5

Healing Tears and a Van Reservation

(The final week in Hong Kong)

Fred was not the only one who needed prayer. Suzanne had displayed unusual stamina and emotional stability through the events she had been through. The Lord had sustained her through the long trip to Hong Kong by assuring her, "If I were going to take him home to be with me, Fred would have died in the hotel room." This assurance kept her at peace and enabled her to hold herself together.

But now that the most serious danger was over and Fred’s condition improved, Suzanne’s deteriorated. Jet lag and stress had kept her short of sleep for days, and it all began to catch up with her. The poor air quality in Hong Kong had given her a sore throat, and she was having dizzy spells. On Thursday and Friday, she nearly fainted twice. It seemed that her body had reached the breaking point, and now she was falling apart.

Friday night, as she was praying desperate prayers for help, she felt the Lord telling her to cry. She hadn’t cried in over a week. That night she held the tears back. The Lord was so good, there was no reason to cry.

After a sleepless night, morning came, and again she felt the Lord telling her to cry. Finally, the tears came, and she wept, and wept, and wept. That morning she learned that tears can be a gift of God. When Pastor Wong called, she told him, "I’m crying now, but I’ll be alright." Pastor Wong told her that it was OK -- she needed to cry. That was what she needed to hear. She didn’t need to hear that she needed to pull herself together or that things would get better. She just needed to be reassured that tears were OK. She cried all the stress out of her body and felt much better afterward.

Pastor Wong helped Suzanne by bringing her breakfast and always having a compassionate, listening ear. He took care of settling the hospital bills at a time when Suzanne could not face them. The bill was only a fraction of what a comparable stay in an American hospital would cost, but Suzanne didn’t know how she would pay it. She had maxed out her credit card to pay for the medical evacuation and there seemed no way to transfer funds from their bank account in the USA to Hong Kong. Pastor Wong put the entire bill on his credit card. (A month later, God showed he was still working, when the heath insurance company’s check for reimbursement arrived on the day the credit card bill was due.)

Pastor Wong also arranged for his cousin, Eleanor, who lived in Hong Kong, to take Suzanne out to eat and go shopping. Having a friend to pass the time of day with, walking arm-in-arm as Chinese women do, down the colorful streets of Hong Kong helped take her mind off the stressful situation she was in.

By Friday, just a week after his initial hospitalization, Fred was well enough to move out of the intensive care unit into a regular hospital room. Antibiotic treatment would be complete on Monday, and the doctor said that Fred could then be released. Monday evening, the doctor announced that the MRI showed that the blood clot in his brain was gone. His kidney functions were returning to normal.

Plans were made to travel back to the USA the following Friday. This seemed ambitious. On Monday, Fred could not stand on his own. He could barely move his right knee and needed the support of two people to maneuver the two steps from the wheel chair to the MRI table.

All over the world people were praying for Fred. The progress between Monday and Thursday was amazing. On Tuesday he used a walker. On Wednesday, he walked by himself to the bathroom. By Thursday he could walk up and down the hall.

On Thursday, it looked like Fred would actually be able to leave the next day, but there was still the problem of how to get Fred and three persons’ luggage out to the airport. Fred, always pinching pennies, was trying to think about how he would get on a public bus to ride out to the airport on distant Lantau Island as he had the previous year. Pastor Wong and Suzanne were thinking about how taxis in Hong Kong are usually small and it would be impossible for Fred to get into a regular car since he could barely bend his leg. Although one of Fred’s colleagues had stopped by the hospital and picked up his laptop computer to take back for them, and some of Fred’s books had been given away, Fred still had 4 pieces of luggage in addition to Suzanne’s and Pastor’s. Their luggage would probably not fit into a taxi.

Suzanne contacted an official at the American consulate who had offered to help. He suggested that the ideal vehicle would be a newly-purchased van from the consulate’s motor pool, but unfortunately, the van had been reserved for the scheduled visit of a high official from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There was more prayer and faith. Later that day, a call informed Suzanne that the official’s trip had been canceled and the van was available. Pastor’s wife, Nancy, concluded, upon hearing this, "They thought the van was reserved for that VIP, but it was really reserved for Fred!"

The trip home went smoothly. The hospital pharmacist had given Fred seven different medications to take -- at different time intervals. Some were to be taken with and some without food. Suzanne heroically kept it all straight. Fred’s brain was still in somewhat of a fog and he felt physically weak, but there were no problems. Perhaps the greatest challenge was to use the tiny airplane lavatory with a leg that refused to bend.

The biggest frustration of the trip for Fred was having the rare opportunity to read stories on English soccer, his favorite sport, in a Hong Kong newspaper and being unable to read it through eyeballs that just didn’t want to cooperate. Several days later, wondering if he was suffering vision loss, Fred discovered that a big part of his problem was that his glasses must have been smeared with fingerprints while he was ill. After getting his glasses cleaned his vision was much improved!