Divine Intervention

“Throw away all your medicine…” the voice said.

Did it realize what it was asking?

It was 2016. I was taking up to six different prescription asthma medications a day, weighed nearly 200 pounds, and was sick all the time. Years of taking heavy duty steroids had shredded my immunity. Worse than being sick was the pain that came with it.

Every time I coughed—and eventually every time I put any strain on my head: sitting up, laying down, sneezing, laughing  (god, the laughing), going to the bathroom—my head filled with enormous pressure and pain that was like being slammed in the back of the skull repeatedly with a sledgehammer, the shock reverberating up and around to my forehead before eventually receding to an unstable pool at the back of my neck. 

No other pain compared to this.

On April 30, 2016 my hubs and I were cleaning in preparation for a trip to buy tickets for a beer festival, which required us to camp all night outside the bar where tickets went on sale the following day. I was terrified. A night in the damp spring air when I was already sick (again) promised long hours of excruciating pain in my skull. Were the tickets worth it? 

Was anything worth it? 

I had just mowed lawn and felt like I was breathing through a screen when I came inside to help clean the floors. Watching wads of cat hair roll across the hardwood like tumbleweeds in a bad western movie, knowing I’d have to cough again soon which meant more pain that would bring me to my knees, I finally shattered. 

I can’t do this. I can’t take this anymore. Maybe it’s allergies. Maybe we should get rid of the cats. I can’t breathe. I can’t take the pain. I’d rather die than know I have to feel this pain forever. What kind of a life is this? This isn’t living. I CAN’T DO THIS!

When I finally calmed down, we agreed to make some changes at home, but realizing I would rather be dead made things like improved air filters and switching to non-toxic cleaners seem small and inconsequential. The doctors’ solution to “cure the cough and we cure the headaches” wasn’t working. It didn’t matter what medication they tried this time, or in what hellacious combination; I was still coughing constantly, even when I wasn’t sick. If I kept waiting for a miracle of medicine, I would never be free from the pain. 

I would rather be dead. 

With nothing left to lose, I searched self-healing online. I didn’t know what I was looking for, only that everything I tried up until that day had failed. I knew there had to be more to life than waiting for the next round of debilitating pain. 

The first thing that popped up on my browser was the book You Are the Placebo by Dr. Joe Dispenza. Unlike the doctors I had worked with for years who were quicker to try the latest drug to mask my symptoms than address—or even find—the cause, Dr. Dispenza was dedicated to helping people heal themselves with their own minds. 

I stopped to buy this beacon of hope at a bookstore on the way to camp out for the festival tickets. In the store I had a coughing fit that triggered one of the worst cough headaches I’ve ever had the misfortune of experiencing. On the floor in the middle of the aisle, I tucked my head and waited for the pain to recede—or my skull to literally split—praying that I didn’t draw too much attention. When I could finally stand, feeling the urge in my throat to cough again, I hurried to the register then back out to the car, where I swallowed half a bottle of cough syrup, and spent the majority of the two-hour drive with my head between my knees hoping the pain would stop.

I started reading You Are the Placebo the following Monday from a chair on my deck. 

A few pages in, I set the book in my lap, closed my eyes, and prayed for something I had never dared to ask for before.

I prayed for death.

Not literal death, but the death of my current body, circumstances, and pain. I was ready to end that terrible chapter of my life and be reborn into something new. I didn’t just pray about it; I imagined what the death of this experience would look and feel like, and said goodbye while I watched it disappear. Without an ounce of fight left in me, I completely surrendered to a higher power, and what I hoped was a new life on the other side.

When I opened my eyes, a profound stillness settled over me and I felt compelled to go inside to my bedroom. There, in the light of the setting sun to the songs of redwing blackbirds and doves out my open window, I picked up Wayne Dyer’s book Change Your Thoughts—Change Your Life. I had left off in the middle of the verse, “Living with No Fear of Death,” and the first words I read said simply: During meditation, practice dying while still alive.

Since I had just done that very thing, it felt like a thunderbolt from God.

I could hear Them speaking to me through the words, assuring me that Someone was listening, and I wasn’t alone. Before this I had felt completely isolated in my pain living alongside others who were not sick and couldn’t possibly understand how hard it was just to get out of bed in the morning. In that moment, I felt the breath of the Divine and knew without a doubt that God was listening.

Then, a very loud voice in my head said, “Throw away all your medicine.”

Throw away all your medicine.

I wanted to. I wanted so badly to have the total faith and trust that this really was a higher power speaking, not just a manifestation of my own mind mired by grief for the life I was losing, to dump the meds without looking back. 

But I couldn’t. 

I admitted to the voice that I was afraid. I had relied on those medications to scrape out a meager existence for years, and they were expensive and not easily replaced. I didn’t know how I would feel without them. What if, god forbid, I got worse?

Instead I promised that I wouldn’t take anything for a week and see how I felt.  That night, at the insistence of a coughing fit, I had a puff of Spiriva. After that I stopped all medication completely.

I took my last puff on the evening of 5/2. On 5/2, I recorded five substantial, earth-shattering coughing fits. On 5/3, I recorded two. In less than one week, there were several days that I had none. None. I drank. I exercised. I went to stores with poor ventilation. I dealt with stress at work. I traveled. I spent days outside in the dust and sun. It was rainy and damp for two days…and I hardly coughed.

A few months later I was (finally) diagnosed with a Chiari malformation in my brain, which prevents fluids from flowing freely between my brain and spinal cord—the true cause of my headaches and cough.

Throw away all your medicine.

I’m glad that I was too afraid at the time. Now my bag of drugs serves as a physical reminder of a life that ended on May 2, 2016, the day I was reborn.