I just got home from having a painful surgical procedure that I usually have a couple of times a year. No, I should correct that. I usually have it a couple times a year, but it is not always painful.
In 2000, I had a heart transplant and every so often the cardiac team requires me to check for rejection of the transplanted organ. This is done via heart biopsy in which, under local anesthetic, a catheter is introduced into your vein through your neck near the collar bone. The catheter is inserted all the way to your heart through the vein. Then a wire-like instrument is inserted into the catheter, then into your heart, and clips off tiny pieces that will be viewed under microscope to check for normal or abnormal cells.
As you can imagine, having a tube rammed into a vein in your neck is no picnic, but in my case the procedure is even more abrasive. You see, normally the doctor would go through the right side of the neck where your vein has a direct path to the heart. However in my case, since the vein on the right is occluded, the vein on the left must be used. Its path normally starts on the left, crosses the chest and merges with the right vein. Then to make it a little tougher, the vein on the left has a couple of corkscrew turns that have to be navigated along the way. If you don't know your way around, it can be a painful ordeal... and sometimes even when you do know your way around it can be a painful ordeal.
Last night, after meditation, I used a technique to send healing energy to the procedure room where the biopsies are normally performed. The effect of this technique would be to spiritualize the room and the participants so the outcome would be for the highest good for all participants and I am confident the technique was successful. Yet, I am left wondering, "if it was successful and the technique should have made the biopsy nearly painless, then why did I endure another painful encounter?".
It's kind of like a prayer that seems to go unanswered. You ask for something, and at first glance it appears like you are ignored. This is what many of us would think. However in my case, my beliefs are so engrained in me that I can come to another conclusion. My technique was successful, or my prayer was answered. The rationale is this: I was considering a situation where I expected the regular amount of pain and through the technique, hoped to reduce it to nominal pain. When instead, today's procedure was to be extremely painful, and after the technique of pain reduction, I was left with regular pain.
So to recap, when we ask for something and it appears not to be granted, we must look at what greater pains may have rained down on us if we had not prayed at all. Our prayer may have reduced greater pains to normal, instead of reducing normal pains to zero.
In short, always be thankful, because things could always be worse.
