a thousand times no

I've been hesitant to write about this. Truth be told, I've spent the last four months or so hiding it all away, and so the prospect of spilling my proverbial guts on these pages is a little overwhelming. However. I find that I no longer want to keep this to myself.

It started a few months after that needlestick. I was always tired, and every time I worked night shift I would spend the next couple days recovering from violent illness. I caught every cold going around, and I felt like an absolute weakling. It all seemed easy to explain, though, since I live on a ship and breathe the same air as four hundred other people.

It was around the time that Baby Greg first came to us that I signed up to be a blood donor and gave a sample to the lab for routine testing. I was sitting by Greg's bedside in the ICU, willing him to breathe, when the crew nurse poked her head around the door and asked me to come to the clinic. I figured my hemoglobin was too low or my electrolytes were out of whack from my latest round if sickness. I just wasn't expecting Dr. Craig to say what he did.

You have Hepatitis B.

My world quietly crumpled and I sat, numb, while he drew more blood to repeat the test and explained to me that the man whose blood I had injected into my finger must have been very recently infected. That there was only a small chance of the virus going chronic. That I would probably recover.

And the whole time, all I could see in front of me were the yellow eyes and swollen bellies of patients I've cared for with liver disease. I found my way back to the ICU, back to my critically ill baby, forcing myself to concentrate. Willing myself to believe that it was going to be okay.


But it's hard to believe that things are going to be okay when you're a couple months away from your twenty-fifth birthday, living on a ship off the coast of West Africa, and infected with a potentially deadly virus. I'll admit it now; I was angry. Back when I was preparing to come to Liberia, people constantly told me to be careful. It's so scary over there! I can't believe you're doing something so dangerous! Anything could happen! I smiled and shot back the same glib answer every time. If God wants me there, He'll protect me.

But He hadn't. I'd somehow slipped out from under the shelter of His hands and into the big, bad world where things like incurable diseases lurked. I couldn't figure out why He would let it happen.

I spent the next three months waking up in cold sweats, wondering how I'd be able to afford a liver transplant. (I'm not sure Talent Trust covers that sort of thing. They do, however, make provision for repatriation of mortal remains. Which I was also thinking I might have to use, in a worst-case fulminant-hepatitis sort of scenario.) I dodged questions as to why I was drinking soda instead of Club beer with my dinners when we went out on a Friday night. I held on to my little secret, feeling dirty and diseased, and I tried to pretend that everything was all right.

Which, in true I-worried-about-this-for-nothing style, it is.

I'm now, as of a couple weeks ago, the proud posessor of another little pink slip of paper that bears my latest test results: negative. Just like over ninety percent of everyone who gets infected. (Those odds, interestingly enough, don't seem so great at three in the morning when your cabin is dark and your mind won't stop racing.)

I still don't know why it happened. I'm still a little bitter, if I'm being totally honest. Because I can't help thinking He failed me.

But, oh, His voice speaks into the silence of my pain. I know every hair, He reminds me. I knit your body together as you grew in the secret places. Every day and every moment of your life, I planned it all. Have you ever known me to make a mistake?

No. No. A thousand times no.