"Medicine is not a science!"

I don't really trust doctors. I mean, I don't believe they're all quacks, but sometimes they're a little too confident.

Last week, I stretched and accidentally stuck my left hand in my ridiculously low ceiling fan, which was humming away full-blast. It smacked me right at the base of my index and middle fingers and I was sure I'd cracked at least one of them. I spent 4 hours in the ER. The doctor never came back to tell me the results of my x-rays. Instead, a nurse came in with my discharge papers, and that's how I found out I had a bone contusion (bruise).

Imagine my surprise when the ER called me today to tell me I had a hairline crack at the tip of my thumb! Surprising because it took them so long to inform me of this, and also because the fan didn't hit my thumb! Like, at all. The thumb was not involved in any way, shape or form. I told the physician's assistant who called me that I had no pain in my thumb and that it had never even been injured. "Are you sure?" she asked me. Yup, pretty sure. I even poked and prodded my thumb a little bit to make sure I hadn't missed something.



Now I'm wondering if maybe I did, indeed, crack one of my other fingers.

The doctors at the hospital I was taken to after my car accident in 2001 didn't seem to know an x-ray from a View-Master slide. First, my left knee looked like it was broken. Then, it didn't. Then, it did. Finally, the doctors said "screw it" and stuck me in a leg immobilizer, no cast. When I told them my left pinky finger didn't hurt, but I couldn't move it, they told me to "give it 2 weeks." Well, I gave it 2 weeks and finally went to an orthopedic surgeon who informed me that I'd severed a tendon and would need surgery, and HOPEFULLY I'd still be able to use that finger because I'd waited so long to get it checked out.

This is a View-Master, kids. We didn't always have smartphones.


Tomorrow, I'm going to the dentist to contend with an infected wisdom tooth. Yeah, I know, I'm a little old to be dealing with wisdom teeth. Most people get those yanked out long before their 36th birthday. I ignored mine until they started hurting - the one on the bottom right is killin' me. I'm a little nervous, and by "a little" I mean Gorbachev-trying-to-figure-out-how-to-fix-Chernobyl nervous. I fear the pain. I fear the awful cracking sound that accompanies roots being ripped out of your skull.

Honestly, I fear the dentist yanking the wrong tooth, because nothing surprises me anymore.

Love Wins? So Does Censorship. Here It Comes.

I have always been pretty steadfast in my support of gay marriage, much to the chagrin of a lot of my Christian friends.

It wasn't that I believed God is OK with homosexuality (I don't). For me, it was a purely political standpoint. I couldn't understand how in a free country like America, we could keep people from becoming legally married. I'd listened to arguments that redefining marriage would open the door to redefining it in truly scary ways in the future - like allowing people to marry their pets, or allowing perverts to marry children. The argument never swayed me. Marrying animals or children, after all, would mean victimizing someone (or something) who could not defend themselves. That isn't gay marriage. Gay marriage is about two consenting adults, not a...labradoodle or a 5-year-old.

It's Too Easy to Say "Yes" to the Enemy

I enjoy strange things. No, literally - I enjoy strange things. UFOs, conspiracies, that sort of thing. That doesn't mean I believe everything I read/hear/watch, it just means I like stretching my brain a bit.

For years, I've been listening to a radio show called Coast to Coast AM. It's a show about all the bizarre things in the world. Sometimes I tune out because it gets downright unbiblical. I pick and choose my episodes carefully. Well, it's 7:22 a.m. here and I never went to bed last night. (Thanks, insomnia.) I tuned into an old episode - from the mid-1990s, when I was still in high school - and the guest was Father Malachi Martin, a.k.a., "The Exorcist."

Yup, that one. From the creepy movie. (So creepy, in fact, I decided to add a little facetiousness to the mere mention of it...)



If you didn't know, it's based on a true story. But I assure you, this has nothing to do with the movie or the story itself.

The host of the show at the time, Art Bell, asked Father Martin how someone can be possessed by a demon. His response was lengthy, but something he said struck me. I don't remember his exact words, but he basically said that people say "yes" to many things without even realizing it. We may not utter "yes" from our mouths, but that doesn't mean we don't sign on to do whatever it is.

Actually, ya know what? Maybe we should talk about Ouija boards for a minute here. It's a perfect example.

How many people play with a Ouija board with the attitude that it's just a children's toy? They might do it out of pure morbid curiosity, entertainment, even thinking it's funny. They don't sit down in front of the board and say, "Yes, I hereby open myself up to demonic activity!" But that's still what they're doing. You don't have to say yes to mean it.

Ten years ago this month, I got a book published. I thought I was on my way to...what, exactly? Who knows. Bigger, better things, anyway. Ah, but it didn't happen that way. I've always struggled to "make it" as a freelance writer. It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that if I wrote about other things, I could make more money, but some of those other things are contrary to my faith. I would never sit down and choose to "sell my soul," but if I'd gone that path, I would have been selling my soul, in a way. I would have been saying "yes" to something so dangerous without having ever uttered a word. What kept me from traveling that path? To quote Father Martin, who was answering a similar question for a listener: "The fact that you didn't means that Jesus Christ has ownership of your soul."

I'm a Christian, which means I belong to Christ. I cannot be possessed, but I can still be oppressed. I'd never thought about my decisions this way until I heard Father Martin on the radio this morning. I realized that I say "yes" to a lot of things without recognizing or acknowledging them. Perhaps it's time to take a fresh survey of my life and see how much I blindly let into my heart.
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