[title subtitle=”words and image: Jessica Sowards”][/title]
When I was just a few years old, I started to have some issues. I don’t remember that of course, but I grew up hearing the same thing repeated to doctor after doctor, “She potty trained early but then regressed before she was three.”
I was a sick kid. It was the kind of sick that makes you pee your pants and pee the bed when you stay at friends’ houses. I didn’t really stay at friends’ houses. Instead, I stayed pretty embarrassed and kept it quiet. A failing ureter, a bad case of kidney reflux, just a few little issues that hung heavy as a storm cloud over my childhood.
I remember pleading with teachers that failed to remember I had special permissions to take bathroom breaks when needed. I remember walking out of classrooms because I’d rather have the disciplinary consequence than wet my pants in front of a room full of my fourth-grade peers.
It didn’t feel that different. Didn’t everyone have difficulties feeling misunderstood and embarrassed in childhood? Were my difficulties really unique? I spent so much time in the children’s hospital, I never counted my circumstances as bad ones. Did I not seem like a perfectly healthy child walking down those hospital hallways, with my long sandy brown hair and long, willowy legs? With my working arms and sharp eyesight?
When I passed mothers pushing wheelchairs containing teenagers they’d never be able to hold a conversation with, I couldn’t help but consider myself whole.
I took medicine for years though. Round after round of antibiotics. Thankfully, my mother had a sense of the importance of food and even though raising kids on soda wasn’t frowned upon at all in those days, it was never a staple in our house.
I imagine my case would have been exponentially worse had I not been taught to drink water instead of caffeine and sugar. Even still, I never was quite well. I continued to have infections, some more serious than others, and over and over the doctor scrawled his messy signature on that little white pad and tore it loose. At first the medicine came in a liquid that tasted of bubble gum flavored chalk, but I could swallow pills by the time I was seven and swallow pills, I did. Day after day.
Sometimes the prescriptions were for six months, and no sooner than they were over, infection would move back in so the pills would come back to my bedside table.
My teeth yellowed. My digestive system suffered. We didn’t know a thing about gut health but looking back, I can see the clear consequences of having a completely dead gut. I couldn’t be in the sun because the antibiotics could cause phototoxicity in my skin. So, during the summers, I learned to stay inside during the heat of the day. I spent the days at the baseball park for my brother’s game sitting in the shade while the other kids played.
When I was sixteen, I went in for my yearly series of tests, an ultrasound and a procedure called a VCUG. It was the very same test that had determined I was not just regressing in potty-training because my brother had been born, as they had originally supposed.
The words of the doctor weighed a million pounds that day. I was shown the dark areas of my kidneys that were scar tissue, and I was told the rate of which that was expanding. Phrases like “Never have children” and “Dialysis by thirty” were hung around my neck in that little room. There was a picture of elephants on the wall, and I stared at it for a while before I was sent along my way.
It’s weird, but I don’t remember being particularly upset at being told I’d likely never carry a healthy pregnancy. I guess, at sixteen, I was probably more preoccupied with my job making pretzels at the mall than I was concerned about becoming a mother. Maybe I’d become so accustomed to keeping my issues quiet, because of their embarrassing nature, that I just tucked away the emotions that surely existed in being told my renal system had about ten years left to function.
I do remember one instance in an AP Biology class, learning about all the parts that make up the urinary tract, and there in that classroom, I started to cry. My lab partner, a red-haired boy with freckles that matched his hair, leaned over and asked if I needed a tissue. I choked out the words, “I need a kidney.” He awkwardly withdrew and I swallowed my tears, and that is the only time I ever remember expressing a word of disappointment about my broken body.
I got married when I was eighteen. That, in itself, is another story altogether, but in marrying my first husband, I gained his mom, Kathy. She loved Jesus in a way I’d first dubbed as completely crazy. She would talk about the Bible and I’d just roll my eyes, but that never stopped her. She talked about healing and miracles and all sorts of stuff I had no context to believe.
It was because of Kathy that I ended up in a little church in a shopping center in Waller, Texas one random Sunday morning. I was nineteen. I’d never been there before and I never did go back, but that Sunday morning, my life changed. I was uncomfortable. I called churches like that “Holy Ghost Churches” and seeing people fall to the floor when they got prayed for made me think they were all just as crazy as Kathy.
A woman stood up and shared a dream she had about a young lady with an affliction in her body, and instantly something gripped me. She went on to show the region she had felt this nameless woman’s health issues were, waving her hands across her abdomen and then up her sides and across her lower back, and even though I didn’t trust a single one of the crazy, Holy Ghost church people, I knew. She was talking about me.
She made an altar call and asked if anyone wanted to receive their healing. She waited. The room full of people squirmed a bit. But I did not move. “Alright,” she said, “we are going to change plans today. We are going to learn about healing.” For the next hour, we did. I heard scriptures I’d never really known and heard testimonies I could hardly argue with. As soon as she finished teaching, before I realized what I was doing, I was walking to the front.
I marched right up to the woman. Then, like a kindergartener at story time, I plopped down on the floor, my legs crisscrossed, and in front of the whole church I looked up at her and said, “You can pray for me. But I’m not falling down.”
I was healed that day. Actually, completely, totally healed. I knew as months stretched into years with no infections that it must be the case. Then, when I was twenty-four, another VCUG confirmed what I knew. My scar tissue was gone, my failing ureters were healed. I was no longer at the children’s hospital and the doctor had not reviewed my 12-inch stack of medical charts. When I was dumbfounded at the results of the test, he simply shrugged, saying “Your urinary tract is completely normal,” as if it was no big deal, and I guess, in most cases, normal things are no big deal.
My thirtieth birthday came and went, growing smaller in the rearview and I had a quiet celebration at the fact that I’ve never had to have dialysis. I gave birth to five healthy sons, all full-term, with no issues. Kathy and I are still very close friends. We talk about Jesus in a way that probably makes people think we are crazy. And these days, I may mention in passing that I was a sick kid, but usually I don’t go into more detail than that.
At this point, I’ve been healed and well longer than I was sick. These days, I am normal, and unlike more cases, that is the biggest deal in the world.
To watch Jessica’s garden tours, visit her YouTube channel, Roots and Refuge.
