A Complete Divorce of Medicine from Healthcare
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The Testing Room
The Lord is with me. He had not abandoned me. He had not abandoned GraceAnna or our son. God is sovereign. He put me in this closet. He had put GraceAnna in the surgery room. He had prepared us for this moment. And He was with us. I realized that all I could do in this moment was to “wait for the Lord.” He must act. Whatever seemed good to Him would be right. His will for GraceAnna, our son, for me, and our family was all that mattered.
My worst possible fears played out before my eyes. My wife, GraceAnna, and I were in the delivery room for the birth of our fifth child. But this delivery would be different from the others. Our previous deliveries were relatively smooth. Textbook deliveries, you might say. Speaking of textbooks, when our second child, Evangeline, was born, I even studied for a Greek exam for seminary while we were in the delivery room (only in the early stages, I promise)!
Nothing would be textbook about this delivery. Our son had been breech, and there had been discussions about a possible scheduled c-section. However, he ended up turning into the head-down position on his own, and GraceAnna went into labor naturally at about 2 AM on a Sunday morning. Even though this was our fifth child, once we checked into the hospital, we were never able to truly relax. Maybe it was because we were older. Maybe it was because GraceAnna went into labor a week early. Maybe it was because it was our first delivery in North Carolina. But it didn’t feel like the previous deliveries. It never would.
After GraceAnna’s water broke, something disturbing begin to happen. Every time she had a contraction the baby’s heart rate would dip on the monitor. The first time it happened, it alerted the nurses and the doctor. That had my attention. “What could be causing the heart rate drop?” I thought. The doctor, seemingly reading my mind, explained that the umbilical cord could be compressed during contractions. So she asked the nurses to move my wife into different labor positions to see if the situation would resolve itself. Through all this, I thought to myself, “Should we just go ahead and ask them for a c-section? After all, I would rather be safe than go through a risky delivery.”
Code Green
Sometime later, the doctor came in and told GraceAnna, “I wasn’t comfortable with that last heart rate dip. We need to move you again.” When the nurses started to move her, GraceAnna suddenly felt very lightheaded. She told the doctor, nurses, and me that she was about to pass out. The doctor quickly asked for some meds to be given through her IV, which helped stabilize her. At this point, the doctor noticed that GraceAnna was bleeding significantly. Almost simultaneously, the baby’s heart rate plunged on the monitor and didn’t bounce back up. Everything seemed to be going wrong at the same time.
What was I doing during this time? I wish I could say I was sitting at GraceAnna’s side, calmly reassuring her. But instead, I was pacing the room, praying out loud. How could this be happening?
The next thing I knew the doctor initiated a “Code Green,” which is an “all hands on deck” signal for an emergency c-section. GraceAnna told me later that the doctor had told her, “Everything is about to happen really fast. But we need to get him out.” When she issued the Code Green, seven or eight nurses hurriedly entered the room and began unplugging the IV and all the other electrical cords. Though I didn’t know what a Code Green was at the time, I knew enough that it must mean an emergency c-section. The Marine in me kicked into gear, and I started moving all obstacles that stood between the hospital bed and the door. The doctor then came to me and said, “Everything is going to be alright.” I didn’t know if the doctor was just telling me that to try to reassure me or if it was because she meant it. I have seen too many war movies to know that sometimes you tell someone it will be ‘alright’ to calm their fears, even though nothing is right! There was no time to explain more. They then rushed her out of the room. It happened so fast that I quickly moved GraceAnna’s leg as she was going through the door so it wouldn’t hit the door frame. I knew we were in a serious moment.
The Testing Room
I sat down in the chair in the now empty delivery room and began to pray, but before I could pray for more than a minute, a nurse came and asked me to follow her. She took me to a very small room down the hall. It was so small it was almost a closet. There was a small sofa on one wall, and it faced a television maybe five feet away on the other wall. Underneath a small table was a mini-fridge filled with drinks. Against another wall was a locker filled with medical scrubs for dads to scrub up (apparently to go into c-section surgery). I realized that this little room was, as I have jokingly called it, “the daddy timeout room.” It is the room where they take dads awaiting news or needing to change to go into surgery.
