3/3/2020

3/3/2020

But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, - Job 19:25

⚠️Trigger warning⚠️

On the 3rd March 2020, I underwent gynaecological surgery on grade 2 endometriosis that had spread from my reproductive organs to the top of my bowel (including my intestines), to remove an 8cm dermatoid ovarian cyst, and two uterine polyps. One year on, I strongly believe it is the right time to share this story with you, the lead up to surgery, recovery and the miraculous that has taken place since. The purpose of this piece of writing is not to overshare about a health condition (that is not talked about enough) but to bring attention to the fact that God is now, and will ever be, Christ the Redeemer.

I could start this blog genuinely at any point in my life. It seems that somehow all roads have led to this moment right now. But I’ll start it on June 1st 2019. For those of you that are reading this and know me you know that 01/06/2019 is my wedding anniversary. Yes, on this overcast Saturday in June I married the love of my life, Jonathan Harri Newbould. The best decision I have ever made, and the clearest picture of the grace of God in my life. Being his wife is the honour of my life, and I’ll never have enough thank you’s to God for allowing our paths to cross. Following our wedding, on the 3rd of June 2019 we left sunny Stoke on Trent for the holiday of a lifetime. We honeymooned in Bali, Indonesia. I can say wholeheartedly, that if I never left the country another day in my life, I could rest knowing that my honeymoon was once in lifetime. I had breakfast with an Orangutan, I bathed, swam with and fed an elephant. I jet ski-d in the pacific ocean, I swam on turtle island, I swam under hidden waterfalls, I ate in incredible restaurants every single night, and best of all I got to do all this with my brand new husband and best friend. Cloud 9 isn’t the phrase for how we felt when we arrived back on Wednesday the 19th June to our new home, to start our lives together. But this unfortunately is where life had let us know that our honeymoon had well and truly come to an end.

3:43am on Sunday 29th June I was woken up by a pain that genuinely made me think an intruder had entered our home and was stabbing me in my gut. It was debilitating and I had never felt pain like that before. Not wanting to scare my husband, I snuck out of bed and made my way to the bathroom with all the strength I could muster as quietly as I could. As I stood up I knew immediately something was horribly wrong, being bleary eyed and disoriented I believed that the pain I was in had caused me to wet myself. All I could think of was how embarrassing that would be to tell Jonny! I walked to the bathroom and saw that was not the case at all, I was in fact bleeding actively and profusely, everywhere. Without wanting to be too graphic after 90 seconds alone in my bathroom, it resembled a crime scene and I knew I had to call Jonny. I shouted his name, I think he heard the panic in my voice because he came running into the bathroom to pick me up off the floor, now bloody himself. He had no idea where I was bleeding from or why, he just held me and kept telling me everything was going to be ok. He ran to the bedroom, tracking blood across the ground as he went, grabbed his phone and called an ambulance. Everything else seemed a blur to both of us from that point, I remember the ambulance crew telling me that my husband was following in car behind and not to worry. I remember getting wheeled into the hospital and onto the ward where Jonny followed shortly after. I remember my main feeling being guilt, we hadn’t even been married a month and I had already put him through this. He looked terrified, but he would never let those words come out of his mouth. To top it all off I was meant to be back at work on the 1st of July, at a job I had only been doing since February and meeting my new manager for the first time. Laying in that hospital bed I just knew that was not going to happen.

I was seen by doctors and nurses through course of that day who couldn’t really find definitive answers to explain why we had been through what we had. But they ended with two conclusions. The bleeding was either the result of a change in contraception or a very early miscarriage. I was told they could not get a definitive answer on the latter because of something to do with the contraception I was using interfering with hormone levels so making that unclear. With that, we were given medicine to stop the bleeding and sent home. I felt better physically, but emotionally I have never felt worse. I had been married a month, the doctors told me I could have miscarried and in my head, the idea that my husband could be anywhere near attracted to me after what he had seen over the previous 48 hours was now comical. I remember laughing out loud. Everything I thought the start of my marriage would be was further away than I could describe, and my heart was broken, really truly broken. I could hardly stand long enough to make dinner, I was missing work, I slept all the time, and my husband had seen me in a way that I could only describe as in a state I have only ever seen in my nightmares. It felt like the bottom, like I couldn’t get any lower for someone who had just had the most incredible month of their lives. I kept hearing over and over that I was a failure, I had already failed at being a wife, and failed at being a mother (because of the possibility of a miscarriage) I had failed at being a friend and even failed as an employee. But the hope that it couldn’t get any worse carried me through. Hoping wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t have been more wrong about things not getting worse.

