Ouch pt. 2

So today is the day that I have my surgery. Dr. Stephenson, who is an excellent physician will operate soon. Let me quickly recap for you. I am now in Lubbock (thanks to my wonderful fiancee) and I went and saw the doctor on Friday. At first the doctor's P.A. said that it didn't look like it was broken and that it would just need to rest and let the swelling go down. Dr. Stephenson came into the room and made the other guy look like a complete idiot. Just after we had gotten excited over the fact that I would not be having surgery the real doctor informed us that in fact my foot was broken and in fact I would need surgery.

That leads us to today. It is 8:30 I am have to go the Covenant Lakeside hospital to have blood work done at 9:00 and then at some point this afternoon I will be having two bio-pins placed into my foot. The pins we be able to absorb into my bone after it is healed. The doctor will send a scope into my foot, clean out around the bone and then place the pins in, easy enough right? No! Yet again a doctor has told me how strange the break in my foot is. "I only see one of these about every two or three years."

The bio-pins that are being placed in my foot have a metallic end that drives the bio-pin into the broken section. The metallic portion is then driven out another section of my bone and out another section of my foot, OUCH!! After the bio-pin is in place they snip off the excess pin sew me up and I am done. I would like to just go ahead and say that I am not looking forward to this. I hope everyone else has a grander day than me, but hey on the plus side I was promised ice-cream tonight.

Thought of the day: OUCH!!

Ouch pt. 1

It was any idle Tuesday afternoon when I was leaving my Intro to Marriage and Family class satisfied with myself for receiving an 89 on a recent test. I quickly reached into the left pocked of my three day worn faded blue jeans to retrieve my cell phone. I flipped open my razor punched in the numbers of a friend in order to enjoy a leisurely conversation on my brisk walk back to the dorm. I walked down out of the doors of Abilene Hall, walked down the sidewalk and stepped off of the curb onto the street. The only problem was that in my senior year at H-SU, after having at least seven classes in Abilene Hall on this day I forgot that the curb at Abilene Hall is twice as high as that of other curbs.

"POP!" My ankle went sideways bearing my weight on my ankle and sending sharp pains through my leg and foot. I immediately hung up the phone without even waiting for an answer and began limping back to the dorm. After hobbling twenty yards I once again grabbed my phone mashed the number 2 speed dial and attempted to call Ashley, no answer. Slapping my phone close and re-opening it, all in one motion, I pressed hard on the number 5 speed dial, no answer from Dad either. On the third try i finally got in contact with my mother. "Mom, I think i broke my ankle."

After receiving instructions on keeping my foot iced and elevated, and grabbing a pair of crutches owned by Anderson Hall I contacted Geoffrey who willingly agreed to drive me to Dr. J's (our insurance approved medical clinic). When we walked into Dr. J's we were immediately met with hostility when I was informed that the office manager would not accept my insurance since i did not have a physical copy of my card. After begging and pleading, having my father beg a plead and asking to speak to the office manager who was not there I stormed out of the office speaking very loudly to the remainder of the people waiting in the waiting room, "I hope they give you all better care than they gave me!"

After re-weighing my options The best course of action was determined to be paying the extra fifty dollar co-pay and going to Hendricks memorial for medical attention. With my foot in writhing with an intense sense of pain We waited, and waited, and waited. We called Pizza Hut and had a large pizza with half pepperonis and half hamburger meat and then we waited. Geoff went and got my laptop and season two of scrubs on DVD and we waited. We watched three episodes of scrubs and they finally called me back into a room and had x-rays taken of my foot. After this I continued to wait for two hour before I finally saw a doc (this allowed me to watch an episode of dirty jobs as well as an episode of House).

When the doctor finally arrived after five hours of waiting he told me what the deal was. Good news my ankle was not broken. Bad news something else was. His exact words to me were, "I have never seen anything like this before." After reviewing my x-rays he wasn't quite sure what he was looking at so he enlisted the help of an orthopedic surgeon that just so happened to be walking by at the time. After consulting the surgeon the news was grim. I had fractured a very strange part of my foot and would most likely need surgery. If i had only have skipped class that day.

Rain Rain Go Away

As of Friday September 14th I am officially engaged to be married. It was a very interesting experience, amazing, wonderful, and I am relieved I don't have to face the anxiety again. I put so much careful thought, consideration and planning into the event that I almost missed the beauty of it as it quickly passed through my life.

Growing up I never was much of a planner. I simply did what I wanted when I wanted to but as I have gotten older and particularly since I began college planning has slowly taken a larger hold on my life. See before college parents tend to due the majority of the planning (for males this tends to have been mostly pertaining to mealtimes.) but college begins and home is has become a place for visiting each second of the day has to be filled doing something. When I first obtained the "planning" responsibility I didn't handle it well. As a result of poor planning skills I was lonely and board often. But alas, as I have grown in my collegiate years so have my planning abilities (homework, work, class, meals, church, social time, time spend with my girlfriend, ect.). So much in fact that when I spend a large amount of time planning something and it doesn't go the way I envisioned chaos is soon to follow. Such a time was it on Friday.

