My Testimony part 2

When I was in hospital as a child my parents where given a passage of scripture as a promise from God about my life, this passage was John 11:4 which states, "This Sickness will not end in death. It is for the Glory of God to bring Glory to the Son of God." It is a promise that I has always stuck with me and because of it whenever I went into hospital for a check up or for any small operation I knew I would be fine and that through me being there I would bring glory to God.

In 2003 my family moved to Downham Market in Norfolk, it was the first time I'd lived in a place where I had Christian friends who were around the same age as me and it was the first time I had been part of a youth group that did a regular bible study. As a result of this my faith and confidence in God flourished and for a time everything was brilliant. Then I had a dream; in this dream I saw a shadow move along the ceiling in my room and hover over my bed. then the shadow formed the shape of a knife and stabbed me in my heart. In the dream I fell out of my bed in pain and called on God for help and at that moment a great light that encompassed everything entered and the shadow fled I then felt myself being lifted up and held until I was reassured that I was fine. Over the next few weeks I began to feel tired and the walk to college which I used to manage fine would now take me several hours to recover from. I was taken into hospital several times and eventually moved to my usual hospital in London which specialises in heart diseases. I was the diagnosed as having an area of diseased heart muscle which was affecting the conductivity and stopping the electrical signals which tells the heart when to beat and how fast. This meant that my heart would enter irregular rhythms where my heart would be beating at around 120-180 beats a minute and I wouldn't notice. When it did this it could last for days at a time and then just cut out and return to normal and the only symptom I had from this was tiredness.

Several months after being diagnosed I went to Spring Harvest with my family and over the course of the weekend I made several friends and they along with other people prayed for me, then after Spring Harvest probably about 2 or 3 months later I had a procedure called a catheter oblation where the doctors burnt across the diseased tissue in an attempt to stop the irregular rhythms. It worked and I recovered twice as fast as they expected so they decided to move an operation called a Total Cardio-Pulmonary Conversion (it was one I was scheduled to have already) forward by a year. So in August 2005 I had the operation. When the surgeons opened me up they we're expecting an 8 hour long operation instead they ended up doing a 13 hour long one. It turned out that my heart had swollen and expanded and that the outside of the heart muscle had scar tissue which meant that it was sticky and because of this my heart had become so it was stuck to my sternum. If the operation had not been moved forward from August 2006 to 2005 then in January or February 2006 I would have died. However because of the prayer I had received which then caused me to recover as quickly as I did, God was faithful to His promise.

To be continued when I can figure out how to write the next bit!