Here I am on the other side! Twelve days ago I had major surgery on my lower spine; and it was utterly needed to delivery me from months of strong pain in my hamstring muscles, tendons and buttocks. It’s such a relief to be able to walk around and not have that pain that would so take over my leg muscles each morning.

The operation is call called a “laminotomy” and “lumbar fusion”. It took 90 minutes, I was totally unconscious and they had to get down to the real nitty gritty in my lower spinal column. But it worked. Or more actually, the Lord did it and used the expertise of these doctors to “roto rooter” my lower vertebra, relieving the constricting that had heavily pinched my spinal column there. As soon as I was conscious after the operation, I could feel that the leg pain was now gone that had been there since last summer.

And now, since the surgery I’ve been managing the new pain that’s come up after they cut through my back muscles so they could get to where the “severe spinal stenosis” has been. Hats off to my sister who really came through in the hour of trouble, taking care of me at the hospital and then at her house before I got back here at the beginning of the week.

I was aware of a lot of people praying for me at all times. So many things didn’t happen that could have gone wrong. And I’m so thankful that I’ve had peace in my heart and mind through all this. I’ve realized again that “me” is not primarily my physical body. My body really went through the wringer in the biggest way. It seemed like I’d been shot in the back or that a mortar shell had hit me.

But it’s like I wrote about “You you”, 7 years ago. The real ultimate “me” didn’t get a knife stuck through it and become all sliced up, like my physical body did. It helped so very much to have a Christian perspective on it all and that “me”, me physically as well as my heart and soul were experiencing this. But through it all, the actual real me inside was doing pretty good and something really positive was happening. The cramped, pinched spinal column was being fixed by real experts. That was very good, even if it was a traumatic experience to go though physically, with an operation like that.

Shortly after I was back in my hospital room after the operation, I was aware that I was “on the other side”. There was discomfort but I could already feel then that the leg, tendon and buttocks pain was gone. What a relief and joy!

They had me on strong pain medication and the main one was Oxycodone, a narcotic. It did work; along with adding some Tylenol, the pain level overall was bearable. But it wasn’t long before I was experiencing some stuff that was messing with my thoughts and emotions. As the pain drew down over a few days, I decided to just stop the Oxycodne and also to really dial it back on the other pain killer meds.

After 4 or 5 days at my sisters’, she took me back to my place and that’s where things are now. I wear a back brace about 12 hours a day to keep my back aligned as the new situation in my spine stabilizes. There’s still pain in my back but it’s to a much lesser degree than what I experienced for the months with the leg cramps, before the operation.

I think perhaps the thing that helped me the most through this time was a God-given sense of humor. It kind of surprised me at times that, in very pinnacle situations, I found something to laugh about and to not be overwrought by the events of the moment. Perhaps this was an answer to the many people who were praying for me. I was able to laugh or at least be cheerful and light-hearted through all this and I do feel it was something supernaturally, God-given from the Lord.

And I thought to just give you a little back ground to all this, as my last year has been one of the most unusual I’ve ever had. Last February Facebook suddenly “paused” my ability to use Facebook advertising. I still could communicate with everybody but my weekly ads on Facebook were stopped. For years, I’ve been doing Facebook advertising of the videos I’ve done in many languages. So this “pause” from Facebook stopped my ministry to millions of folks.

Facebook said there was some anomaly with my payment method and they were pausing my account. They told me a few things to do, which I did, and I waited for it all to work out. Days passed and I wrote again. They wrote back, asking me to be patient. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months.

I got increasingly desperate as well as rather hopeless. Facebook has billions of customers and you don’t just call up a representative. But here’s how God answered the prayers of many for my situation. I lived in Brazil in the late 90’s and out of the blue a friend I knew there wrote to say that her daughter, who I knew when she was 12, now lived about 5 kilometers from me and would like to meet me after all this time.

We did that and guess what? Turns out that she had worked for some time in the Meta company, which owns Facebook. I told her my plight and she said she might know someone on the inside. Things moved fast after that and in 10 days my account was restored. To me this was just an astounding miracle when I saw no way I was going to be able to contact anyone in Facebook to get my account back on.

Then, 5 days after Facebook was restored, there was a sudden lightning strike around 40 yards from my desk here. There was sort of a storm going on right then but there’d been no lightning nearby. My laptop was destroyed, my router, modem, the printer, the aircon system in the house and wiring under the house, all were knocked out. Replacing the laptop, which is what I do the video editing and website work on, was a big deal. Thankfully none of us were hurt and the house and cars were not hit. But getting back to where I could work on videos and do editing on a new computer took many weeks.

