Date: Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Day 1 of 173
Well, it’s my first night alone in Taipei’s Truth Lutheran’s College dorm. And wouldn’t you have it, it’s my birthday. I’m 22, today. Wow. 22 years of God’s Faithfulness, Grace, Mercy, and Steadfast Love. Isn’t it amazing that he chose this moment to begin my 6 months in Taipei? What a gift. Amazing experience, amazing lessons to be learned, an amazing opportunity to expand and stretch my faith—all start on my birthday. I don’t know how to tell you. Oh, where to begin? Tears Or Joy? Pain or ecstasy? Loneliness? Unspeakable sadness or unspeakable happiness? This is where my faith becomes real, righ now. This is when God appears—when I’m being brought low, when I’m the weakest and most saddened. I have known this truth, this unbelievable reality. Why don’t I feel excited? Why am I not jumping for joy at the opportunity to serve the LORD? Why am I so depressed? Why I am so broken? Of all people to know and understand God’s steadfast faithfulness and unwavering presence, it’s me.
How, you might ask. Let me tell you. Loneliness has been a reality in my life for much of my life, but not loneliness in the traditional sense. because you see, I had many friends. I didn’t have a problem with making friends, but for some reason out of my knowledge whenever, I’d make a lasting and deep friendship, God would chose to take me out of my comfort zone and place me somewhere new. This happened at the end of Grade School, High School and College. Each time God was teaching me valuable lessons in dependence, obedience, and faithfulness; but each time the pain became more and more unbearable, each relationship deeper and more valuable; and each lesson increasingly more endearing. The most significant transition, besides the present, was when I graduated from High School. Up until that time, I had become numerous deep friendships where we’d all encourage one another to pursue our relationship with God. The most notable of these individuals being, Zachary Larson, Josh Daramola, Austen Dahmes, Mike Dehnboustel, Patrick Franzen, Kyra and Tahnee Brundell, Sarah and Megan Byron, Paul Willis, and Whitney Lowe. All of these individuals, powerhouses of faith, mentioned and those left unmentioned, all endeavored to grow and stretch my faith. Who knew that as an answer to all of our prayers to foster a new more real faith, God would chose to take me out of my comfort-zone and place my in an entirely new environment, called Wheaton College?
Needlessly to say, the first two years were emotionally lonely and temptations abounded. All of my feelings of loneliness and isolation, despite my ever growing friend group, climaxed and exploded all around me my Senior year at Wheaton. In late September, 2011, my Men’s Ultimate Frisbee College Open Club Team and I headed to Lafayette, Indian, to compete in a tournament near Purdue University. The night before my life threatening incident, I shared a meal and a joyful evening with my dear friend, Mike Dehnboustel. We had dinner at a local diner where we both ordered meaty burgers. Jokingly, Mike suggested that I order a burger prepared with peanut butter then slathered with a peanut butter type sauce. Casually I declined, but answered his innocent remark with my own stating that I should because it’d make our night way more exciting than it had been. Little did I know that this hilarious interaction would play out later the next day.
That Sunday, the second day of our tournament, one of my teammate’s parents brought some chocolate chip cookies that had been prepared with walnuts. When I was offered one, I asked if there were any peanuts in them or if they’d been prepared with any peanut oil—I had glossed over the fact that I’m deathly allergic to all nuts not just ground beans like the peanut. The parent answered no, and thinking nothing of it, I picked one up and took an small bite not sure if I should believe him or not. Oh how wrong I’d been! Within seconds I knew right away that something was terribly wrong. In an effort to prevent the worst, I ran to the nearest porta-potty to throw out the cookie and induce myself to vomit out the rest of its contents within my stomach, too late. From the time it took to run to the porta-potty, vomit, then fast walk back to the playing field—2 minutes at most—swelling of my face, mouth, and upper throat/wind pipe had begun and had advanced quite quickly. By the time I returned to the playing field swelling in my mouth and cheeks were pretty bad. I asked the parent if he had any Benadryl to combat the swelling and the increasingly worse reaction I was having to the cookie. When he ran to the car and returned with the bad news that he did not have any Benadryl with him, I began to contemplate a hospital trip and started to assess just how bad the reaction was—did I need to use my Epipen?
I asked one of my teammates to go get a trainer to see if they had any Benadryl handy. When my teammate returned with the trainer, the trainer said that they were not allowed by policy to administer any medication to me because they could not be liable to any complications that may arise if they worsened the incident. The only thing they could do is call for an ambulance. At that point, approximately 15 minutes past the initial ingestion, my swelling and reaction to the walnuts had steadily advanced to point where I was starting to feeling light headed and nauscious (the beginning of a lowered blood pressure response my body was inducing to try to limit the spread of the allergen toxins that were starting to infect my blood stream) and requested that they call for the ambulance. When I was being walked to the ambulance pick-up site, I was in a pretty bad place; and even though I was being lead to the spot, I felt out of it. By the time the ambulance came, 45 minutes had past. After a quick assessment, the medics decided that no matter what I said they were going to take me to the hospital no matter what I might have said. Needless to say, I don’t think I would have refused! Once on the ambulance, they immediately began an IV drip and then asked if I used my Epipen. When I had told them that I hadn’t, they quickly gave me a 5 mg shot of Epi as opposed to the standard 3 mg.
