Andy's Story - 2000

The condensed trip report can be found here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PfneNds4j2_LQumpAK328qIc2uCp1wCe/view

But there is much more to the story.

After traveling from Tegucigalpa to Marcala, we set up in a school where we would spend 4 nights. We hoped to be able to start the clinic that afternoon as a trial run to prepare for the very busy 3 days of clinics thereafter. This required moving desks from the classrooms (where we would be sleeping on cots) to the open-air gym and establishing a corner for the dental clinic (back center), another for the pharmacy (on left), run by Dr. Beth who needed to unpack and organize all the meds. The line of desks and chairs (on right) was for the providers, interpreters and waiting patients. Lower right was the entrance and to the left (after patients visited the pharmacy) the exit.

Andy M. was good friend and a Deacon in our church in Kansas, and a very active Gideon, having participated in several international Gideon Bible distributions.

As I was trying to direct the set-up, one of the team members came up and said “There is something wrong with Andy.” Andy was lying on a cot we had placed in the gym, was white and covered in sweat. He said he was feeling fine and suddenly had severe abdominal pain and thought he was going to pass out.

His abdomen was soft but in the left lower quadrant I felt a hard fist size mass. My first thought was that he had a colon cancer that had just eroded through the wall of his descending colon, and he would soon have peritonitis.

I got a sharp senior medical student, Shane, with whom I had worked the year before in Tegucigalpa, and asked him to examine Andy, and he felt the same mass. We had a somewhat comprehensive emergency kit, and I told Shane to get an IV started and to give him Gentamicin and Ceftriaxone (antibiotics) and Tramadol (a non-narcotic IV pain med).

I found Jim and explained the situation; that Andy needed to be driven immediately the 5 hours back to Tegucigalpa and be sent to the U.S. The Mississippi Baptist Convention had an emergency evacuation insurance policy, and I wrote out for Jim to tell them Andy had an “acute abdomen” and required immediate transport.

Jim, Charlie S., Shane and Andy took off.

On reaching the mission house, now late in the afternoon, Jim called the insurance provider, told them as best he could what I had said, and they explained that “We don’t send a plane until the team member has been evaluated by a local doctor”. Apparently my in-person evaluation was deemed inadequate!

There is a hospital in Tegucigalpa primarily serving U.S. businessmen and U.S. government staff, so Jim took Andy there. After being examined, he had an ultrasound which showed a large left kidney stone. After the IV fluids he was feeling much better and decided to stay in Honduras and rejoin the team in Marcala!

Since he was back in Tegucigalpa, he then called the national Gideon president, told him what we were doing, and asked him if he could deliver some boxes of Bibles.

And they were delivered the next morning!

Andy and Charlie S.

Late morning of the 3rd clinic day in Marcala, in walks Andy!

He was free of pain but in retrospect I regret not examining him again for the mass.

We finished the mission and returned to Tegucigalpa. That afternoon Andy’s pain returned. We restarted the IV, and were able to get a commercial ticket home for the next morning (the team was to stay one more day for sightseeing and shopping).

Fortunately another team member had a ticket to leave a day early so Andy had someone to accompany him.

But it was May, the end of the dry season, when all the fields of corn were being burned. There was so much smoke in the air that the plane sat on the runway for 4 hours waiting for the sky to clear enough to take off!

After connecting in DFW on a later flight to K.C., Andy’s daughter Teri met him late in the night at the airport and took him directly to the hospital in Olathe. I assume the docs there did not feel the mass in his LLQ or he certainly would have had an investigation. Another ultrasound confirmed the "huge" kidney stone. Andy was feeling better, told to push fluids, and was scheduled for Lithotripsy in 2 weeks.

On arrival for the Lithotripsy he had another ultrasound to confirm the location of the stone – AND THERE WAS NO STONE. 

Andy most certainly would have known had it passed (quite unlikely because of the size), both because of the pain and he had been straining his urine.

Rocks don’t just dissolve and it is my opinion that this was a miraculous healing. In my medical career, like every doc, things happen that can’t be rationally explained. Patients get well that medically shouldn’t, but this was my only personal witness to a miracle.

And BTW Andy has had no recurrence of a kidney stone now 25 years later.

It was observed that Satan chose to attack the guy who got us the Bibles.