My sister-in-law telephoned to tell me my mother-in-law was sick. Karyn
said Ila had no energy, was very weak, constantly tired, fatigued. She had
to sit up in a chair in order to sleep, and was discouraged, emotionally
depressed, despondent. Now she was talking about dying. Would I pray for
her and see what I could get?
I prayed for Ila while Karyn was still on the telephone. Three letters popped
into my mind: "CGP." What does that mean? "See GP."
That's all? "Yes."
I told Karyn what I received, and translated it as "See General Practioner."
But besides being awfully terse, the message didn't make sense. I knew Ila
had been going to a heart specialist every three months since she had a
heart attack in 1984.
Karyn started asking a lot of questions -- name? place? type of doctor?
-- and she suggested several answers for each question. I tried to relay
her questions back up the channel, but all I got was a vague indication,
as though the person who heard me shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands,
and said, "That doesn't matter."
Finally, I set Karyn's detailed questions aside, re-tuned myself, and prayed
for Ila again. The message was the same: "See GP. That's all."
I relayed it to Karyn.
She said, "Well, Okay. If it doesn't matter, I guess we'll take her
back to our old family doctor."
A few days later, Ila telephoned to tell me what happened. She sounded great
-- very happy and full of energy. She said, as soon as she walked into the
doctor's office, his nurse took one look at her, got up from behind the
desk, came to her, gently pulled down the corner of one of her lower eyelids,
and said, "Hmmm."
The doctor examined her, and told the nurse to draw a blood sample. The
nurse took the sample into a back room. A few minutes later she returned
and said to the doctor, "We were both right." The doctor told
Ila she was dangerously anemic. He wrote a prescription for a blood transfusion
-- two pints of whole blood.
Ila took the prescription to the hospital and got the transfusion. Immediately,
she felt better, even before she left the hospital. She slept very well
that night. The next morning she woke up feeling better than she had for
years. Laughing, she said, "From the way it revved up my motor, I think
that blood must have been donated by a teenager! I feel like I've got a
whole new lease on life."
_________________________
To give credit where credit is due: the source of this message apparently
knew a lot of things I didn't know: what was wrong, what needed to be done,
and how to get it done. Why didn't the source tell us the diagnosis and
prescription? Probably because I couldn't order a blood transfusion, and
it probably wouldn't have done any good to send Ila or Karyn back to argue
with the heart specialist who failed to detect anemia. So, in retrospect,
the very terse message "CGP" was an elegant solution to the problem.