I took approximately 5 minutes, 10 max, to reach the hospital. Upon my arrival, the ER doctor assigned to my case quickly ordered another shot of Epi after looking at my vitals. This was to be the stop-gap treatment before he could figure out the best course of action to both slow the spread of the toxins and prevent the dreaded post-drug reaction which could be 3x as bad and could be a fatal reaction. This is due to the fact that once the steroids and other treatments wear off, if the toxins had not be removed or flushed from my system the reaction after would be body-wide and there would be little to nothing they could do if it was detected too late. But in my case, since the initial reaction was already in the critical zone, the reaction being within 15 minutes (in my case it was less than 5 minutes), an after-treatment reaction could be so fast and so severe that they’d have no chance to treatment in time. So they began a threefold treatment utilizing three types of steroids: one lasting 6 hours, another would treat during the first night and through half of the second day—12 hours, and lastly the last treatment phase would be in pill form to last me two weeks—making sure there is no chance of an after treatment reaction. The side-effects of all these steroids was drowsiness, so I took the week off after I returned to Wheaton College.
During my night in the hospital, I found myself wondering where was all of my friends? I found myself both enjoying the company and amazing treatment and service that the ICU nurses gave me and questioning God’s design to leave me stranded and alone without anyone to hear me out and help get through this trial. Not only did they basically bring back from the brink of death, but they also made sure that I had a way to get home, by organizing a cab to take me to the nearest train station and bought me a ticket on the only express train that day. For this and so much more, I owe my life to those selfless angels that serve in Elizabeth Medical Center at Lafayette, Indian.
When I finally arrived at Union Station, I was elated but also thoroughly fatigued. I was happy that I had arrived in Chicago, but disappointed that I still had an hour Metra ride before getting back in Wheaton, then needed to walk all the way to my dorm, MacEvans, in the center of campus. I almost collapsed when I got to the counter to by my ticket home; I literally had to hold myself up using the counter. Then gathering the last bit of energy I stumbled onto my train seconds before it left, success! Then slept all the way back to my station at College Ave. Another prayer got me to my first floor room on Evans 1. Then after a phone call to my mother making sure she knew that I had returned to campus safely I took another good long nap.
When I woke up, the feeling of loneliness didn’t end. Even though I was now with my closed friends I still didn’t feel emotionally content; in fact, I felt drained. I felt tired of putting in all of the effort to develop friendships that didn’t seem to matter when I really needed them. Slowly, ever so slowly, the friends closed to me appeared to distance themselves from me, at the moment when I needed them most. I couldn’t believe it. I spent hours up arguing and pleading with God to make himself known: why did he use my college experience to teach me one lesson, loneliness? I could think of any other lesson than that: learning to deal with incredible loneliness in the midst of throngs of people. It bothered me that on a campus that was so friendly and so kind that the friends that I had made who I thought I could depend on for spiritual, emotional, and relational sustenance had, at the moment of greatest need, seemed to feel the most distant and ignorant of all that I was dealing with emotionally, spiritually, and relationally. During the day, I put on a face trying to hide the fact that everything was in fact not even close to being okay; praying that one of my friends would ask me how I was doing so I could tell them the truth—none did. At night I cried myself to sleep wondering what I did to deserve such pain and torment.
Then one particularly terrible night, I remember leaving my dorm so that I would awake my roommate and walking to a park bench on Blanchard lawn (an open field in front of Wheaton’s infamous Blanchard Hall), I cried even more. In between sobs, I began an earnest prayer that God would return to me. I confessed of my spiritual adultery. I had spent years looking in friendships for what God could only satisfy. Then at my moment of deepest repentance, God answered my prayer in the most unexpected way. I still don’t know what to make of it, but at that moment, a skunk waddled up looked up at me with the most comforting eyes and put a paw on my leg, almost as if saying, “it’s okay, God is here with you; God has been with you when you felt most alone; and He will never leave you.”
After that moment, God slowly brought back each and every individual friendship and ever so slowly mended, repaired, and matured each friendship even as I began to learn the place in life that friends have when compared to theFriendship. But now after learning yet another lesson on loneliness God as chosen to do the same thing, this time on another level: literal physical separation from all relational ties. But even now when I feel so alone, I am slowly being revealed to small glimpses of God’s blessings: I still have my aunt and her family here in Taipei, the Pastor that I’m interning under is has been Christ-like in his willingness to accommodate me and make sure I learn all I want to learn, and lastly and most surprisingly the only roommate that is present during the summer plays Ultimate Frisbee!!! God is still active, though I am alone. Though I mourn for past happenings, God is present with me past and future. God is my present, this birthday. What a gift. I suddenly feel so unworthy of this gift.
Living for His Glory and My Joy,
David
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