I have been horrible about keeping Danielle's blog up to date....she asked me to post this email right away, but I will go back and update with past emails as soon as I can....Here's her latest email....
God works in mysterious ways! I have to start this story out by saying that I am fine! We have good doctors here and everything is going good. So far on my mission I have had a hard time explaining priesthood authority. No matter how I try to explain it, people just don’t seem to get it. I forgot that I had prayed for help in how to explain it better. Well, God works in mysterious ways. Last Sunday I was sitting in Relief Society and all the sudden it was hard to breathe and my heart was beating really weird, like really hard and palpitations and such. I thought maybe it was my asthma so right after church we went to the bathroom and I used my inhaler. And it didn’t work. So I used it again. And it still didn’t work. After that we went back home and I tried eating something (I thought maybe fasting had something to do with it) and just relaxing for a while but still nothing helped. Finally I was like whatever and we went out to work. By Tuesday it was still hard to breathe and my heart was just acting funny. After we went grocery shopping I was so out of breath that I sounded like I had just tried to run a mile (which let’s be honest, we all know I can’t do). So I finally texted my mission president’s wife and told her. She asked me if I felt like I needed to go to the doctor. I hate that question. I just want someone to tell me what to do. Because I don’t want to go if it’s nothing but I don’t not want to go if I need to. After about half an hour I finally decided yes I needed to go and I better go then while the walk in clinic was still opened so I didn’t end up going to the ER. Well that one back fired on me. We left our apartment about 4:00 and went to the walk in clinic. I waited for about an hour in the waiting room and within five minutes of taking me back and talking to me the doctor said, “I think you have a blood clot in your lung. We don’t have the things to test that here so you need to go to the E.R.” I must have been looking at him weird because he said, “This is a big deal. You can’t wait til the morning, you need to go now. Sometimes we send people over there in an ambulance for this but you don’t look like you’re doing too bad so I’ll let you choose.” Of course my companion and I said no, we’ll just drive over there. He said he would go fill out the paperwork and then send us over. In the meantime the nurse came in and did an EKG. She took the results out to the doctor and before I was even finished getting dressed she came back in and said, “There is an abnormality on your EKG and…” I was expecting her to say, you need to go straight to the hospital…don’t go home…blah blah blah. But she completely caught me off guard when she said, “You need to go to the hospital now, there is an ambulance on its way to come get you.” I just stared at her with my mouth wide open and started crying a little bit because that was NOT what I expected to hear! We called my mission president’s wife and had her talk to the nurse. They were on their way back up from El Paso but told me to go in the ambulance and that a senior couple would meet me there at the hospital. She also told me to call my district leader and have them meet me there to give me a blessing. So…I went to the ER. In an ambulance. But of course the hospital was PACKED and I ended up sitting in the waiting room for like 4 hours. When the President and his wife got to Albuquerque they came straight to the hospital (they didn’t even go home). After the hospital started quieting down the president and the senior missionary wheeled me into the vending machine room and gave me a blessing. They blessed me that my body would heal itself and that the doctors would be able to perform the procedures well and be guided by the Master Surgeon. It was not the most comforting blessing I had ever received. I thought for sure I was going to be getting some sort of surgery. When they finally took me back to a room they did a D-Dimer blood test and a chest x-ray and a cat scan. And found absolutely nothing. When I got there they were positive that I had a blood clot that had travelled up to my lungs, because of the symptoms that I had, and because just a few months ago I started birth control, which can cause blood clots. But after the Priesthood blessing they found nothing.
They sent me to the doctor a few days later to follow-up and still they couldn’t find anything. They sent me over to the cardiologist to do a stress test. I lasted 12 minutes (apparently that is a long time)! And he said my heart is perfectly healthy so whatever it was, it wasn’t my heart.
Since then I have had two opportunities to teach about the Priesthood power and how it is only found in our church. I have been able to teach it with more power and authority than I ever could have. I am so grateful for the Priesthood in my life. I know that it is literally the power of God and that through it God works miracles. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be a missionary and to teach others about the blessings that they can receive through the Priesthood.
I'll try to update more this weekend!
