This has been a long time coming, but I finally have an update on our grand niece’s(Isa) ongoing medical issues. I told you about her a year+ ago(?) when they found out that she had a tumor on her pituitary gland that required surgery.
They managed to remove most of the tumor, but it had already destroyed most of it to the point where she now has zero function. This had left her almost completely blind, and her vision has only gotten worse. She has about 10% of her vision in one eye, and is completely blind in her other.
Her parents(our nephew) are of course heartbroken and doing everything they can to try and help her. They’re luckier than most because her family comes from old money and are loaded, so there isn’t anything stopping them from trying things most of us wouldn’t have access to.
They’ve taken her from Salt Lake City, where they live, to Stanford university hospital to see a specialist, and it isn’t looking good. There isn’t anything anyone can do(except god maybe?) to restore or improve her situation. She’s now 9 years old, has to take medication for the rest of her life, and is going to be completely blind as well.
How the fuck can you rationalize something like this to her, what possible answer is there to make her feel better after going through all of this shit? There’s still a chance the tumor could come back as well, which hasn’t been ruled out in the future yet. But god is still great, right?
My wife’s older sister, our nephew’s mother, was diagnosed with breast cancer recently, and has undergone surgery and is now going through chemotherapy. They’re pretty sure they caught it early enough to give her several more years of life, even though the chemo has had the usual effects.
During all of this, my wife and her family have been staunchly resolute in their faith(I hate that word) that this is all for a reason, and to pray daily for his fucking blessings to help them in these times.
On top of all of this, our daughter-in-law has been fighting with what they thought might be pneumonia for several days now, and ended up in the ER on Friday night after tests showed she might have a blood clot in her lungs. They admitted her for a CT scan and put in an IV for the contrast. During the test, when they injected the dye, the IV wasn’t put in properly, so it went into her arm muscle instead of her bloodstream, which was, as she said “almost as painful as childbirth”.
This made the CT scan useless, and left her with a severely swollen arm. After looking at her new blood test results, the Dr. said it was highly unlikely it was a blood clot, so they sent her home. I like what our son said, “5 1/2 hours in the ER just for fun”.
One of the things my wife actually told our son via a text thread that included myself was that she was “praying for healing before the throne”, really?
Another message was, and it’s a long one, was “the remedy for feelings of grief, feeling overwhelmed, or anger is to praise the lord for all of his goodness, dwell on his promises, and offering thanksgivings to him for his endless blessings”.
Am I missing something? What is wrong with them, or is it just me(us)? They actually truly believe that you’re supposed to be thankful for all of this fucking shit? It’s things like this that have made me consider religion to be nothing more than a crutch that people lean on during bad times, a messed up one, but still just a crutch.