For the sake of the word count, I’ll fast forward to November 26th 2019. I had been learning to live with constant bleeding and dealing with the ramifications of that. Myself and Jonny weren’t happy that this was just the way things were going to be from now and so the month before we had gone to the doctor and requested a scan just to make sure there was nothing more going on. November 26th was the day we picked up the results of that scan. I had a heaviness in my heart. I had shut all my emotions away in hopes of being a better wife (I had been trying to ‘make up for what happened’ back in June every day since it happened). Because of this, I did not let Jonny come into the room with me to hear the results. I had truly convinced myself that whatever the doctor said I would be able to spin so it would not hurt or scare him as much. The doctor welcomed me into his office and I could tell it wasn’t good news from how he said my name and invited me to sit down. He went on to tell me that I had an 8cm cyst on my left ovary, and one polyp in my uterus. He said because the scan picked up both solid and liquid matter in the mass either it was a dermatoid cyst, or it was cancerous. I asked him what the prognosis was if the mass was cancerous and I will never forget his words. ‘I’ll be honest, the survival rate with tumours of that size isn’t great, but it isn’t zero’

Not great, but not zero. The words that flew through my mind from the moment that the Dr said them to me. If we thought we were heartbroken before, we had no idea. That whole weekend we held each other and cried. We woke up and cried, went to bed and cried, cried sat next to each other, cried while driving, we could not get our head around the news that we just received. It may help the whole picture to mention that the Dr had said children shouldn’t be in our view at the moment, the best case scenario is that it wasn’t cancer, and having to remove my ovary or entire uterus because of the damage, wouldn’t have been a bad outcome. After a weekend of relentless sobbing, we decided it was time for some cheer. We drove to Keele Christmas tree farm and got ourselves a tree so big it did not remotely fit in our living room. One evening after putting all our decorations up, we decided to get a second opinion. Our doctor had told us it could take two weeks to get the tests ordered to see what kind of mass it was and we didn’t want to wait. So we decided and were fortunate enough to get a second opinion at a private hospital. It is there, that we met our angel. Who we will call Dr L. And whenever we recall this story, we say ‘hope began with Dr L’. I had learned my lesson from our last appointment Jonny was right by my side holding my hand. Dr L had requested my notes from my GP and was fully up to speed. When he asked what he could do for us, I began spilling everything the other doctor had said to me, I told him symptoms and worries and anxiety’s, and he sat and listened, he wasn’t saying a word but compassion bled from him. He let me get to the end of my explanation and said ‘First of all, I think the main cause of your pain and bleeding is endometriosis, and lucky for you, I’m the only specialist at removing endometriosis in Staffordshire’. Crazy how one doctor broke our heart with is words, and another renewed our hope.

You’re probably wondering why I haven’t mentioned God up until this point. Why I haven’t talked about my prayer journal, or seeking him or resting in his arms, or believing scriptures that would tell me I would be healed. The reason is because I wasn’t doing any of that, Outwardly I was, but In my heart I was furious. To me, God had taken the first 6 months of my marriage and consumed it with this. I had been waiting my whole life to be married, God knew that, and He still let this happen. I was ok with things breaking my heart, but what God was allowing was breaking Jonny’s heart as well. It wouldn’t just be me who couldn’t have children, it would be Jonny as well. He didn’t ask for any of this. He was inheriting unimaginable pain from me and I could not have been more furious with God if I tried. People were praying for me, and advising me, standing in the gap for me and fighting in prayer for me. But if I’m honest I didn’t want any of it. There were only two explanations to me regarding why this could be happening, 1) God was inherently cruel. He took pleasure in my worst fear unfolding right in the middle of the thing that I had prayed for my whole life (My marriage). 2) It was me. I didn’t deserve the life I had got. And this was me paying for it. What I had was too good to be true and good things didn’t happen to people like me. I was undeserving of what I had and God was reminding me of that. It helps to say that I have been in church since I was born, I’m a pastor’s kid. So I knew without doubt that my theories were lies from the darkest parts of hell. But they were theories that made sense to me, so I ran with them. It was easier to accept that my God was cruel and I was undeserving of anything Good, than to believe that God was as good as I was raised to believe, and that he had just decided to let myself and my husband go through this for sport.

