I pretty much spent the day at the hospital from about 9:00 in the morning until midnight. There was a break for a couple of hours to get something to eat and pick up some things to take to Mary.
In the afternoon after waiting for 3 hours to find out when she would be operated on, we were told that it would be quite late. So we decided I should go home and get some dinner and then come back in an hour or so. I had just left McDonald’s when the phone rang and I was informed she was going to the operating theater. I made a quick U-turn and was back to the hospital in 5 minutes.
She had already been moved to the surgical waiting area but she was 2nd in line and they were working on an unscheduled emergency of an earlier patient. After another 2 hour wait she was wheeled off to the operating theater and I had another 2 plus hours of waiting before I got to see her for a very short time in the ICU ward.
The doctor told me that everything went well. The rupture occurred when the mesh from an earlier hernia operation failed. They say she will be in the hospital for 4 to 6 days and then there will be 4 to 6 weeks of recovery.
We will have to see how things work out over the recovery period but I will just have to do what I can do in working with the Youth and the leadership. Unfortunately I am sure it will be 3 or 4 weeks before she will feel up to giving piano lessons. The important thing is that she gets well so we can finish our mission and hopefully accomplish what the Lord sent us to South Africa to do.
Not the best day we have had on our mission. Mary woke feeling terrible and believed she had developed a hernia. To make a long day short, we spent all of it at the doctor’s office or in the Richards Bay hospital. After a number of tests and a CAT Scan it was determined she did have a hernia and they admitted her to the hospital so she could have surgery tomorrow.
Today’s Tender Mercies…
Although it was hard to see them while they were happening, there were many tender mercies showered upon us today. Elder Reeder, Tsegula along with Khulekani came down from Enselini and gave her a blessing. Khulekani anointed for the first time and it showed me that we needed to work with him on ordinances so when he will be prepared when he goes on his mission. I count that as two TM.
Dr. Kelling, Mary’s surgeon, is very nice and told her that he would give her some medication to try and reduce the hernia so he would not have to operate. It turned out not to work but it gave us a feeling that he would not operate unless he really needed to.
Dr. Kelling wanted to make sure it was a hernia so he asked for a CAT scan. The first nurse we talked to at the x-ray department said we would have to come back tomorrow, but another nurse came by a little later and said they could do it today and gave Mary a barium milkshake that she had to take over a 2 hour period. She also said that it would cost about R6600 – that is about $750 US. Later when we came back and Mary had the scan it turned out that they did not have to use the dye so it only cost about half that. As we were waiting for the scan to be ready so we could take it to Dr. Kelling, I decided I would speed things up so I asked if I could pay for it. As I was waiting for the cashier, a doctor walked by and asked what I was waiting for and when I told him he went up to the window and told them to help me right now. The scan had been sitting there just waiting for the cashier to get around to asking for payment. As I was paying I told Mary to take the scan and go to Dr. Kellings office. When she got there it was closed but a very helpful nurse paged him and he had Mary put in an emergency room until he could look at the scan. There are a number of TM in this part of the story.
The hospital will of course not let you be admitted unless there is some way you can guarantee payment. I was on my way home to get some things that Mary would need when she was admitted and they called to say that I needed to come back so they could work out how the bill would be guaranteed. I told them the mission would guarantee payment and gave them the office number. When they called wonderful sister Johnson told them the mission would be happy to guarantee the payment and I think sent them a fax to that affect. Since we have more than enough credit on our mission account to see us through the rest of the mission, the amount of the hospital bill should just about make us even by July when we go home. Another TM..
The last one was getting her a bed. The hospital was jammed but it turned out one patient went home late in the afternoon so all we needed to do was wait until they sanitized the bed and then they took Mary up. So all in all it was a day where we learned patience and where the Lord blessed us through our suffering.
As I prayed I remembered to give thanks for Christ’s love and for His taking upon Himself our sins and sorrows. While this will reduce what we can do over the next few weeks, it will not cause us to go home early so we can hopefully fulfill whatever the Lord sent us here to do.
Neither of us felt like doing anything that took a lot of driving today so we stayed in the Richards Bay area. We got a call from the Zone leaders asking if they could bring the district leaders over and use our computer to show them the weekly graphs. We said sure without realizing they would need to use the internet which was down because we used up all our bandwidth for the month.
When they said they could not access their mailbox I remembered the problem and hurried down to the mall to buy some more gigs of web time. Monday is usually very busy at Telkom but when I got to their office there was only one lady in front of me and she finished her business quickly. Mine also got done in record time but as I left I noticed the line waiting for service was now out the door. I count this as the first tender mercy of the day. I was able to get the elders online before they ran out of other things to discuss and they were able to leave happy.
Our excitement for the day was to go to Meerensee to pick up my cleaning and check the PO box – nothing in the box today. We then went to the mall for lunch at Spurs and checking times of movies at the multi-plex. Back at our boarding I managed a short nap before returning to the mall to see Sherlock Holmes. We knew it was going to be different than Basil Rathbone’s Holmes – I just found out that he was born in South Africa to English parents but left when he was 3 – but did not realize how very different it was going to be. Although it was different it was quite good and except for a couple of sequences near the beginning where they put his thinking process on the screen we really liked it.
When we got home from the movie we found the Zone leaders boarding waiting for us. Elder Wengert needed to transfer some pictures off his camera so he would have enough room for the last two weeks of photos. He also got permission to call the US to solve some problem with his bank card.
While this was going on the elders from Empangeni boarding showed up because Elder Kitili needed to check something about an application to BYU. Then elders Reeder and Lemmon dropped by – they were working in the area – so we had 10 of the 12 here before they started to move out again. Since the Enseleni elders had come by early in the day to pick up a set of scriptures for their new convert we managed to see all our great missionaries for the second day in a row.
Once the group had moved out – it was about 6:30 I think – we settled down to a quiet night. Mainly we worked on the puzzle and read. It was a nice peaceful P-day for us. Just as I was getting ready to head to our bed, I remembered I forgot ….