Exactly one year ago today, I underwent surgery to remove my adrenal gland – and, more importantly, the tumour that had grown within that adrenal gland. 

I’ve written about life with pheochromocytoma, my struggle to be diagnosed, and how life changed afterwards. If you’ve been around for long enough, you certainly know most of this story. But please indulge me again, because this is easily one of the most significant events in my life within the last decade. 

I wonder how much we can appreciate our health until it’s gone. I think it might be one of the easiest things to take for granted unless and/or until it disappears. I might be a very strange case, because I didn’t realize that my health was gone until it was restored to me. That sounds crazy, I know. But it’s only in retrospect that I can see the long slow descent into poor health that took over a decade. I didn’t know it was happening at the time. 

By the time that I was going to the hospital emergency department, I obviously knew something was wrong. By that time, I was convinced I might actually be dying. But even then, I described myself as okay in between my crisis episodes. I just didn’t know that I wasn’t okay. 

I didn’t know. I didn’t know how much health was lost and what needed to be restored. I couldn’t remember. But God knew. God remembered. And God restored. 

One year ago, I underwent surgery to remove my adrenal gland and, more importantly, the tumour that had grown there that was producing extra adrenaline – sometimes 20 times the adrenaline my body should have had. I knew that I would feel better after surgery, but I just figured I wouldn’t suffer those awful life-crushing crises any more. I didn’t know what God had in store for me. 

Let me give just one example.

I used to wake up with a headache almost every day. A person just can’t actually take Advil every day of their life, no matter how much they may want to, so I would wait and see if this was the type of headache that would go away, the type of headache I could ignore, or the type where I really did need to take some Advil to make it through the day. Somewhere between 3 to 7 times a month, the headache would develop into a migraine. I am so thankful that I didn’t have some of the worst migraine issues – I rarely had photosensitivity or problems with noise. (When you often end up sucking it up and continuing to teach through the migraine, that’s really, really fortuitous.) But I did often have awful nausea accompanying the migraine, getting worse as the day went on to the point that I would just try to lie absolutely still in my bed so that I would just have the migraine headache to deal with. Migraines run in the family, so this was just an unfortunate genetic inheritance, it seemed. 

As the weeks after surgery went by and I kept feeling better and better, I stopped waking up with headaches. I was thankful not to have any migraines, but I wasn’t really holding out any hope that they were gone for good. I expected them to be a part of my life forever. But time kept passing and I just never got a headache, let alone a migraine. Over the summer, I flew to Alberta and stayed with my sister, taking care of my nephews. When the older one started school in September and came back with a cold, one morning I woke up with a bit of a sore throat and a headache. Just a headache, nothing more. But I was pretty miserable, wondering how did I do this almost every day for so long? 

The real benchmark for me was a week of lost sleep before coming to Guatemala. With variants of concern identified in Canada, I often lay awake in bed for hours, wondering if I would really actually be able to fly out of Canada and enter Guatemala. I never had the slightest bit of a headache. Previously, lack of sleep had been my number one migraine trigger. While getting a good night’s sleep wasn’t enough to prevent a migraine, not getting enough sleep pretty much guaranteed that I would pay with a migraine. We arrived in Guatemala close to midnight, and with the time going through customs and immigration, driving from the airport, and getting settled in at a new place, I fell asleep well after 2 am. With the time change, bright sunlight shining in, loud motos driving by outside, and dogs barking in the street, I woke up at 5. While I felt absolutely exhausted, I had no headache. No migraine. Nothing. I could only marvel at the goodness of God in the timing of this healing. 

It’s not just the goodness of not worrying about a tumour or about the next crisis. It’s the day to day goodness of good health. It’s the gift of being in a new country and a new job and new community and feeling good, every single day. 

I do not take this for granted. I literally thank God for my health each day.