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A New Reality

This is a sort of ‘follow-on’ from yesterday’s post - it’ll probably make more sense to read that first. 

As you may have gathered from some of my earlier posts, God’s people are very important to me. They’re important to God too. It’s through His people, the church, that God is manifest in the world. He chooses to partner with people in almost all He does; and in one sense He’s only as good as those who are willing to work with Him. I am truly blessed in having a bunch of amazing saints around me, who have ‘represented’ Him in a tangible way during my recent troubles. Those who’ve listened to my rants; soaked up my anger and frustration; helped out practically; mopped up tears; hugged me when I felt abandoned and bereft; prayed; shared testimony of their experiences; and so on.

And, amazingly, there have been times when God has stepped into my mess and confusion and acted personally. For instance I am one of the privileged few to have had probably not just one (which would be startling enough), but two visits from angels. The first I described in an earlier post; the second happened just before the ablation procedure, in the Catheter Lab...

Ablation

I’ve been trying, for a couple of weeks, to write a post about my cardiac ablation and what’s come afterwards. Somehow, it’s felt really difficult. I’ve had lots of tries; some short, some yawningly long. None have quite said what I want to say in the way I want to say it. Here goes for attempt No. 83a (well, perhaps I exaggerate a little)…

I’d known for many years that something about my heart just wasn’t quite right; it would sometimes do little runs of fast, and irregular, beats. But it happened so rarely that all attempts to capture it with ECG, Holter monitor, or whatever had failed utterly - virtually all of the time it was pretty much perfect, like one of those children who look as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, but whom you know just can’t be that good really! And most of the time it did behave perfectly - through all the swimming and other ‘abuse’ as well.

It seems odd to me that, when it did begin to be a bit more persistent about exhibiting symptoms, finding out was so profoundly disturbing, and upsetting. Cutting a long story short, a year of ‘episodes’ of AF was followed, in December last year, by a change in its behaviour (which might have been induced by trying out some different medication - the jury’s out on that one), so that it began to exhibit the symptoms of persistent atrial flutter as well. So instead of being a little bit unwell occasionally, I was quite poorly all the time. And mightily hacked off by it I was too.

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