I had everything planned to the last detail for how I was to propose to Ashley, then on Thursday while traveling to Alabama (my ideally planned proposal location) I heard the forecast, rain...all weekend long. Not wanting to lose my cool I did not panic (at least not immediately). I quickly began text messaging my brother-in-law who was located in the seat directly behind me in the van full of my family and Ashley. We were text messaging in order to covertly discuss the looming dangers of a weekend full of isolated showers. In the end we decided it best to hold out and hope the rain would break.

Friday, after sending Ashley away with my mother and sisters for the day I began putting my plan into action while keeping a weather eye on the chance of precipitation. While the news said there was a thirty percent chance and the dark gray clouds threatened rain the ground remained dry. It was looking good, everything was going to worked as planned. I had received to supreme confirmation in the fact that it would not rain by the premiere weather expert in Dunbar, Alabama (population 7) my own Grandfather. He was wrong. Twenty minutes after the said prediction the rain came in the in brute force (the official Alabama term that is used is gullywarsher). At this point I lost it. The plan hinged on the participation of the elements as the occasion would take place at a specific spot outside. After demanding the weatherman's resignation I took a deep breath collected my thoughts and began freaking out all over again. Even if the rain did stop the ground would now be to wet for the setup that was the center point of my plan would sink (quite literally). I had to go to plan "B" which I quickly realized I had forgotten to make...again with the freaking out.

It was my brother-in-law that came to the rescue. He took me aside and said to me the most prophetic words I had heard all day, "Joel, its going to be perfect." Kyle convinced told me that the planning I did was great but what made it perfect wasn't all of the little things I had planned but the event it self. That night I was asking someone to spend the rest of her life with me. Thanks to Kyle I regained my composure moved my setup 12 feet under the protection of a covered porch and enjoyed to perfect evening and the beauty that was the moment that I said, "Ashley, will you marry me?"

Oh by the way it had stopped raining.

Who am I to be god?

The death penalty has always been something that vexed me. I didn't know how i really felt about it. On the one hand i firmly believe in justice and the responsibilities of one's actions resting on their own shoulders but something never seemed to sit right with me concerning taking someone's life as punishment. Before I go any further I would like to give the disclaimer that I have never had or even known someone who had wronged another person so much that the law was imposing a punishment of death on them. I cannot honestly say how I would feel if one of my loved ones was killed by another and the possibility of the death penalty came up. With that being said I realized something today. The occasion for having such a realization was a very small moth. I was sitting and working the desk at my job when a small moth started fluttering by my computer screen annoying me. As soon as the moth landed to the left of my lap-top I swatted, it forever ending it's existence. The realization I had was the fact that I took life away from something. I decided that the life that was flowing through something was less important than my annoyance level. In turn I played god to a moth and took it upon myself to decide the fate of another creature. This realization brought me again to thoughts of the death penalty and i asked myself, "Who are we, any of us, to be god to another's life?" With this realization I cannot help but come to the conclusion the killing someone for justice is wrong. Incarcerate them, remove them from society, yes but killing them is not the solution to the problem.

Randall Gallaway

Tuesday night I was working at Cracker Barrel and Randall Gallaway came and sat in my section. I immediately noticed who he was remembering that he had spoken at one of my high school chapels. The most striking things about Randall are his hands. Upon seeing him for the first time in high school I was somewhat shocked to see that he had one mechanical and attached to place his right hand would have been and a pinching hook mechanism attached to the place where his left hand would have been. In high school I had heard his testimony of surviving 13,500 volt shock and 38 surgeries. Since that time he has become a successful motivational speaker and has recently taken a job as leading and training mission teams for short term mission trips.

When I walked up to him and had introduced myself and reminded him of the time he had spoken in chapel he told me of a problem he had. He said that he had been driving to the Dallas and the air conditioner had dried out his eyes and he was unable to drop eye drops in his own eyes. He told me he had been praying for a place to stop for dinner where someone could help him with his eye drops and he just happened to stop at Cracker Barrel and sit in my section. I gladly helped him with his situation, took his drink and food order only after promising to come back for more discussion. When I finally had a moment to again talk to him I explained to him about my life in Abilene and Hardin-Simmons. I told him of the calling on my life to pastor and that I had been on short term mission trips recently.

It was a nice conversation but nothing extraordinary, just a nice conversation between old acquaintances. I told him goodbye and wished him well in his trip to Dallas and the Lord's blessing over his ministry. When I returned to his table to bus the dishes and clean it for the next quest I noticed that he had left two twenty dollar bills on the table. In my six years of waiting tables this the second largest amount I had ever received. At first I was overjoyed with the abundant provisions the Lord had blessed me with but as the night went on I felt the Lord leading me to an opportunity to bless someone else.

After Asking Ashley's Dad for Her Hand in Marriage...

It will be a reliefe to finaly get some sleep tonight.