The day after our appointment with Dr L, I had my blood drawn to decipher whether or not the mass that was found was cancerous. The wait for results was like being irreversibly numb. In one moment I was getting my affairs in order, in another I was angry this was happening, another moment I would cry, and then I would plead. I wasn’t completely sure who I was pleading too, I was still in an angry place with God, but as angry as I got I still knew who He was. I knew he had the power to bring good out of this, and that drove me mad. I didn’t trust Him at all at this point, but I believed. I believed He could give us a good outcome. And that’s exactly what He did. 4 days later we got a call from Dr L saying that the mass was benign. It was most likely a dermatoid cyst and he would do his best to remove it while sparing the ovary. He said he would do the same with the endometriosis and the polyp too. We were given a date of February 18th originally, that was changed for March 3rd. From there it was a waiting game. During this whole process there were so many different kinds of waiting. But this by far was the easiest, we felt like March 3rd 2020 would be the day of conclusion, whatever the outcome, whether Dr L was able to save my uterus or not. At least the pain would come to an end.

The 3 three month wait for the operation went quite quickly, coping with the bleeding didn’t seem so bad because I now knew it wasn’t forever, I knew it wouldn’t have to be something I coped with forever. On January 24th 2020, my GP signed me off work because the bleeding had got significantly worse. I hadn’t been in this line of work for a year and I was being told I couldn’t work. Not only that, but I couldn’t volunteer either, which meant I couldn’t serve at my church, and that for me was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was ordered to rest, at home and I hated it. I stayed in bed for 3 days, curtains shut. I came out of the bedroom to shower and to eat, but that was it. I had hit my bottom. In my head, my ability to work, serve at church, and be a good wife had all been taken away from me by a God that was supposed to love me. I honestly couldn’t think what I had done so bad that this was my lot. I was alone with my own thoughts, but worse? I was alone with God. I’ve mentioned that my husband is amazing, he’s kind and compassionate, but he doesn’t baby me. He tells me what I need to hear and does it with so much love I’m frequently convinced that God is speaking to me directly though him (Nobody tell him I said that). The evening of my 3rd day in bed, he sat on the end of the bed and told me dinner was ready, he then asked me what I wanted for lunch after church the following day. This question really hit me because church hadn’t crossed my mind, It was a no brainer that I wasn’t going I was to sad and thoroughly enjoying sulking. I told him I wasn’t planning on going and he responded with ‘I’d really like it if we went’. This man asks so little from me, my heart was moved, and I was going to church.

Church was weird that Sunday, for the first time in 7 years of attending, I was entering as a member of the congregation. I couldn’t serve, I wasn’t allowed and it felt so strange to me. Don’t get me wrong I didn’t serve every Sunday, my church looks after us really well in that way. But I almost felt like I had earned the Sundays when I didn’t serve. But now I didn’t have a choice, I had to sit there and receive and it made me incredibly uncomfortable. I’ll be honest I can’t remember what the topic of the sermon was, I can’t remember what I wore, I just remember feeling really naked. Like everyone could see through me. Because of the sensitive nature of my condition, I was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, so I just felt like people thought I was skiving or lazy, and it made me nervous. I couldn’t wait for the service to be over. What I do remember is the song that was played as the service came to an end, it was ‘see a victory’ by elevation worship. Have you ever had a moment when you feel like God is speaking directly to you? This was one of those moments. Lyrics like ‘The weapon may be formed but it won’t prosper, every war he wages he will win. The God I know knows only how to triumph, my God will never fail’. These words were so loud, followed by ‘you take what the enemy meant for evil, and you turn it for good’. I believed in that moment that I was hearing God speak directly to me. I was frozen in my seat, I could not even stand to worship I felt heavy. As tears flowed and the song came to an end, Jonny asked me if I wanted to go and get some prayer. I agreed. I walked over to the prayer team and completely broke down. Still too ashamed to share my condition, one of the ladies on the team held my hands and prayed over me, then she said something I will never, ever forget. She told me to pick up my head. As I made eye contact with her she said ‘Deborah, God is a good father, who longs to give good gifts to his children, it’s time for you to believe that’. The world could have stopped spinning and I wouldn’t have noticed. The evil for good lyric of that song came back to me, and she asked me to ‘look for how this situation is from the point of view of a father who wants to give you good gifts’. From that moment until the day of my operation, that’s exactly what I did.

