surgery in the dark...

I am leaving for honduras on saturday morning and i'll be gone for a week. i go every year. a lot of my pictures are from those trips. my responsibilities while on this mission trip will be countless. in a way, it is what i live for because every God-given talent i possess is in great demand when i am there. it is a surgical trip where i will spend 10-12 hours a day in the operating room making sure the patient's operation is clean and efficient. it is my job to assist the surgeon, put in stitches, pass instruments, and protect the sterile field from contamination. it is also usually my job to communicate with family members and staff that don't speak english. i speak spanish fairly well, although i have never formally studied it. so when we go anywhere as a group to eat or shop or when we order breakfast at the motel in the morning i have to translate for the other members of our group who go to foreign countries without learning the language. Standing in the operating room using my medical mind and stepping out and using my spanish mind, then seeing the poverty and hopeless environment these natives live in every day brings out my emotional side and breaks my heart. it's like stepping into a war zone with no one really on your team. as my close friends know, i am not needy. i am self-sufficient and confident and usually the one helping everyone else. when i am there i barely sleep and when i do, i dream terrible nightmares of what could go wrong. last year we saved a woman's life. she had a gallstone in her common duct, which basically means if we hadn't operated that week, she could have gone into acute pancreatitis and possibly liver failure. it was an incidental finding we did not anticipate. she was our first patient, first surgery, first day. so none of the kinks were ironed out at all. most of the surgeries we do are laproscopic which means a few small holes like little stab wounds, a camera, and laser surgery. during this woman's surgery, the power surged and the lights went out, as did all of our equipment. the surgeon decided to open her up since you can't monitor a patient without electricity near as well. i had never seen a patient opened up and had no idea what i had gotten myself into. all the sudden i am elbow deep in this woman's abdomen reaching for surgical instruments to hand the 2 doctors trying to fix her. of course those instruments have ridiculous names that no one knows but surgeons and really old nurses. people were yelling all directions and i looked to the surgeon beside me, my mentor and friend, and said, "i don't think i'm ready for this. do you want me to step back?" he simply said, "I need you beside me, her life is our responsibility, and i can't do it without you." he is 66 years old and besides my dad, the greatest man i've ever met. we spend 3 1/2 hours putting this woman back together. the power came back on 5 minutes after it went out, but by that time we were all soaked in sweat. She made it. i stayed in the operating room and held her hand as she slowly woke up from the anesthesia. I looked straight in her eyes, smiled and said in spanish, that she was ok and we were done. she nodded. i walked out of that operating room, spoke to no one, went out back alone and cried. one of the teenagers in our group followed me, stood till i had cried alone for a few minutes, then sat beside me and said. "You did good. i could have never done that. I'm really proud of you." I looked up with my tear streaked face at this 15 year old boy and said, "without hearing that from you, i don't think i would ever have the courage to go back inside and do it again." Here's the kicker. my mentor, the surgeon, has a steadfast rule of praying with his patients before they go to sleep for surgery. he does it in the states as well as on mission trips. he prays in english and gets a translator if the patients only speak spanish. this woman was our first case and with all the chaos he forgot to pray with her. everyone was asking him questions about everything right before the surgery and he just forgot. i noticed he was busy and had memorized a prayer in spanish identical to the one he says in english. while she was in the holding area, i prayed with her in spanish. speaking spanish and praying in spanish are very different. prayer is so personal that it's more difficult to communicate your heart in a different language. my first prayer in spanish. maybe God just never wanted me to forget. my mentor apologized to me later that week and said, i didn't pray before that first surgery and that may be why everything went wrong. i'm sorry. so i looked at him and said, "I did pray with her before the surgery." he said well maybe that's why she's still alive. long story, and intense on so many levels. the point is this. i leave in 7 days. i will have anxiety and fear looming over me between now and then. it is satan working on me and all my insecurities. he plays with my mind and takes me through worst case scenarios, like what if i die there and never make it back or worse, what if someone dies because i wasn't smart enough or courageous enough to save them. i am scared. bc i am willingly going into a place of spiritual battles. my job overall is to give a poverty-stricken country hope. and hope is something they don't know anything about. am i ready for what's before me? if you read this far, please comment or call me and encourage me. i need it. i can feel when things are about to fall down all around me. and when they do, i don't want to feel like i'm alone. my mom is going with me this year. it will be her first mission trip. so i can't tell her i'm scared bc she's scared too.