Power of prayer
I wrote about the power of prayer months ago with the Buffalo Bills player, Damar Hamlin. I just experienced it last week while sick with the flu. It kicked in pretty good last Sunday. At one of the Masses, I stood up to proclaim the Gospel and felt quite dizzy. After all the Masses, I slept hard through Sunday night into late Monday morning. Couldn’t sit through the Holy Hour, celebrated noon Mass, and went back to bed. When I woke up in the late afternoon, I realized that whatever I had (cough, headache, chills, dizziness, fever) wasn’t getting better. In fact, it was getting worse. I went to Urgent Care where they diagnosed me with Type A flu. The doctor said it’s a very rare type of the flu (Type B is common), and wondered aloud how I got it. She told me I had to isolate for the week which is why we had to cancel Masses all last week, unfortunately.
She prescribed Tamiflu which I started taking Monday night. On Tuesday, people were telling me via text messages that Tamiflu is excellent in getting rid of the flu. But, through mid afternoon, my symptoms hadn’t changed. I was starting to get nervous when I recalled a time years ago as a priest when I got so sick that I had to go the hospital. And, then the clincher: I called my Mom to let her know what was happening. I normally try not to tell her bad news, but this was getting serious.
It wasn’t long after that call to Mom that I felt something I hadn’t felt in three days: comfort. There was some kind of comfort zone that I finally found followed by a decrease in the intensity of the symptoms. By Tuesday night, I felt that I had turned the corner!
A thought hit me that night. We had put out an email via Flock Note Tuesday morning that I was sick. People messaged me all day with prayers and get-well wishes. I knew that many people at OLVP were praying for me. The thought that I had was that their prayers helped me turn the corner. Yes, I think that the Tamiflu finally kicked in and did its thing. But so did all the prayers. There are still a few, small remnants of the flu, but overall I feel fine. I have publicly thanked people here the past two days for their prayers, and truly believe that they helped me to recover.
