Botox Anyone?

“Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense.”
–Proverbs 12:11

“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.“
–Matthew 18:10

Every once in awhile, you read a story in the news that makes you cringe. Mind you, the one I am talking about is probably not the worst we hear about these days. In this fallen world, we are inundated with horrific stories of crimes and disasters every day. But this one is unusual, so of course it has gotten some attention.

Over the weekend it was reported that a mother admitted to injecting Botox in her 8 year old daughter for the purposes of competing in a child beauty pageant. You can read the article here. For those of you who may not know, Botox is a drug made from Botulin, that is used by people to temporarily remove wrinkles. It is normally NOT prescribed to children. Obviously, since wrinkles are usually something adults are trying to prevent, the thought of injecting this drug into a child sounds lubricious, since children do not normally suffer from wrinkles and there could be serious side affects as well.

Why would a mother feel the need to use Botox on their daughter? Is it really possible that her daughter has wrinkles? Even beyond that, what would possess this mother with the desire to inject a drug into her child for competitive reasons? What would happen if the child ended up having a complication? How could she live with herself knowing that she caused her child to have a medical problem in her pursuit of a pageant trophy?

I am sometimes amazed at how low we humans will go in pursuit of sin. Jesus tells how precious children are in the passage above, yet we simply don’t learn. Why do we allow the sin of vanity to affect us so much that we would be willing to harm our children to bow down to this idol? I suppose this is no different than any other sin. Those who sink so low as to resort to adultery start with a look, or a simple compliment. Those who fall into the sin of addiction start with one drink.

So I guess that this mother probably had to start somewhere. Maybe it started with someone innocently suggesting that her daughter should be in a beauty pageant. Then maybe, someone else mentioned a pageant or contest in the area. Before she knew it, they were wrapped up in the pageant community, and she was now living through her daughter, losing all focus on what was right for her. At some point, she may have been so wrapped up in her sin, her daughter’s well being was no longer important. Her daughter was no longer the precious child Jesus taught us about that inherits the kingdom. She was now just a means to an end.

Lets stop and think about this and how it pertains to us. We have all suffered from sin. Since we are all sinners, we all have a sin or two that we struggle with. If we are not careful, that sin can take over our lives. It always starts small, but grows as we give in to our worldly desires.

“No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it. “
–1 Corinthians 1-:13

Let’s remember always that Jesus was also tempted by sin, and resisted. God will never give us temptations without giving us a way out. Remember also that God always warns us before we fall into sin. There will always be something that reminds us what is right and what is wrong. With that said, God also gave us free will, and it will always be our decision to make. He shows us the path, but we must embrace it.

I will say one more thing. Resist the temptation to sin, and then rationalize. It is NEVER the fault of someone else that you sinned. No one is responsible for your sin but you. No one pushes you into adultery, addiction, and surely not vanity. Let’s make sure to take personal responsibility for our actions. It is only through personal responsibility and surrendering to God’s will that Jesus can dwell within us and make the change necessary in our heart to transform us and mold us into the child of God He wants us to be.

To the mother who injected the Botox in her child, be the mother you want your child to grow up to be. Let your child be a child, and look to the Bible for guidance.

Please, stay away from the Botox!

Husband or Nurse?

“The nurse should be here soon.”

She could not have been more than 19 or 20 years old, staring back at me with a pale look on her face. She was of dark complexion normally, but now white as a ghost.

“We don’t have time to wait. It’s going to leak all over the wound. We can’t wait for that to happen.”

I am hoping to snap the young nurse-in-training back into reality, as I stand there with a mass of gauze on top of my wife’s ileostomy, preventing it from leaking all over her open wound, a wound so large it took up most of her abdomen. When I first saw it after surgery, I had to look away. I had never seen such a large, open wound. I cried that night, and asked God to get my wife through this somehow. Now it was months later, and the wound had made little progress because of the ileostomy that was created as a result of vascular disease. It forced surgeons to cut away about half of her gangrenous colon. The ileostomy was added above a large wound created when flesh from her abdomen had to be cut away to save her life.

The nurse is standing in a corner, like she is trapped there. She still has that deer in headlights look, and the gauze I am holding will not last much longer. The nurses had already told me not to change the dressing myself. The problem is that finding a nurse willing and able to do the work necessary was not easy. Most nurses don’t expect to have to deal with this, and no nurse wants to. The end result is that nurses tend to disappear when the dressing needs to be changed, which led to my wife’s mom and I having to learn to change the dressings. In reality, we become better at it than the nurses.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ok, forget it. We have to do this ourselves. Get that bag over there with all of the stuff. Hurry!”

I am no longer the patent’s husband. I am the nurse, and the nurse in training is my assistant. My assertive voice brings enough clarity to my assistant that she follows my command. She gets the materials and drops them on the floor next to me, awaiting my instructions. I put on some latex gloves.

“Put on some gloves. Now take out plenty of gauze, the saline bottle, the scissors, and the ileostomy bag. I will also need that tape, and the cream for her wound.”

The nurse follows my orders, laying out all of the materials on the bed. For the next 10 minutes, I clean the area around her ileostomy. I cut the paper gasket into the right shape, and affix it to her skin around the ileostomy using a special adhesive. Using that same adhesive, I affix the ileostomy bag to the gasket, and hold it in place until it adheres. Now the leaking into the wound has stopped, and I can start working on the wound. I use saline and gauze to clean the inside of the wound. It is quite painful for her and she is crying. It was so hard to do this the first time, and it still breaks my heart. But to save her life I block out my feelings, while still trying to console her.

