My Testimony
I guess a question someone might have looking at my situation would be “How can you still believe in God in light of all that has happened to you?”
Let me explain my situation. I am a liver transplant recipient (five years, no rejection) and a bone marrow transplant recipient still in recovery.I am also a born-again Christian.
I was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder when I was fourteen years old known as Polycythemia Vera. It’s a rare mutation in the stem cells that normally shows up in men around the age of fifty. It wasn’t discovered that I had this disorder until a blood clot had developed in my inferior vena cava (the vein that takes blood from the lower body back to the heart), and my hepatic portal vein. This caused issues with my liver. Honestly, the thing worked fine but the clot had caused it to swell to the size of a football when it should have been the size of my fist. The doctor said ten to fifteen years... my body said otherwise. I was transplanted thirteen months after diagnoses on June 9th, 2011, after years of migranes and months of swelling ankles, back pain, and a headache that didn’t go away until after transplant. My stomach had been squished between my spleen and my swollen liver to the point where it was a narrow as a pencil. I thought this was hard. I hadn’t seen anything yet.
Almost four years later, after establishing normalcy and beginning to take my medication into my own hands, I had a regular bone marrow biopsy that gave some not so good news. The Polycythemia Vera was mutating. My doctors predicted that if the P vera wasn’t taken care of as soon as possible, I would end up with Acute Myloid Leukemia. I was admitted into Egleston Children’s Hospital on January 4th, 2016 at twenty years old. I went through the hell that was chemotherapy for 8 terrible days. I was transplanted on January 13th and the side effects of chemo really began to show as my hair began to fall out, my nails stopped growing, I always felt sick, I was weak and never wanted to do much of anything. My immune system was shot. I had no protection from infections except for a mask. My liver, which I had at the time had no problems with at that point was not happy. I could tell by how yellow my skin became. I suffered from internal bleeding causing me to throw up blood. Even after leaving the hospital, I was in almost complete isolation for six months. My recovery time from my liver transplant felt like nothing. I had my liver transplant in June and was at band camp in July. After BMT, I didn’t want to do anything for months. It was a fight for me to eat. But slowly, very slowly, my strength came back and I’ve only gotten stronger since. I’ve been home from the Ronald McDonald House in April and back in Bible Study in July.
So how can I still believe God exists after all that? First off, I wasn’t a Christian when I got my liver transplant believe it or not. Well, I didn’t have a lot of what I call Jesus influence at the time. I had the questions everyone asks. “God, why are you doing this to me?” “What did I do to deserve this?” I didn’t realize until later that the answer was nothing. It wasn’t anything I did. I didn’t know Matthew 5:45 “that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (NKJV) I didn’t realize that I wasn’t being punished. But that is how it felt. I always believed in God but there was a point in my life where He was not my Lord.
Yet He still saved me.
I did not immediately ask Christ into my heart. Like I said, I was not surrounded by Jesus influence. It took at least two more years and part of the problem was me. I can’t blame the people that were around me at that time. Instead, another question plagued me a lot in this time period. “Why take another person’s life to safe mine?” I honestly thought I was nothing special so why save me? I asked this question for years and it actually wasn’t until after I gave my life to Christ that He answered me.
My senior year of high school, my parents began dragging me to church. My dad had made a deal with my uncle that if I got my liver on time, he would start going back to church. We hadn’t gone in years so you can imagine my annoyance, especially since I wasn’t getting to bed until after one in the morning because of band competitions the night before. But as time went on, I began to learn about Jesus. I began to understand the Bible more clearly. I experienced His love first hand. A month after I graduated high school, I went to a youth conference where I gave my life to Christ and was baptized. Not long after that, God answered my question.
A couple months earlier, I had invited a guy from my school, who I had grown very close to, to go to church with me. Eventually, he just didn’t stop coming. When he was baptized, God told me, “That’s why.” God had used me as a light when no one else was one. Five days before his baptism, that guy asked me to be his girlfriend and we have been together for almost three years.
So when the BMT came up, I knew I had Jesus by my side the entire way. Through all of the pain and the sickness and the loneliness that isolation caused. He was with me the whole time. I know that if it wasn’t for my faith, I don’t think I could have been as strong through all of it as I was. I had to remember that God did not do this to me. We live in a cursed world and my flesh failed me. God never did. And He has still never forsaken me. He gave me peace and comfort through one of the toughest times in my life and he continues to do so.
I still believe in God because I refuse to believe that this was all by accident. If He didn’t exist, what would be the point of what I went through?
I’m choosing to share my testimony in order to be a light or encouragement to someone who may need it. I am not ashamed of my Savior. I do not wish to be combative. Only to spread the love of God. And He says one way to do that is our testimony. “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.” Revelation 12:11 (NKJV) No one can take your testimony and what God has done from you away from you which is why I have decided to start with this post. I’m not sure how regular I’m going to be posting yet because I’m not used to this.
I want to share the Gospel. I want people to know that Jesus loved them so much that He not only died on the cross, He bled out to make sure His children were covered by His blood. God is Love.
God bless.
-- Kathleen