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Standing on the Authority of God’s Word
Written by Dr. David S. Steele |
Friday, February 25, 2022
“O Sovereign LORD, you are God! Your words are trustworthy, and you have promised good things to your servant” (2 Sam. 7:28). God’s Word is the anchor of truth for believers who live in a world that balks at the notion of truth. It is the firm foundation where believers may confidently rest, knowing that the sacred Scriptures will never disappoint for they are utterly reliable and trustworthy.As we embark on yet another year, the challenges before us may seem daunting. We live in a culture that relies heavily on hunches, intuitions, and feelings. The emphasis on the subjective has led many to deny biblical Christianity and reject any notion of truth. The witty British writer, G.K. Chesterton poetically described the plight of postmodern culture: “Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe nothing; rather the problem is that they will believe anything.”
Given the dismal postmodern attitude toward authority, where are we to turn? Perhaps more than ever, we as disciples of Jesus need a solid rock to stand on or the waves of syncretism, pluralism and false teaching may sweep us away. We must, therefore, begin and end with the Bible as the source of divine revelation from God.
The Word of God is our highest authority. Therefore, we also need to become acquainted with the supreme value of Scripture and the benefits it brings to our daily lives. Understanding the transcendent worth of God’s Word not only helps us grow more deeply in love with the Savior; it helps point our generation to the truth that can be found in Jesus Christ alone. Consider a few valuable qualities of God’s Word found in Psalm 19:7.
God’s Authoritative Word
First, the Word of God is perfect. Psalm 19:7 plainly says, “The law of the LORD is perfect.” The Hebrew word translated perfect means “complete, whole or sound.” It is in accord with what is true. So we can confidently approach God’s Word with the full assurance that the truth presented corresponds to reality.
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How Consumerism Trains Us to Devalue the Past
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
The impact of consumerism is one reason why church sessions and elder boards often spend more time than is decent on discussions about worship and programs. Someone will make the point that certain young people have left because the worship is not to their liking and thus the church needs to rethink how it does things. Laying aside the fact that, for most of us, no church gives us everything we want in worship but we are nonetheless happy to attend because the word is truly preached it is interesting to note the session member’s response: we need to do something, to think again about worship.Losing Respect for the Past
Consumerism can be defined as an overattachment to material goods and possessions, such that one’s meaning or worth is determined by them. This definition is reasonably helpful but misses one key aspect of the phenomenon: it is not just the attachment to material things but also the need for constant acquisition of the same. Life is enriched not simply by possessing goods but by the process of acquiring them; consumerism is as much a function of boredom as it is of crass materialism.
What has this to do with rejection of the past? Simply this: consumerism is predicated on the idea that life can be fulfilling through acquiring something in the future that one does not have in the present. This manifests itself in the whole strategic nature of marketing. For example, every time you switch on your television set, you are bombarded with advertisements that may be for a variety of different goods and services but that all preach basically the same message: what you have now is not enough for happiness; you need something else, something new, in order to find true fulfillment. I believe this reinforces fundamentally negative attitudes toward the past.
Think for a moment: How many readers of this are wearing clothes they bought ten years ago? How many are using computers they bought five years ago? Or driving automobiles more than fifteen years old? With the exception of vintage car collectors, the economically poor, and those with absolutely no fashion sense, most readers will probably respond in the negative to at least one, if not all three, of these questions. Yet when we ask why this is the case, there is no sensible answer. We can put a man on the moon, so we could probably make an automobile that lasts for fifty years; most of us do little on computers that could not have been done on the machines we owned five years ago; and we all get rid of clothes that still fit us and are quite presentable. So why the need for the new?
A number of factors influence this kind of behavior. First, there is the role of built-in obsolescence: it is not in the manufacturer’s best interest to make a washing machine that will last for a hundred years. If that were done, then the manufacturer would likely be out of business within a decade as the market became saturated. Such is a possible but unlikely scenario. Developments in technology mean that longevity will not be the only factor driving the market.
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