New Issue

I have had a new diagnosis attached to my name...I may have dreamed of having letters after my namw, but instead I add disease processes to my name. My introduction begins with a lost of symptoms and diseases.
They added chronic costochondritis. This is an inflammation of the cartilage of the rib cage. Mine is all over my ribs, to the attachment of my ribs and spine, to my breastbone and those articulations with the ribs. This makes movement and breathing terrible. However, the worst side effect is the diaphragm spasm. This is absolute agony, makes me so ill, and sends spasms up my neck---or triggers anxiety high enough to make me spasm neck and abdomen, finishing off the misery with even less breathing. I am afraid to go to sleep, now, because I will wake in such misery.
The doctors told me there is not much to be done, which is disappointing. Disappointing barely begins to describe how I feel about it. I hate how autoimmune diseases add more and more things as you go along.
Even with all this...I have hope. I don't have much hope in medicine, to be honest, because of so little luck over the past four and a half years. I retain hope in God.
I don't even know that it is His plan to heal me on earth, or if it is more His plan to heal me as I enter Paradise. Whichever, as Joni Earickson Tada stated, being healed in Paradise is still being healed.
It is the waiting for healing that is so dreadful. I ache for Him to return, that I might be saved from this misery all the faster. I have laid in my sick bed and begged God to come and take us from this wicked, wretched world. Waiting for that healing is horrendous.
It makes me think of the Pool healing I wrote about a few posts back. That man had been disabled his whole life...and while they probably felt as we do that medicine was so much further than it had been...one soon finds out that sometimes one has tried everything. That man had been crippled for his whole life. Or the woman who touched His cloak, who had been bleeding for 12 years. Enough to make you a social outcast.
Their wait time must have been nearly unbearable, as I often feel lately...that no more physical pain can be stood.
Then I remember Christ facing the crucifixion. Perhaps He had never even been sick in His life, I cannot recall scripture stating He was or wasn't. But imagine if He had never been hurt or ill...and then He goes and takes on crucifixion plus the shunning of God. This is then rounded up nicely by the fact all the punishment we deserve for our wicked ways are dumped on Him. 
That short paragraph nearly makes one shudder. 
God knows first had what ultimate agony is...for even at our worst pain, He has not left ua alone. Christ died within 6 hours of crucifixion----an extremely short time period for crucifixion, one that surprised Pilate when he was told Christ was dead. I suspect if any of us were to take on crucifixion with the added punishment against sin, we wouldn't last anywhere beyond a single moment. 
He understands misery, and often will help when we ask for relief against the misery of life. He doesn't forsake us, or let us feel lost from Him when our hearts struggle with the worst of moments. He sees us as we sob out to Him during the watches of the night, when we feel the most alone with our trials. He longs, if we will so much as begin to open our hearts in His direction, to love us, and show us the depths of this love.