The minutes were long but the days were so short in the run up to the 3rd of March. Myself and Jonny would sing the lyrics to ‘see a victory’ on a daily basis. I was on talking terms with God again and my goodness he was so kind. He was so loving, I felt his presence tangibly, every day like he was hanging out with me while I was making dinner. I felt like we became friends. I started to see everything through the lens of a father who wants to give his child a good gift. And I had the resolve that God wasn’t only going to make sure I was ok, but he was going to exceed my expectations and make this good. A good outcome. We had to be at the hospital at either 7:30 or 8am on the day of my operation I can’t quite remember, we got up early and made sure our song was playing. We were nervous but more optimistic. Just as we were about to leave we had one last moment of doubt, I took my wedding rings off to leave at home so they wouldn’t get lost, and that was just too much for the both of us. We both shed a little tear but reminded ourselves that we were going to see a victory, I wasn’t only going to be ok but the outcome was going to be better than best case. About 10 minutes after arriving at the hospital, I was admitted and Jonny was told to wait in the waiting room. We had been through everything together, just he and I, separating at that time felt like I was leaving a part of me in the waiting room. But we reminded each other what we believed we were promised and it instantly made both of braver. I got one last look at him on my way down to theatre, walking past him made me cry again. When I got down to the room where they were going to put me under I could hardly breathe. The anaesthesia assistant sensed this, she put an oxygen mask on me and held my hand. She then asked me a question I was not expecting. ‘You like to be in control don’t you?’ I laughed and said yes, she followed up with ‘well, you’re in very good hands, it’s time to let go now’. There was a countdown from the anaesthesiologist and I was under.

I woke up after what turned out to be a 3hr 45 minute surgery. We were told it shouldn’t take longer than two hours so I was worried thinking that Jonny was waiting in the waiting room scared. My oxygen was a little low so back came the oxygen tubes. When I had enough strength I was able to pick up my phone and tell Jonny I was ok. I know this sounds crazy but I was so grateful to just have woken up. He said he didn’t have any information other than that the surgery went well and they were going to monitor me to see if I needed to stay the night or not. Soon after this Dr L and another doctor came into my room. I had been given no information about the success of the operation at this point so that was the first thing I asked. I took a deep breath and braced myself, knowing that whatever the outcome, my God would take what the enemy meant for evil, and turn it for good. I said ‘How did it go?’ He looked back at me with the most self-assured rise smile I have ever seen and said ‘What do you take me for? I got everything out that wasn’t supposed to be there, with clean margins, you not only have your uterus, but you have both your ovaries, in perfect condition’. He followed this up by telling me that the endometriosis had spread almost double the surface area that he had thought it would be, the cyst weighted 2lbs and there were two polyps and not one. He commended me for functioning for all those months with what was going on inside of me, and told me I wouldn’t have to worry because I wouldn’t be in pain like that again. The only words I could muster were ‘thank you’. But I know I wasn’t saying it to Dr L, I was saying it to God.

Because Dr L got such clean margins and the operation went so perfectly I was able to go home after about 4ish hours in recovery. I asked Dr L what he thought our chances of having children would be, he told me that although the surgery was successful, my body had taken a battering carrying around all that was in there all that time, and it could take a while before it was ready to have children. He said that I and Jonny would most likely have to try for a year, but if there was no success after a year he would have me on the list for a fantastic fertility specialist that he knew. Honestly, this was more than we could have asked for, compared to the news we received on November 26th the previous year, this felt like the victory God promised us and then some. We got home and recovery began, I wasn’t allowed to drive, lift anything, stand for too long or sit up for too long for at least a week, then I could start doing more. Recovery was slow, and painful. I was off work until April 10th. Remember earlier when I talked about not being attractive to my husband anymore because of what he had seen? Yeah that insecurity was still flying full force because there was absolutely no dignity in my recovery whatsoever. But we were grateful, this was recovery pain not sick pain anymore, it was a pain that reminded me of our victory.

