In these last days we have much to be concerned about but God is with us no matter how dark things appear. I want to encourage others by sharing a miracle in my life when the Lord protected me. He is protecting us each day but we are not always aware of how and when He intervenes; yet sometimes there are situations when it is obvious.
In 1974 I went to my doctor for a checkup. I felt fine but just wanted to be sure. He looked in my left ear and asked if it hurt. I said it did not. He kept looking. Then he said it looked infected and wrote a script for antibiotics and said come back in two weeks. I came back and he kept looking in the ear, asking me about pain. I said I was fine. He insisted I see an ENT.
I went to the ENT and he said the same things. He put me on a stronger antibiotics. I finished them and went back. The ear still didn’t look right. He said he thought it might be a mastoid or something more serious, and scheduled me for exploratory surgery. I was 23 but he insisted on calling my parents. Everyone was worried except me.
After surgery the doctor came in my room and said that I was born without a certain bone in my ear, and said that he replaced it with a piece of teflon sheet. When I got out of the hospital, he kept sending me for x-rays on the left side of my neck. I had no idea why he was curious about my neck. Remember, this was 1974, before MRIs and CT scans.
Fast forward to 1985: I got a head ache that incapacitated me. I can’t even describe the pain. It was all on the left side behind my ear. I went to another ENT and he ordered a CT scan of my ear and neck. He called me in and told me that I had a glomus tumor in my ear close to my brain. He said it had to come out. He said there was a chance it was cancerous.
The night before my surgery I was falling asleep in the hospital. A nurse woke me up around midnight, and it was the doctor calling to speak to me. He said that something woke him up, and he could not operate without further tests. He ordered an arteriogram.
After the procedure he came in and sat on my bed. He said, “Thank God that I didn’t operate, because I probably would have killed you. What we thought was a glomus tumor, was actually your carotid artery in the wrong place.” He told me that because I was born without a bone in my inner ear, the carotid artery grew right through the inner ear canal. He said that it was extremely rare (only around 40 cases in medical history) and asked if the hospital could take images of it.
I told him about the exploratory surgery I had in 1974. He wanted to see the operative report, which I did not have. He asked me to call that doctor’s office to get the report. I called them and the nurse said they didn’t have it. Then my doctor told me to say that my attorney would be calling. All of a sudden they had the report on microfiche.
They mailed it to me. I brought it to the doc. By that time the initial head pain had gotten better. When the doctor read the operative report he said, “Girl, you are a walking miracle! You should have stroked or died on that table!”
The operative report stated:
The middle ear was explored. A large mass was seen bulging from the middle of the Hypotympanum. It reached the under surface of the drum and was adherent to the handle of the malleus. It was soft but did pulsate very minimally. The mucosa was removed from the surface of it and appeared to be the wall of a large vein, probably the jugular bulb although it was not in the usual position, the jugular bulb being too far anterior.
The entire middle ear was explored, care being taken to dissect the handle of the malleus from the mass. The mass was then aspirated and was full of blood. It bled profusely and stopped with pressure and a little gelfoam over the sight of the puncture. It was thought to be a vascular anomaly, probably the jugular bulb, and nothing further was done. A Teflon sheet was placed over the mass between the handle of the malleus and the mass to prevent reoccurrence and of adhesions.
That doctor had not been totally honest with me, but the Lord kept me safe in the exploratory surgery, and then He woke the new doctor up so he would not operate. This was in 1974 and I was not born-again until 1983!
GOD IS SO GOOD.
email: grandmageri422@gmail.com