Ashley Bell
ERCH 422.92
Dr. Topping
September 20, 2012
Trust is the Key to Understanding Life

Picture this: You are a first year senior in college. In order to graduate, you must teach overseas. In order to teach overseas, you must receive vaccinations. You receive three vaccines and your life changes forever.
Anxious about my trip to Cambodia and nervous about the three vaccines; I patiently wait for the nurse to call me back into an exam room. Sitting in the waiting room, I reflect on all that is to come. I will be getting vaccines so that I can teach for a month in Cambodia. When I come back I will be able to student teach and then graduate. Yes, I am so looking forward to graduation.
Deep in my thoughts, I miss hearing the nurse call my name. The little old woman with a little too much perfume on nudges me and points to the door. Grabbing my coat, I whisper thank you before heading for the door.
Inside the exam room, a nurse with shoulder length blond hair informs me that she is going to get the three shots and will be right back. A moment later, she returns with three needles and three alcohol swabs. Before administering each shot, she carefully cleans the intended injection site. She engages me in a conversation before she ever so cleverly sticks the needle into my upper arm injecting the serum. Placing a Band-Aid over each spot, she tells me to monitor the sites for possible swelling. I nod as I head out the door.
Leaving the parking lot, my phone rings. My mom tells me to come over to my sister’s house and help her finish packing. I arrive at about 5:30 pm. After eating pizza, my sister and I finish packing the upstairs. Lifting a box, I feel an intense sharp pain in my armpit. I ignore the pain and keep on working.
At 10:30 pm, we decide to call it a night and finish tomorrow. Driving home, the pain increases with each turn of the steering wheel. Trying to ignore the excruciating pain, I take a hot shower and crawl into bed. I had always been very healthy and never got sick. I had a high pain tolerance as well. I knew something must be wrong.
Stumbling down the stairs, I collapse in a lazy boy. I curled up in a blanket and cried myself to sleep. An hour later the door opens and my dad walks in. He walks over and feels my head. He fixes me a drink and takes my temperature. 104.6° F! My dad picks up the phone and calls my mother. Five minutes later, my mother burst through the door and calls the doctor.
The doctor prescribes Prednisone (a synthetic steroid hormone produced from cortisone) and Vicodin (Tylenol). I take the Prednisone for a week and nothing changes. I do not take the Vicodin because I am allergic to Tylenol.
Since my fever still has not broken, I return to the doctor. Upon further examination, my doctor discovered a circular bruise on my upper forearm. The doctor said that he was having me admitted in to the hospital because of the swelling, bruise and high fever.
After grabbing a quick dinner, my mom and I head to the Ephrata Hospital. Once inside, I am placed in a wheel chair and wheeled into a room on the third floor of the ICU. Seven hours after arriving, I complete the intake process and receive three IVs in my right arm. Since I have pain in my arm when it is moved, I was told not to use it.
As a result of the bruise on my upper left arm, a hematologist was consulted. Differential diagnosis included traumatic injury with rapidly spreading hematoma, vasculitis, bleeding disorder, or infection. Vancomycin and Ceftriaxone were started in addition to two other broad-spectrum antibiotics.
Unable to move my arms, I am forced to rely completely on others for everything. Day after day it is the same routine. The nurses and doctors would tell my parents and me that everything was normal. My blood pressure was 120/80, respirations were 18 breaths per minute, and pulse was 69.
I had blood drawn, CAT-SCANS done, Ultrasounds and MRIs done. Four days of tests and different answers. No one is on the same page. The doctor says that I may need surgery. The Infectious Disease people say that I am a medical mystery. The surgeon says I can go home.
Thursday, March 3, 2011, the doctor comes in and tells me I will be discharged in the morning since nothing has developed in my blood cultures. I am relieved, but still in pain. A nurse gives me a hot wrap to place around my arm to ease the pain. Later that night, I did develop some nausea and vomiting though.
Friday, March 4, 2011, I am horrified at what I see. Removing the hot wrap, I see a swollen, maroon colored extremity where my arm once was. Hearing me scream, a nurse comes running in and calls for a doctor. The doctor comes in and just stares as if in disbelief. He admits that he has never seen anything like this before in his life. I am taken down for another ultrasound.
