I Am A Medical Mystery

I really am.  I'm not talking about the fact that I have long legs but I can't run fast.  Nor am I referring to the fact that I have a freakishly small number of teeth due to my tiny mouth and large teeth and the pulling of enough teeth to make room for all of those big guys in my baby-sized mouth.  No.  I am talking about the fact that there is nothing and everything wrong with me.  Read on.  I promise I have not made up a single diagnosis.  These are all quotes from medical experts to me.


I am allergic to my own skin.  Yes.  I have these weird red circular spots that come and go from my hands, feet, and legs.  They look like burn marks.  They are under the skin and are untreatable.  Painful? No. Weird? Absolutely.


I was born with not a heart murmur but something similar.  It was a whole in part of my heart.  Am I blowing your mind with these technical medical terms?  It closed enough soon after my birth that I did not have to have open heart surgery to have it repaired.  I had regular check ups to monitor this problem until I was 11 or so.  Then they said it wasn't changing and wasn't too much of a problem.  Back in the day when we tried to get pregnant, the doctor made me have it looked at it again because they were worried about how it would affect me during a pregnancy.  When I went to my check up it was gone.  Which is impossible.  I'll come back to this in a minute.


I had a weird bump in the skin behind my knee.  It felt like a teeny tiny twig.   The doctor made a small incision to remove it (which left a bigger scar than the bump had been in the first place), and then dug around for a bit.  He put some things in a little metal tin and said there had been an explosion in a layer of my skin below the surface and he was removing the shrapnel.  Now you know I am telling the truth.  No one would make that bizarreness up.  


Next!  I had all these weird and random health problems one after the other.  I will spare you some of the graphic symptoms but included in the list were swollen ankles so big I couldn't even fit socks on -- I could barely walk, fatigue like you wouldn't believe, stomach issues, etc.  No one could figure out what was wrong with me.  For almost two years.  They checked every level of everything you can measure levels of.  I will note that all of my hormone levels were totally normal.  Then one day after some lab work I got a call to come in to the doctor's office, and they told me they thought I might have cancer but they weren't sure where, so I was screened for a whole lot of different kinds.  Side note: mammograms suck.  Then they realized it was just some cysts on my pituitary gland that secrete cancerous toxins.  Which I am happy to say I just take a pill for every day.  No problem.  (Hang in there, the point is coming!)  So! Once they figured that out, I became pretty healthy. 


We started trying to get pregnant.  It had taken awhile to get to the point where my body was healthy and this was a possibility to aim for.  Just to be clear, I was a lady with some weird issues, but who was at this point totally checked out and okay in every way.  (Skin shrapnel and being allergic to myself aside.)  I had a healthy heart, properly working everything, hormone levels all where they should be.  And no pregnancy.  I like to think this is one of God's most beautiful stories in my life.  He made sure I knew my body was as in good of a place as I ever could have dreamed it would be.  And no pregnancy.  Because!  That's not how we're doing it in my family.  Adoption is God's A plan for us.  He knew who our children would be before they were born.  And He made sure we knew they were from Him all along.  It blows my mind and fills me with joy.


This Wednesday morning I am turning in our Home Study packet.  We're ready for our third child.  And we are so, so excited to see who God has for us.  It feels nice to cry happy tears for a change.


Love,
Molly