scary. I didn't know what kind of damage the burn had done to my skin. What kind of a burn was this? Was I about to lose my thumb? I prayed for God to heal my thumb. I put some ice in a plastic bag, smashed my thumb against it, and drove to a nearby convenience store and bought some Neosporin so that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life relieving the pain with cold water or ice. After I got home, I was disappointed to discover that Neosporin didn't ease the pain at all. I quickly ate my dinner, fed my cats, smashed my thumb against some ice, and drove myself to the emergency room. To add to the serious mood, I think it was raining, too.

After waiting in the ER for a long time (and going through at least one small bag of ice that the staff was kind enough to provide), I finally saw a doctor who took a quick look at my wound and immediately diagnosed it as a second-degree burn. After he left, the nurse came, bandaged my wound, and showed me how to do it because I would need to keep my thumb bandaged for the next several weeks while it was healing. She applied an ointment (silver sulfadiazine cream) to my burn that worked a million times better than Neosporin. Then I left the hospital with instructions on how to care for the burn; the instructions explained that it would take about six weeks to heal.

I drove to a pharmacy and filled a prescription for painkiller, and by the time I got home and got to bed, it was around 4 or 5:00 in the morning. I called in sick from work (via email) and slept in. A wound that only took up about an inch of my body consumed and disrupted my entire evening and would affect my entire life for the next few weeks.

When I returned to work the following day, to my job that required lots of typing, I was thankful to see that my left thumb is the digit that I use the least (if at all) when I type. I'm pretty sure it was God's mercy that I ended up burning that thumb and not any of my other fingers.

During this time, I became a connoisseur of bandages. I experimented with which brands of gauze and adhesive tape to use and how much to use. Living alone suddenly stank because there wasn't anyone to bandage my wound for me. It was just me and my nine other fingers bandaging up my blistered little nasty-looking thumb.

About one week later, it appeared that something miraculous had happened. The blister on my thumb went down and turned yellow. I thought that my thumb had healed early. Forget the ointment, the gauze, and the tape; I could get away with using only regular Band-Aids. Forget the hospital instructions for the six-week healing. My wound had healed in only one week! Right? Nope. My healing had barely started.

The original now-yellow layer over my thumb peeled off and exposed a deep, raw layer of skin underneath. This part of the healing process was almost more painful than the original burn itself! I needed to continue the bandaging process with the ointment, the gauze, and the tape. A tiny little one-inch burn not only hijacked a Sunday evening and a Monday, but it also dominated my daily routine for the next six weeks or so.

While my wound was healing, I walked around with a white bandaged thumb, and I sometimes got interesting responses from people. Some people showed sympathy and pity. Many of them simply asked what happened, and then they empathized, and we swapped burn stories. One person remarked, "That's what you get from frying up fish." Well, I wasn't frying (I was baking), and all I was doing was trying to cook dinner like a normal human being, and was this person insinuating that the trauma to my thumb had been all my fault?

"Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of My people?" (Jeremiah 8:22)

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." (Psalm 147:3)

Emotional healing can be very similar to my second-degree burn's healing. A trauma can happen and cause severe pain that can seem to halt your life for a while. You try to stop or relieve your pain, possibly trying several different methods, but the pain is acute and insistent. Finally, you talk to an expert and get help. Maybe you find a professional counselor, or maybe you get help from somebody at church. However, the Wonderful Counselor who is always available -- regardless of however many fallible human counselors you talk to -- is God. Jesus is like a doctor who will diagnose your wound and prescribe treatment for it more accurately than anyone else. He's like a nurse who will spend time with you, clean out your wound, and carefully, skillfully bandage it up so that it will heal properly. He's the ointment, the balm, that covers the wound and absorbs the pain. He doesn't make you feel guilty for getting wounded in the first place. He talks to you, helps you, encourages you, assures you, comforts you, heals you.

Sometimes this healing can happen at different levels or in layers. Maybe you think one area is healed because it doesn't hurt anymore, but maybe God sees more underneath that needs to be taken care of. Maybe the top layer needs to peel off so that He can dig deeper and heal the wound more thoroughly. Maybe there's an infection, and He needs to flush it out. Maybe there are root issues that have never been dealt with. God isn't always in a hurry. He's patient. I think sometimes He waits until we're willing to be healed or until the timing is just right. He made all of us individually (Psalm 139:13-14), and He knows that we're all wired differently. I don't think every prescription or treatment will work for everybody.

Frankly, one reason why I became so depressed and sick 12 years ago is because people around me kept telling me that I was fine because I had already done certain counseling. But I wasn't fine, and I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, and I probably didn't understand at the time that my pain was worth investigating. Another reason why I slipped down into a pit of despair was because I took bad advice. And quite frankly, my whitewashed upbringing didn't help, either. Sometimes stuff just pops out, unplanned, out of the blue. It's OK to hit the pause button for a while so that God can take care of an issue, instead of plastering on a smile, comforting yourself with a platitude like "Everything happens for a reason," beating yourself up for "having a pity party," and pretending that everything is OK, while people around you are wondering why you can't smell the stench in your infected wound.

"My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds; my neighbors stay far away." (Psalm 38:11)

This paragraph has extremely gross stuff in it, so please feel free to skip it (especially if you have a weak stomach). One evening very recently, I came home to a nasty surprise. There was a hairball on the carpet, and apparently it had been sitting there since I had left that morning. On closer examination, I discovered that it wasn't a vomited hairball. It was a pooped hairball. (What the crap? It was crap!) Cleaning it up was a disgusting task. But I have two kitties that I love extremely much, and they get hairballs just because they're cats. Emitting hairballs is a natural, necessary part of feline life. I would rather my cats vomit or poop a hairball onto my carpet (or couch or wherever it lands) than for the hairball to stay inside them and grow to a deadly size. I heard a story once of a cat that died of a massive hairball. That's terrible. I want my cats to be alive and healthy.

God wants us to be emotionally healthy. Some wounds are more severe than others or just take longer to heal than others. I don't think there's any shame in letting Jesus heal me as thoroughly as He wants to.

A couple of years ago, long after my left thumb had healed and was back to normal, I went through a phase of cooking burritos. I would heat up flour tortillas at the stove, and once in a while I could feel something deep inside my left thumb. It was as if something underneath wanted to peel off or run away. Maybe more healing was happening underneath, or maybe it was just trying to get my attention: "TIRZAH, USE OVEN MITTS!" (Why do I suddenly want to draw a smiley face on my thumb?)

My thumb survived a traumatic incident, and I'm confident that God can help my heart survive all of its traumas, too. Hopefully while my heart gets all healed up, however long it takes -- unless it'll be a lifetime process, which I'd definitely be OK with -- I'll get a huge dose of wisdom along the way. (Don't worry -- I won't try to draw a smiley face on my heart.)