In the thirty minutes, it took for the ultrasound, the discoloration and ulcer looking things had spread down my arm and had now begun to move into my chest. Over the next half hour, I had developed progressive dark-purple “rings” over my upper and lower arm. At this time, a CT scan of the arm was taken showing evidence of gas in the tissues. When I return to my room, my eyes widen as a near fear develops.
“Mom, something is wrong with my heart!” I say.
“You are probably just nervous Ash” my mom says.
“Feel my heart! It feels like it is going to explode out of my chest”
“Oh my word! Nurse! Something is wrong with my daughter” my mom exclaims.
A nurse comes in to check my vitals and runs out of the room. She returns with a doctor who after listening to my heart, rips open my shirt and jams a needle into my heart. As I scream in anguish, the doctor tells my mom that I have to have emergency surgery or I will die. My heart is beating 385 beats a minute. If it hits 400, I will go into cardiac arrest. If I did not have emergency surgery, I would lose my left arm and most likely, my life!
In a matter of minutes, I was wheeled into an O.R. and placed under anesthesia. Two hours later, I am wheeled in to a room in the Quarantine section of the hospital. I was groggy and very nauseous as a result of the morphine drip. I looked up and saw my oldest sister, Nicole, smiling down at me with tears in her eyes. “I was afraid I had lost you” Nicole says.
I motion for Nicole to help me get up and in to the bathroom. As I stagger into the bathroom, I smile because I could see how much my sister cared about me. As I turned to go back to my bed, a wave of nausea hit me. My sister tries to get me back to the bed, but it is too late. The contents of my stomach came bursting forth in a volcanic like fashion. My loving sister was covered from head to foot in the contents of my stomach.
Despite being disgusted, she called for some nurses to help clean me up. Once I had calmed down, I apologized for having just vomited all over her. She told me it was ok. Nothing mattered right now except for me getting better.
A week after my initial surgery, I had to have another. This time the surgeon made an 8 ½ inch incision on my lower left arm in addition to the four inch incision already on the upper portion of my left arm.
After surgery, the surgeon informed my parents,
Upon my initial incision, I had discovered extensive Type II Necrotizing Fasciitis involving the entire lower arm and the distal half of the upper arm. A small amount of “soupy fluid,” was found in both regions. The subcutaneous tissue and skin on the volar aspect of the forearm was thrombosed and nonviable. Most of the muscles, nerves, tendons, and vessels were viable but were enclosed in a thin, adherent, necrotic sheath. The necrotic sheath was very tenacious and had to be scraped and scoured off all the tendons, blood vessels, and nerves. She will have to have 4-6 additional debridements during the next two weeks (Dr. Platt. personal interview).
Every day that I was in the hospital, someone would smile at me and say something like, “God does everything for a reason.” “What is God trying to teach you?” I thought that the people who said this were just trying to be funny, so I stuck what they said in the back of my mind.
After being hospitalized for a month, I was finally released and allowed to return to school. I worked endlessly on my assignments and eventually completed the semester. However, I did not complete an overseas teaching experience. Since this was a graduation requirement, I received a letter from Lancaster Bible College on August 5, 2011 informing me that I would not be doing my practicum in the Fall and student teaching in the Spring because I did not fulfill this graduation requirement. As a result, LBC would extend my time another year. This meant that I would lose my K-6 certification as the certification changes December, 2012. It was this decision that prompted my transfer to Millersville University in August of 2011.
It has been about a year and eight months since the day I received my scar. The scar that changed my life! Before I had received the vaccines, I had been stressed, perfectionistic and not very happy. I did not trust anyone, nor was I overly tolerant. All I thought about was myself and what was best for me. I never took the time to depend on others for anything and always took things for granted. Going back to the question of what is God trying to teach you? At first, I did not know, nor did I care. All I could think about was how unfair this was and how deformed I was going to be. As time goes on, my scar may fade, but it will always be there. It was through this scar that God taught me the value of family, love, patience and above all; TRUST.
“For we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient to ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, the giver of life. For apart from Him we can do nothing” (NIV 2 Corinthians 3:4-5).

Works Cited
2 Corinthians. The Contemporary Parallel Bible: New King James Version, New International Version. (2004). New York: Oxford UP, Print.
Platt, Dr. Eugene S. "Necrotizing Fascitus." Personal interview. 10 Mar. 2011.