“I know it hurts. I am almost done.”

She understands. She has more courage than anyone I have ever met. How she maintains her sanity through all of this is beyond me. She has been in and out of hospitals for 3 years. Yet every time she goes in, she can’t wait to get out and go on with her life. She takes the time to buy gifts for the nurses who take care of her. Everyone in the hospital knows us by first name now, and cannot believe her resiliency, her bravery.

Many of them tell me they don’t know how I do it. They tell me I am a hero, or a saint, or a great husband. It actually makes me angry. I don’t want to be thought of as something out of the ordinary. The day I married my wife I made a commitment to God. I am doing what I am supposed to do, no more and no less. It angers me to hear people talk about me like I am doing something so rare. I did not ask to be a hero, and I am certainly no saint. I am just a man standing by his family, doing what God expects of a husband. I don’t want the job of hero, not this way, not for this reason.

Once I am done cleaning and applying fresh dressings, the pain subsides, and my wife thanks me. The nurse in training puts the materials away and quickly departs. I never saw her again. She either learned something and today is a better nurse, or she chose another profession.

My wife passed on September 14, 2007. Diabetes, Kidney failure, Gastroparesis, and Vascular disease finally won the battle. I wish I could tell you that before she died, I prayed with her. I wish I could tell you that I made sure she sought God. I did not. Even though I prayed often, we did not pray together. I was so caught up in trying to keep myself together, fighting with nurses, doctors, insurance companies, that I did not take the time to pray with her. Funny thing is, she found God in spite of me. A few months before she died, she knew what was going to happen. She called a family member. I know that day, she surrendered her life to God, and she sits in heaven today. I thank God for intervening, for reaching her when I could not.

God has a way of showing up at pivotal moments in our lives. I know He was there that day I changed her dressings, working through me. I cried that night, asking God to give me the strength to continue. For three years, my life was a blur. How I maintained my sanity would be a mystery, if I didn’t know now that God was carrying me. He had plans for me. He took care of me, gave me just enough strength to wake up the next morning and do it all over again. And I did, over and over again.

Three years after her death, I met another wonderful woman, and I married her. She has some of the same wonderful qualities of my first wife, even though they are quite different. I am at peace these days, knowing we did everything we could for my first wife. My new wife is the beneficiary of the wisdom I gained during those years. I value life so much more today. I am closer to God, and she helps to keep me on that path. So my wife and I move forward every day, having entered into a new covenant with God, knowing He has a path for our lives.

There was a time I cried out to God, not knowing if He was listening. I hoped, but I did not know. It took three years after my wife passed, while I wandered through life in a daze, for me to realize something. God was there every step of the way. I was no hero, nothing extra ordinary. It was God who worked through me, even when I questioned whether He heard my prayers. So today I KNOW what He did. I thank Him every day for the many blessings He has granted me, and I ask Him to continue to give me strength, to reveal His plan for my life.

“I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
–Philippians 4:12-13

Stop the Insanity

While I have tried to stay out of politics on my blog, there is one subject that really bothers me. The The Affordable Care Act or Obama-care as some call it, has been quite controversial. There are good reasons for reforming Health Care. In the last 10 years or so I have had plenty of experience with health facilities. I have had to fight with doctors, Insurance companies, hospitals, and other health providers. Ensuring a loved one gets the best possible care in America at times puts you at odds with health care systems that seem to be more worried with their bottom line than the wellness of their patients. So it is up to the patient and their loved ones to make sure everyone stays focused on the goal.

With that said, I am convinced no country in the world has the quality of health care we have in America. No one in this country is denied emergency health care. Anyone, rich or poor, can walk into an ER and get life saving medication, regardless of their ability to pay. The issues are usually when it comes to being able to afford the health insurance required to STAY healthy. We have millions of people in this country that simply cannot afford health insurance. There are also many others who have health insurance that is inadequate. While health insurance is NOT a right afforded by the constitution, as a country that cares about its poor and disadvantaged, it is important to try and find a way to improve the system.

I applaud our efforts to do just that. However, we didn’t do it right. Politics as usual played a huge part in the current law. Instead of working together in a bipartisan manner, we shoved a bill down the throats of the American people, and the result is a law that is not going to fix the problem. As an example, take a look at the following article from the US Department of Health and Human Services:

http://www.hhs.gov/ociio/regulations/approved_applications_for_waiver.html

It shows that currently 733 waivers have been given out to the law. That means that 733 organizations have been waived from complying with the law. The reason? There is more than one reason, but many of them are companies that provide mini-med plans to their workers and would have to eliminate them under the law, leaving their workers without health coverage. Wasn’t the law supposed to increase the number of people that could afford health coverage? How could we pass a health reform law that would actually leave so many people out in the cold, so much so that 733 companies are now exempt from following the law? While the waivers issued so far represent only 1 percent of people on private health plans, that 1 percent is 2.1 million people. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lot of people to me, and the number of waivers given out are increasing. This is only one of several issues many have raised with this new law.

Again, I believe there are provisions in this law that are good, such as the ending of the pre-existing conditions clause. But we obviously missed the boat here folks. If you remember, last year President Obama had a televised summit where he met with politicians from both major parties. Several of them implored the President to step back and start over, urging him to listen to both parties and scale back the law. Many wanted him to tackle the issues that had bipartisan support first, instead of this huge bill that so many had problems with. He and the majority in Congress refused, and we are seeing the results. It cost the Democrats the mid-term election and is costing the American people in higher premiums, more debt, and other issues in the future. It is time for Washington to start listening to the people.

Will they?

I can’t tell you I am optimistic.