Reeve Foundation Paralysis Community

I just finished reading this book called 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper.  It is the story of one pastor’s horrible auto accident where he was declared dead at the scene but came back to life after a fellow pastor stopped on the road, crawled into his mangled vehicle and essentially prayed him back to life.  During the time he was dead he spent 90 minutes in heaven.

 

There is more to the story, but the gist is he feels he survived and recovered due to answered prayers; the prayers of all those that knew him.  His faith and the faith of his friends saved him.  It is meant to be a feel-good, hopeful story, and I guess it is for him.  I just didn’t feel all that good with the premise.

 

This happened another time a few years ago when this local man was paralyzed in a bike accident.  A website was set up to send this guy messages of hope and encouragement.  A local lady, who claimed to be a motivational speaker on TBI and SCI, related on this site how she had made a truly remarkable full recovery due to her faith, her willpower and her dedication to her recovery.  Wow I thought, if that is all it takes there would be a lot less people in wheelchairs.  I guess it stands to reason that only the lazy would be left in chairs.  I know a lot of faithful people with incredible willpower and dedication that are still in a chair and have made little functional recovery after their injury.  Using these above theories on recovery, what are they left to think about themselves? 

 

I had this overwhelming urge to call out this lady on her statement and I did.  I sent her an e-mail (in fact it turned into several exchanges) and asked her what are people to think about themselves if they don’t make this remarkable recovery.  I thought her statements somehow left me with the feeling that if you are still in the chair them it is because your faith wasn’t strong enough, your will to recover wasn’t great enough, and your dedication to your recovery must have been lacking.  This is the same feeling I had reading the book.  Why are some people prayed out of these terrible situations and others are not?  I know thousands of very faithful and devout people prayed for my husband, but I guess it would appear that those prayers went unanswered.  Maybe we just aren’t worthy enough.  Although our family is quite religious and spiritual, this concept is very difficult for me.  Why some and not others?

 

When my husband was first injured I read the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner.  I don’t remember much of the book now only that it seemed to make sense to me.  I guess I liked it so well I lent it to someone.  Drat…maybe I need to re-read it now to counteract this feeling I am having after just finishing this other book.

 

I guess here is my prayer for today…Dear God, Please stop me from e-mailing this guy and asking him if he is more worthy in Your eyes than my husband…and why?

 

I guess I will see how God answers this prayer of mine.  So now we can add motivational speakers and pastor-authors to my list of current annoyances which already includes pizza guys, a small population of nutty nurses, and weirdos on the street that make idiot comments.     

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Trish

"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...it's learning to dance in the rain."

Your prayers were answered .... the answer was just "tough luck".  I'm being sarcastic of course ... but I'm an atheist, so the whole god will (or will not) heal me thing never flies too far with me either way.  But it does make me very angry at times - when people tell us they will pray for (name) .... gee, I need to make up a name for him ... let's call him Husband. .. anyway, people will say they will pray for Husband.  I have to stifle the urge to say "Oh, that's already been tried and didn't work, so don't bother".  Or something worse! 

 

One thing sticks out in my mind more than any other with Husband - its a story he told me about something that happened a few years before I met him.  At the time, he was working full time, had been paralyzed for over 10 years, and was (still is) agnostic.  But there was a woman at his work who was a evangelical freak (pardon my verbal shortcut, but even the religious among us know what I mean by this, right?), and she kept telling Husband this one story over and over and over and over again of how a guy in a very similar situation to his was healed at her church.  That they prayed for him at a healing service and he was cured.  He had heard versions of this story for his entire time being paralyzed and gave it no heed at first.  But she just kept working away at him, day after day, week after week, month after month. 

 

Finally, he agreed to go - mostly to get her to shut up, but he told me that down deep there was a tiny part of him that hoped against hope, hoped against all possible logic that maybe it would work.  Well, we all know the end of this story right, or I would be on the support group for husbands addicted to restoring Mustangs, not here. 

 

He was crushed.  Just absolutely crushed.  He was angry because a) he knew better and b) he allowed himself to hope.  And it makes me SO SO SO angry. 

 

I'll be quite interested in the response you get  .... !!!! 

p.s. when I saw the title of this thread, I was absolutely sure this was going to be a 'public encounters that sucked' thread.  LOL ...... (we have the same sick sense of humor I think!)

Your story reminds me of a woman I met when my husband was first paralyzed.  He was in this step-down hospital because he wasn’t stable enough to be transported to rehab but was not ICU worthy.  Like my husband, most of the patients were on vents. 

 

There was one other quad on the floor.  He had been paralyzed for 20 some years.  He had this wife that totally freaked me out.  She stayed at this hospital night and day in the lounge room which happened to be right next to her husband’s room.  She said she had to be there to cath him and other stuff like pray.  One day she whispered to me…"did they tell you that you are going to have to dig poop out of him?"  I thought she must be psychotic.  That was before I knew about the bowel program.  They didn’t seem to know about it at this hospital either…I guess maybe psycho wife was the only one clued in on this topic.  I only wish that comment had actually been part of her delusion.

 

Anyway, she would always tell me that she believed that God was going to heal her husband in a divine miracle.  She told me everyday at home that she mostly just sat at her kitchen table and prayed for that miracle day.  She even told me that one day she was having a heart attack and couldn’t get to the hospital because of her husband.  (I’m thinking..right lady, but that part was probably true as I understand all too well now.)  Anyway, she prayed her heart attack away that day.  She again sat at her kitchen table and prayed for a miracle to stop her heart attack, and it did.

 

I tried to avoid this lady because she truly unnerved me.  It was difficult because she seemed to follow me and offer me all her pearls of wisdom about how God was going to cause a miracle and heal our husbands.  Finally I said to her that perhaps her husband’s miracle was going to come via some medical break through and that maybe she would miss the miracle because she was looking for an instant healing and wouldn’t be open to God’s true miracle for her family.  I told her maybe God’s miracle would come in a whisper instead of what she was looking for.  She totally discounted my idea and continued to insist her husband would have a divine healing. 

 

I’m religious (a Catholic), but I wouldn’t bet my house on the divine healing thing.  I’m open to most religions and see the tremendous impact that religion plays in people’s lives including my own.  I just can’t buy that will power, determination, prayer, and God are the only factors that determine who is going to recover from a SCI.  Could maybe a little luck be involved?  

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Trish

"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...it's learning to dance in the rain."

Dear Trish and bright blue skies,
God knows I love your sense of humor!  So here is the God thing from a deeply spiritual psychologist quadriplegic 62-year-old bald guy who also likes to be playful.
Five years ago in the fall I was giving a lecture at a big church in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  In the middle of the lecture the microphone cuts out.  The minister comes running up to the stage and says: "oh God would not let this happen, not here not now."  At the moment, my internal editor was sound asleep so I said: "maybe your God would not let this happen, but mine would!"  I hear some nervous laughter in the audience and I (perhaps inappropriately) interpret this as permission to go with this thread a little farther.  So I continue "just the other day I asked God to help me with something and the voice I heard back said 'leave me alone Gottlieb, I gave you all the tools you need to work out your own problems. Anyway, I happen to be pretty busy right now.  It's the fall and I have to get these leaves the right color and now on time, so don't bother me!"

Then I turned to the audience and said maybe the real message is that I would be better off if I was paying attention to his/her problems than mine.  Regardless of our beliefs, I know that the more narrow our lens becomes, the more unhappy we are.  I guess that was the message that day.  And I don't know if that voice I heard was the voice of wisdom or the voice of my playful inner child.
Maybe they're the same

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Dan Gottlieb Ph.D.
www.DrDanGottlieb.com