My daughter and I have been sick with some nasty respiratory virus. She’s got double pink-eye and double ear infections and has otherwise been fine— but I have an ear infection and pink eye on one side, had such a bad sore throat it felt like it was about to close my airway one night, and heading into last night it was getting harder and harder to breathe and I was coughing a lot more than I had been (which was a lot to start with). I had tested COVID negative (which took days longer to result than it should have) — but I’d reached out to my doctor twice to try to get in and get treated, and they never called me back. So last night after work I figured I’d do a telehealth urgent care visit through my work app to try to get some meds. It glitched and wouldn’t let me log in, so I decided I’d try to see if the urgent care down the street was still open. Their website said they were, so I tried to call and there was no answer. I figured I’d just drive down there and see if I could get in, because by this point I had chills and felt like I’d been hit by a bus, too. So I left Jocelyn with Christian and headed that way.

When I got there there was a sign on the door saying “we are at capacity for today and are not accepting any more patients.” I quite literally started tearing up. The next closest urgent care would have been an hour round-trip and there was no guarantee they’d even be able to take me, and by this time I was really starting to get worried that pneumonia was setting in. Getting back in my car feeling defeated, I just had this feeling that I should at least go in and ask. They could look at me like I’m an idiot for not reading the sign and tell me to leave, but at least I would have tried because I didn’t have any other options and by now I was desperate.

As I walked into the (completely empty) waiting room, there was a Nurse Practitioner talking to the girl at the front desk and I thought I heard her say “we can take one more.” Walking up to the desk as the NP left, I (with literal tears in my eyes) asked the girl at the desk if the signs on the doors were true. She asked me what I needed and I told her I had pink eye, an ear infection and maybe pneumonia and needed meds, to which she responded “I see that…” (my eye looked BAD)…”your timing couldn’t have possibly been better— if you’d have come in here 10 minutes ago we would have said no.”

She proceeded to put my insurance through and ask if I normally have a copay— I told her yes I do, because this place was out of network for me…she said “ok, so yeah it says you have a $50 copay. Buuuuuut…hey it looks like you’ve got a $50 credit, so you’re good!”

Cue the jaw-drop. I’ve only been there once before and paid my copay up front for that visit only. I have no idea where that credit came from.

So they brought me back with almost no waiting time, took a look at me and retested me for COVID (negative again, thank the Lord)..but I heard the NP say “I’m actually worried about her” when she left my room. I was wheezing when both inhaling and exhaling, so they gave me a nebulizer machine to take home so I could do breathing treatments beyond what my inhaler can do for my asthma. She did some more tests and wrote me prescriptions for meds for pneumonia, pink eye, and my ear infection…and at the end she said something that about made me lose it.

She said, “I am so glad we were able to see you. You needed help really bad. I don’t know if they told you, but we were SO backed up today that we didn’t finish seeing people that had registered at 11:30am until 5:30pm. We got caught up right before you came, which never happens. I have no idea why, but I saw you when you came to the door the first time and I just felt like something was telling me we needed to let you in.”

As I was tearing up (more than normal from my gross draining eye) I told her my side of the story and that it was God that must have told her that. Then she started crying!

Meanwhile:
I have been feeling so overwhelmed all week with working from home while being so sick, taking care of a sick baby, and being on-call for transplant round the clock, all at the same time. I was feeling pretty dismayed and was asking God what His plans were because at times I honestly wondered if I had COVID and was going to get very sick or die from it. But yesterday, He answered me. Not only did He perform miracles to get me the treatment I needed, He showed me why we had to get sick.

My daughter and I have been home from work and daycare all but one day(which was Friday) since Tuesday of last week, and we were just told two kids in her classroom tested positive for COVID yesterday. They just had started symptoms the day before, so she was most likely not even exposed to them while they were contagious. If we had gotten better or shown to be COVID negative days before as planned, she would have been back to daycare and would have been exposed to those kids. I get everything she gets, so that would have meant me, too. God got us sick with a bad virus (they think it’s Adenovirus) to protect us from a worse virus—and knowing what this one did to me, I definitely wouldn’t want any of us to experience the worse virus.

God is good even when we don’t understand. When we are being tossed around by the concerns of this life, He’s not worried. He has good plans for us, plans to give us “a future and a hope,” (Jeremiah 29:11), and we have no need to be afraid. If He says we shall be healed, we shall be healed.

“Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me and I shall be saved– for You are my praise.” Jeremiah 17:14