August 30 Fever

In the middle of last night, I was feverish. I had a sense of doom, that I would not be healed after all. I woke up early to get ready because I did not want to be hospitalized in Macau. Victor and I managed to take the 6 a.m. ferry. I was briefly detained when crossing immigration on the Hong Kong side to have my temperature taken and recorded. We managed to get to Princess Margaret Hospital by about 8 o’ clock and waited for the oncology clinic to open. They measured my temperature a few times – I think to try to “make” it lower. Results of the blood test (white blood count), according to the doctor’s interpretation, was not totally off the chart given my condition and the growth factor injection (to stimulate white blood count); whereas on Saturday a doctor in Macau seemed eager to get me hospitalized.

I observed that when my temperature reached a certain point, not only do I become irritable, my thoughts about God also become negative – such as He is punishing me for something unknown, that this is a premonition of me having only a few years of life left, etc. When the temperature got closer to normal, I would become cheerful again with some silly jokes and future becomes bright again. This fluctuation is quite obvious and there are both times of spiritual insights as well as crying out irrational fears and sadness to the Lord. It feels odd but there really is this rapid shift throughout the day and night.

This afternoon the Lord reminded me of my own prayer: that in this treatment process, the cancer cells would be destroyed but that vital organs would be protected and the good systems would become resilient. Therefore fighting an infection may be a necessary process for the good system to become resilient. [Of course, the doctor’s “normalizing” my fever helped.] So I must trust in the Lord.

The most important is total surrender to the Lord. Faith in His healing comes within our total surrender to Him and His sovereign will. Sometimes I am afraid to ask for certain things because I do not want to be disappointed. Surrendering allows us to freely ask and expect goodness from God and yet accepting “disappointments” and God’s alternative paths, only to find that His perfect way is better than ours.

Last but not least, I just checked the temperature – close to normal as I prepare to enter this blog. But I dropped the thermometer and broke it, resulting in a brief hysteria. Victor had to clean up the mess as well as the hysteria.