This story is long enough, so I’ll skip to the 18th September 2020. I had almost completely recovered at this point. I still wasn’t allowed to do any heavy lifting, but for the first time in my life I was on a regular monthly cycle, the pain was bearable and the heaviness was reasonable. But this date was special for another reason, it was the day we picked up the keys to our first purchased home together. It was a dream that we had both had and we were back somewhere near the cloud 9 that had been so elusive to us in previous months. This home felt like a new beginning, like a chance to move forward and that’s exactly what it turned out to be. Moving is incredibly stressful whoever you are, but our move went relatively well. I had firmly reclaimed my title as control freak and things were moving along. But I was so, unbelievably grumpy. Poor Jonny, everything he did wound me up. He wouldn’t even speak and I was annoyed. I was trying to be nice to him because I knew this must be my new reorganised hormones as I approached my time of the month, but usually that just brings insatiable hunger not untameable fury. Sunday 20th September 2020 arrives and we are completely moved in, our rental property has been cleaned out and we can put our focus completely on this new adventure God has been so kind and allowed us to walk on. I wake up first the majority of mornings, and when Jonny wakes up our conversations are exactly the same. ‘Morning babe, did you sleep ok? Good, what did you dream about?’ Every single day. But today was different, Jonny opened his eyes, looked me dead in the eye and said ‘Are you pregnant?’ I couldn’t answer him for what felt like an age. I thought he was crazy that’s why, and part of me thought he was still half asleep and sleep talking. I responded with ‘no darling of course I’m, not’ not least due to the fact that we were actively NOT trying and based on the fact that Dr L said it would be at least a year until my body would be in a good enough routine to start doing what it needs to do to carry a baby. He told me he had a dream that I was pregnant and he thought I should get a test. I ordered one, for peace of mind knowing it would be negative but wanting to humour him at the same time. I think you can all probably guess where this goes next.

Monday 21st September 2020 (7 years to the day that myself and Jonathan met at Uni for the first time at a fresher’s party) I took the test that would change our lives forever. I was genuinely so convinced it was going to be negative that I didn’t even look at it. I took a quick glance to confirm that it was negative and my heart stopped. It was positive, there were two lines on that test, as dark as can be, no questions asked. I was pregnant. I spent about 60 seconds hyperventilating before calling Jonny to join me in the bathroom. It helps to understand the goodness of God when you remember earlier in the story what happened the last time I called him to be in the bathroom with me just over a year previously. But this time, it was unbelievable. He has since told me he had the same panic when I called him because I hadn’t told him I was taking a test before I went in. But the feeling that we had, standing in the bathroom together, could not be more opposite to what we felt the last time we were in the bathroom together in that capacity. We were in awe, it didn’t feel real, but it did at the same time. It’s like we were standing under open haven. That sounds dramatic but it’s the only way I can describe it. We had gone full circle, God had kept his promise that he would do us one better. I wouldn’t just be ok but GOOD would come out of this, and my goodness how it did.

There is so much more I could say. But you all have been reading long enough, thank you for getting this far. I chose the scripture from Job today But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, - Job 19:25. The word redeem is incredible to me, the oxford dictionary has two definitions for it 1) compensate for the faults or bad aspects of. 2) Gain or regain possession of (something) in exchange for payment. As hard as I try I cannot think of another word to describe not only the situation, but my life. God has absolutely compensated for the start of our marriage in ways we could have never imagined. We are closer than I ever envisioned I could be to anyone, our faith in the miraculous has increased 10 fold, we believe God for anything. I have let go of the idea that I need to serve or work to be good enough, and let go of the idea that there is such thing as a ‘perfect wife’. But most incredibly, somehow, God managed to redeem my perception of Him as a father. I don’t have a relationship with my father and I didn’t realise how I had painted God to be the same. But I now know, and want you to know too that God is a good father, that longs to give GOOD gifts to his children. And if we can start to look at our situations through that lens, try to find the gift God is trying to give us through it, I promise you won’t regret it.

Job lost everything, he lost his job, his wealth, 10 of his children and he was offensive to his wife. And it all happened in a short space of time. I know I didn’t lose anywhere near as much as Job did, but in a short space of time I lost my ability to work, I was told I potentially had a miscarriage and I felt that the early stages of my marriage had been taken away from me. I felt in some distant way that I could relate to Job. If I wasn’t sure before, I am now, because I KNOW my redeemer lives. There is no situation too desperate that Jesus did not climb up on that cross to redeem. And as I’m sitting here typing, with my unborn baby kicking me square in the ribs, I can’t help but be reminded of just that.

My heart for this post wasn’t to explain myself or to tell you guys a long story. In fact, I told God I would write it when the baby was born ‘just in case’. But I know whatever the outcome, whatever labour looks like, God is redeeming everything we lost and I trust him to finish what he started. We have all lost a lot this year, COVID has stolen so much from us all. We aren’t all in the same boat but we have all been in the same storm. If you have lost loved ones, missed out on life experiences, lost your job, home, business or ability to make wealth. I put these words on paper to let you know that there is a redeemer and he lives. I believe truly, with all my heart, it is in the heart of God to redeem what has been taken away from us. He wants to give us good gifts as any parent wants to give to their child. So lean in and trust that. There aren’t any lengths he wouldn’t go to, to prove it to you. Lean into him, and trust that your redeemer lives.

We love you –

Agape x