by Steph Riley on Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:43 pm
Just thought I'd let you all know what's going on in Jenny's life, almost four months later. The surgery the doctors in Columbus performed went amazingly well. Jenny was released from the hospital and sent home only a couple of weeks later. She had tubes that drained gross junk from her insides for some weeks following. Those tubes had to be drained and cleaned very frequently (I think it was every half hour or hour/24 hours). She healed much quicker than the doctors ever imagined and any follow-up surgeries were deemed unneccesary. Tubes were removed and ports left open for future surgeries began healing on their own. She was in excrutiating pain, but the healing process was smooth and faster than expected.
Now for the spiritual healing of Jenny. She had been with this jerk who shot her since fresh out of high school (about 7 years I believe), and he was so bad for her and to her. She had been very distant from our family for years, and would only come to family functions long enough to pack up a couple of plates of food to take back home to him. She was very rebellious with her parents and with us, though we all tried to reach out. She was adopted by her parents as a baby, and I remember her telling me when she was about 13 that she knew she was adopted and wished she had different parents. I know we all say that, but she meant it. Though she is somewhat of a daddy's girl, she and her mother are polar opposites and she has never meshed with her.
Skip to the day she came home from the hospital. She was watching TV and twice in one day heard two seperate stories of someone being shot through the liver and dieing from it. She sobbed. The realization of all of it hit her, then. She wrote the boyfriend a goodbye letter. Not sure if she gave it to him. She soon starting calling my aunt and wanting her and my cousins to come and visit her. She was eager to have family around her! The same mother that she had professed to hate was the mother that changed those gross tubes innumerous times a day. A new light and respect was shed on that relationship. She had friends from high school, who were friends and good kids before she started running in the bad crowd, contact her to say they were praying for her. One of these was a boy who had liked her for years. A very good guy. They began to talk a lot and spend some time together. Through him she has since made a whole new group of good, healthy friends. Jenny then was able to come out to family functions and from reports from my mother, she is a changed woman. More a woman now than the girl she was before. She is open and lighthearted and THANKFUL. Since the time she was able to leave the house she hasn't missed one Sunday in church. She has a renewed and better than ever faith in God, because she knows that it was through him she found the strength, was healed, and was blessed with the firm foundation of friends and family who poured out their love to her through this.
I am amazed at the miracle of her life, and I want to thank you all for praying for her, too. I believe it is because of the prayers of good people, the capable hands of good doctors, and the grace of God that she is alive and a brand new bonus to the world, today. How's that for uplifting? Just call me Oprah.