Two months after the lightning, I was holding on to a tree stump in my backyard that I’d held on to many times before. Suddenly it snapped and I was diving through the air towards the bottom of the garden. I guess I went close to 4 meters forward and 3 meters downward. The full force of the dive/fall was taken by my left hand which transferred up to my left shoulder. The result was that I had a major tear in my left shoulder, so much so that a rotor cuff surgery was not possible. I’m awaiting an operation to replace my left shoulder joint at some point when it can be worked out.

One month after my fall down the hill, in July, I left for my yearly visit to see my kids in Scandinavia. I was already feeling a little funny but not too bad. But when I got over there, I was diagnosed with Shingles. Thankfully it was a relatively mild case but it continued through my visit to Scandinavia.

In August, before returning to Texas, I was briefly visiting friends at a fellowship in Romania. That’s when the leg and tendon problem really took center stage. I’d been having pain in that area for months but it had been manageable. In Romania though, the pain got so bad that I was walking awkwardly and not really able to be a part of the activities. So when I got back to the States in late August, I knew that finding out what the matter was with my legs was top priority

Back in the States, I began in earnest to try to find the root cause of my leg pain which continue to worsen. But no one really knew what it was. The first doctor prescribed pain killers and “muscle relaxants” which were some of the worst things I’ve ever taken. I stopped that immediately. The next doctor said I had “Polymyalgia rheumatica” and sent me to a rheumatologist. At that appointment that doctor said that it didn’t really seem like rheumatism to him and I didn’t think so either.

Of course all this took time, months in fact. I was well into the fall and still kind of flaying around in trying to find out what was causing all this. But the Lord was certainly working behind the scenes. I had a regular appointment with my cardiologist and I was explaining to her how there hadn’t been anyone really knowing what was the problem with my leg pain. She then told me she thought it was my back. I sort of corrected her and told her my back was just fine, never had any pain there.

But she went on to explain that the nerves that affected my hamstrings, tendons and buttocks all run down through and out of my spinal column. So she ordered a MRI as soon as possible. And that was the breakthrough that was needed.

By then it was the first week of January, 3½ months after I got back from Romania. But at least the problem had been found: “severe spinal stenosis” in my lower spine. As one doctor explained, my spinal column should be 15 millimeters wide at that place but it was only 4 millimeters wide. Quite a pinch. In mid February I had the surgery on my back, what I already wrote about at the beginning of this article.

You thought that was all, right? Nope, I didn’t tell you the other traumas of September through December. I had two loose teeth and hadn’t been to the dentist in long time. Although I didn’t have any pain, I thought it would be good to get the loose teeth checked out. And dear God in His great Providence led me to some exceptionally competent, compassionate South American dentists not far from me.

On my first visit the lady gave me a thorough exam and then rather somberly told me I had 11 teeth that were infected and that the infection was most likely spreading to every part of my body. She said I needed those extracted, plus two crowns replaced, a root canal and various other cavities taken care of. Also there will be bridges top and bottom to replace the pulled teeth.

Actually, by this time, I’d been under such an onslaught from one side or the other for months that this didn’t really faze me very much. So through October into December I had the 11 teeth pulled and almost all the other things she mentioned were taken care of. But it all was made so much easier by these two amazing Christian sisters and their touch of expertise, as well as they gentle ways. And of course the mighty grace and mercy of the Lord.

Well, I hope it’s been ok to tell you about all this. Many of you keep up with me on Facebook and I have been posting prayer requests about these things. I don’t think I’ve ever had a time like this that’s happened to me over this last year. And so it looks like I have come through and out of this intense period and now I’m in a rehab after the operation. They said this would take 4 to 6 weeks and it hasn’t been 2 yet.

Possibly some of my friends are going through similar things currently: shake ups in their health, severe and long term challenges across multiple fronts, personality changes as we enter new periods of our lives. I’m so thankful that I have been able to remain rooted to the Christian foundations I’ve had since I was 21 and to be able to stand in Him, through it all.

And I’m so thankful for the many of you who’ve stood with me in prayer during this time. I’m utterly sure if I had not had the Lord and His continuing strengthening in my soul, I certainly could not have survived all this. I could write much more but this is already long. I hope this is a blessing for you. Many are going through medical experiences in these times and perhaps this is a help to some to know how the Lord took care of me through it all.

God bless you, thanks so much!

Mark

II Tim 3:11  “…but out of them all the Lord delivered me.”

II Tim 4:18   “And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work and shall preserve me unto His heavenly kingdom.”

“It’s all by your grace Lord, cause somebody prayed.”