God has some strange diseases out there, and I had one.  Just before my thirty-first birthday I came down with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.  Linnea had recently turned two and we were living on Hazel Street near the Gothros, the Whites, and the Quinns.

Guillain-Barré is a syndrome because people don’t know what causes it and are not quite sure how to fix it.  I have heard there have been treatment advances recently involving complete blood transfusions.  What IS known about Guillain-Barré is that it is a neurological disorder where the Mylar sheathing on your nerves is stripped away, resulting in paralysis because there is no more communication between your brain and your muscles.  It’s an ascending paralysis, meaning it starts in your feet and hands and moves up your body.  If the paralysis reaches your diaphragm then you’re in trouble and you have to go on a ventilator.  If it reaches your heart then you’re in even more trouble and have to have a pacemaker installed.  At some point, the nerve sheathing stops shedding and starts regenerating. 

The course of the disease is pretty well-defined even though it’s a syndrome; they even have a named treatment plan – Expectant Therapy.  They expect you are going to hit bottom at some point and then start getting better; expectant therapy is keeping you alive until you do so.  I like that – keep me alive until I start getting better.  About 2% of the victims die, but those odds were in my favor, especially as I was a young non-smoker.  And, there was another Guillain-Barré Syndrome patient in the hospital when I arrived.  He died, which probably made my odds better somehow.

My case was just like everybody else, at least as far as I know.  You fall down the stairs the night before Halloween, one of the first signs that your muscles are going.  You go to the clinic on Monday and talk to Dr Keith who was substituting for Dr Geoff that day.  It turns out Dr Keith had presented a paper on Guillain-Barré the prior summer, knew all about it, and was surprised to see a real case.  He puts you in the hospital and tells you the basics:  “We don’t know how long this will last, but at some point you will probably feel like your bones are pressing down through your body because the muscles are no longer able to support them.”  Something to look forward to?

You spend your birthday in the hospital, but get nice cards and a banner, and then your prayer buddies come along and crush your head with when they lay hands on, because you just can’t hold your head up and it really hurts and you cry. 

You gradually get worse until the point where you choke on chicken soup and you have to go on the ventilator.  Someone pumps an air bag through your mouth while you’re waiting; there is a delay because someone had to go downstairs to the pharmacy to get the cocaine.  They make you snort cocaine to increase the size of your nasal passage so they can ram the air tube down into the lungs, and then the ventilator takes over. 

The next morning they replace the nose tube because the prior one was too small and was leaking.  This time, the drug of choice is curare – they don’t want you moving while they work.  You hear a train go through your head (right to left) and realize the complete paralysis of the curare occurred while your eyes are open… you see what’s going on! The doctors talk like you can’t see OR hear.  “Let’s work fast, we have about two minutes.  Do we need a seven or a seven and a half?”  I am about to die, I am a car,  and the mechanics are figuring out what size wrench to use…

We get the tube size figured out and the ventilator breathes for you in the Intensive Care Unit and punches a hole in the left lung (pneumothorax), requiring an incision to re-inflate the thing.  Then pneumonia sets in and the doctors are planning a new air tube through the esophagus (tracheostomy) for Monday morning.   At just the right time on Sunday night, the elders come in and pray like it says to do in James 5, and you start getting better.  Literally. These prayer buddies said I was ashen when they came in but had turned pink by the time they left.  A Monday morning x-ray showed enough improvement to call off the trach!

There are many  highlights in this story – cocaine, curare, collapsed lung, choking on chicken soup, etc.  But the best one, from my point of view, was the miracle answer to the elders’ prayer – I started getting better!