It is time.
I need to tell you…
…about this girl...
She is a girl only a handful of people know or remember…
I have put this off for years, too painful to remember, too painful to even look at pictures, but hindsight isn’t only 20/20 it can be healing of itself.
For a long time, I forgot her, I tried to bury her, the memories of what she went through TOO painful to visit but recently, God has caused me to revisit her and my narrative just exploded into truths long forgotten…
So this little, crippled blond girl was SO tough, I mean iron-willed, a bombastic, hardcore warrior at only fifteen years old! She was 15 and already the very epitome of the virtuous woman mentioned in Proverbs virtue being the reference to the strength of a fighter.
Where did it come from? I went to a church that was charismatic but not at all Pentecostal, they DID NOT believe in the gifts AT ALL yet that little girl in the picture above sitting in a wheelchair did. (must’ve been the DNA handed down by one Hazel Elizabeth Nangle because the one thing it wasn’t was taught, it was just there.)
That little girl was told practically every day that she was going to die.
‘If we operate on your brain first, your blood pressure could go up and it would burst the blood vessel in there and you’ll die, if we operate on your heart first, your blood pressure could go up and it would burst and you’ll die, oh and if we don’t operate at all and your blood pressure goes up it will burst and well you get the idea but hey if they knew one thing it was that I could die and I was made acutely aware of that for 6 whole months. It was almost they wanted to make sure I knew that I should be dead but I still could go at any time, it felt relentless. And there were no mental health specialists there either!
What is absolutely hilarious to me is I was NOT having it AT ALL! HOW DARE THEY TELL ME WHAT TO DO? I WAS NOT GOING TO DIE,!
I made them open the chapel the night before my brain operation, I shuffled in there and looking out of the window, up at the dark night sky which you could barely see amongst all the industrial buildings of the Maudsley hospital sight and said. ‘Well I kinda hope it goes okay tomorrow but if it don’t, I’ll see you in the morning!’
You need to understand something, yes, I was a little girl, 15 years old but at this point I had spent every night alone in a hospital ward where all around me were dead and dying, people didn’t survive strokes, and so they had no idea what to do with me, I was alone, the sounds of death all around me and God was RIGHT THERE with me the entire time, you know how I knew that? Because he was the only one who was there and I don’t even remember how I knew, I just remember knowing without any doubt what-so-ever, I was bold and completely given over to him for a period of time in a way I wouldn’t be for another 1/4 of a century!
I mean that girl? I don’t even know her, I barely remember her, I spent years running from her, pretending she didn’t exist because she didn’t need to exist because that never happened, she never existed and if she did she was dead now!
I was SO deep in the river in Egypt, I ate frogs!
For years and years, I hated that girl, I thought she was weak.
I thought she was weak?
How mental is that?
A girl who told God, ‘if things don’t go well I’ll see you in the morning?’ completely with the pointing wink and click of a tongue? I mean, THAT cavalier!
Weak?
Yeah, weak as steel!
My God, I’ve been wrong, SO wrong.
I thought she was weak because she wasn’t in control but the funny thing was she had more control in her life then than she would have for decades after.
You see after that, I didn’t draw closer to God, I ran from him, I was SO angry with him!
LITERALLY : ‘I gave my heart to you and I’m in a wheelchair? My education is down the toilet, I have nothing! WTF God? SERIOUSLY? F*** you!’
-This anger caused me to take an overdose of 72 paracetamol and codeine and when I got up there I was going to tell him exactly what I thought of this great plan for my life! I remember screaming at the ceiling, ‘What was SO wrong with my plans?’ – but that is an entirely different story!
I now look back at that little girl and it is still hard looking at her because of all she will have to go through to go back to who she always was but I have to because now she blows me away with her strength, bravery, wit and an indomitable faith that I am only now starting to understand.
She wasn’t weak she was insanely strong, crazy strong, strong in a way I can barely fathom and she is now who I hope to be again because it would be great if she could now meet my children whom she has sadly never met and whom would be equally as amazed by her.
For my children only know the ditzy, irresponsible, child-woman she became, the child-woman that she would hate to have ended up as. The dependent woman I have become needs to remember her, for she needed no one but God!
She amazes me because I can’t understand her lack of fear or where that faith came from, that insider knowledge she seemed to have as the blood burst through the wall of her brain and knowing full well what was happening, she did feel fear at that point for about 15 seconds,( I distinctly remember that fear, the thought. ‘It’s your brain, you’re going to die.’ And that is a thought that is very difficult to forget) but then she never felt it again, throughout the entire following months of learning how to walk again of being told the risks over and over, she maintained that strength and beat the enemy.
Even now, it’s hard to imagine…
You’re about to have an operation, the odds are 60/40 you’ll make It and not 60/40 in your favour.
In fact, you are told before each operation that you might not wake up, you do not want the operation because you know you might die but if you don’t have it you might die, a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t and you are fifteen and it’s your choice…. Oh yes, all that!
I cry now talking about it, I am filled with terror thinking about it but at the time, weirdly, supernaturally, I was just like
“NO! I WILL LIVE! LIKE, SHUT UP!”
Yes, fifteen year old me was bad man ting!
I was like ‘Yo death? BRING IT!’ And I whooped its butt! Like the little super-girl, I was! Yeah, my children would love her and it’s time they met her. It’s time for me to return to that girl and reclaim her as me because she IS who I am, she never died she just hid for a bit but now she’s back!
ADENDUM: After I Posted this my mother apologized for not being there, it made me realize, it looks like they weren’t there but my family were there and MY MOTHER WAS there most of all but she COULDN’T be there at during work hours or in the small hours. My mother was incredible, she was there before I woke up and SHE dressed me for the day and put me to bed at night BUT there’s a point when you’re in the terminal ward where you are alone and it’s a place no one but God can touch and that’s where I was; it didn’t matter how late my mother stayed, when she went she wasn’t going down the hall or down stairs she was going about 5 miles away! That’s a loneliness nobody can help!
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