Hi, Murray Pinkham here starting on my blog on my journey to writing my book to be called “My Grace Diet”. At this date in January 2019 I am 71 years young and I have been a born again Christian since 1 June 1976, over 43 years ago. The scripture verse from 2 Corinthians ch 12 v 9 is the basis of the book title, and this website. Jesus spoke to Paul when Paul complained about the trial he was going through from persecution. Jesus said, “My grace is always more than enough for you, and my power finds its full expression through your weakness”. (TPT).
In the KJV we read “my grace is sufficient for you”
To me this is one of the most understated verses in the Bible. His grace is wider than the Pacific Ocean, it is more than sufficient!
Here are 2 photos. The first is from Sept 2016 when I weighed about 104 kg. The second is a photo taken 4 months after the op at Bondi Beach in Sydney for Joel’s wedding with Victoria, Nov 2017.
I have always been sporty and grew up on a dairy farm, also worked for the New Zealand Dairy Board. In 2007 at age 60 I experienced what I thought was mild angina while swimming. It is by the grace of God I knew exactly what it was, mild as it was. In New Zealand 40% of heart attack victims don’t even make it to the hospital. Many men particularly think its just a muscle pain. I just went to a funeral recently (Sep 2018) where a friend had an event 6 months before and was told it was not his heart. The day he died he had severe chest pains but would not get medical help because the doc had said his heart was good. A few hours later he had the heart attack that killed him.
After 1 more event on the treadmill at the gym when I had angina again and went to the doc for my regular 3 month bp meds appointment. As I had Southern Cross med insurance he sent me to a private cardiologist, Dr Andrew Maslowski. Turned out I had 3 blocked coronary arteries, LAD 95%, right coronary 90%, right circumflex 85%. They stented straight away, 2 in right coronary, 1 in LAD, the other 2 they could not stent because the arteries had right angle bends where the lesions were. The angioplasty and stents gave me 50% clear arteries, which is fine for normal living.
Note, they can now put stents in 90 deg bends.
After that I had a process called chelation where you are intravenously injected with an amino acid called EDTA and Vitamin C. In a further angiogram before a knee op it showed my arteries were only 30% blocked, in 2009, age 62, about when I became a Chartered Accountant.
I did not know then that spending $NZ4k on 25 transfusions did not give me permanent change.
Step forward 8 years to 2017. While having chelation my test was how I felt playing golf. Before the stents at age 60 I was really feeling pain in my thighs walking up hills by hole 12 out of 18. After stents and chelation, at age 62 I was actually able to play 36 holes in 1 day, 9 hours golf. So the next stage was a big step backwards. I got it wrong!
After leaving full time employment at age 64 I did less chelation because it costs $NZ225 or so plus Doctors Fee $180 every 6 months. Mid age 69, 2017, I started feeling symptoms in my legs playing golf, and light headed if I ran in the round to pass thru slower players in groups. In my 3-monthly check for my blood pressure meds I told my doctor and she suggested seeing the cardiology at the Manukau Super Clinic for Middlemore Hospital. I had previously been a private system heart patient.
On 11 April 2017 I had a stress test on the treadmill. If it hadn’t been Easter coming up I would have been in the Cath Lab that night for an angiogram.
See heart photo below: The whole body has an artery system where fresh oxygenated blood from the lungs and heart go through to the body then go back to the lungs and heart through veins. The arteries are high pressure systems, the veins are lower pressure. The heart has its own separate artery system, called coronary arteries, 5 I believe. When these arteries get blocked, you are in trouble. A heart attack can occur when a part of a lesion in your artery breaks off and travels thru the bloodstream till it finds a narrow part it can’t get thru. Please note here I am an accountant and economist degreed, not a doctor. I am open to correction so when my blogs become a book it is as correct as I can get it, without being incomprehensible to a normal person.
By Coronary.pdf: Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator derivative work [1]: Fred the Oyster (talk)adaption and further labeling: Mikael Häggström - Coronary.pdf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11377867
That night, 11 April, I had my first spiritual intervention. I had a mental picture. I was on a gurney in the Cath Lab and I saw Jesus sitting in a chair. He said to me “Murray, can you really trust me?” I was taken aback, but eventually said “Yes Lord”, and the picture disappeared. At this stage my first thought was that one of my stents had blocked or I had another lesion and a new stent would get me back up and running again.
On 1 May 2017 I went by train to Middlemore to the Cath Lab and was first in the queue at 8:30 am or so. In the middle of the op, where you are fully conscious but sedated, the surgeon said, “Murray, no stents today, your LAD is totally diseased, and there is a large lump of calcium in your right coronary. The good news is, you are a good candidate for bypass surgery”. My first thought was gee, thanks a lot, after years of exercise, chelation and being careful to research and eat the right food.
That night I was reading a book by Kevin Zadai, called “Heavenly Visitation”. See p 16 for the full para titled “AN ELEVATED PERSPECTIVE”. He said: We need a new perspective on life because things often look different from a higher vantage point. God wants us to see things from His viewpoint, which is the real one”. I am reliving these special moments right now. In these words God spoke to my heart that He had my back, He had His purposes in my mind in choosing to heal me through what is, in effect, a big, maybe barbaric, operation. Then I became an overcoming instrument for God, on a mission, not a victim any longer of being a guts eating too much fatty food.
So lets digress a little bit and quote Kevin some more: “When the Spirit of God takes us to a higher place, revelation comes automatically. From that place of understanding, we can operate in a supernatural way……as we see the purpose of our lives from God’s perspective, it is transforming and the supernatural becomes our new natural”.
Smith Wigglesworth often said when he was in a situation where the person he was with was in a bad way he said he had to leave that situation spiritually, mentally, and go to Heaven, into the heavenly realms and see from Gods perspective and get his faith level up, by speaking in tongues, praying, remembering the Word of God and quoting the scriptures out loud.
The very next day, God moved again, isn’t God good!
Our grandson Levi Cooper was attending Alpha Crucis Bible School in Penrose and they had an Open Day where family were invited. My wife Lee and I went for the morning lectures. Midway we had morning tea, then a praise session and then an address from the Principal. He spoke about his visit to Egypt and how the Coptic Christians there were coping under intense persecution. Then at the end he said “I want to depart from my message and say something special. Normally we like to see God moving in victory, great evangelism, healing, deliverances, but sometimes God does things thru tragedy”. At that moment my insides heaved, tears come to my eyes and I gasped, so much that Lee said “are you all right?”. I said yes, but intuitively, inside, I knew that God had spoken again, confirming the operation path as His method of healing delivery, and that the whole venture was more than just my personal healing journey, He had a plan wider than I could ever imagine right then, and still now.
There was another trial coming. In May 2017 I bumped a mole on the back of my neck and it bled, so I went to Plastics in Middlemore Hospital. They said it looked like melanoma and skin cancer, they were right as it turned out. The mole was removed, and I was actually informed of the lab result by my heart surgeons Prasanth Nair and Breckon the day before the heart op. 2 weeks later Plastics said they wanted to cut another 2 cm of flesh out around the wound to cut the risk of reoccurrence. See later.
After going thru the vagaries and ups and downs of the waiting list for the op, I entered Auckland Hospital’s Ward 42 on Monday 26 June 2017. Had the whole list of meeting 1 of the surgeons, Breckon, anaesthetist, ICU nurse, then the thrill of the day, the all over shave from 2 nurse aides.
2 days before I tried an experiment and fasted to make my body a fat burning furnace.
My op was 1:30 pm Tuesday but as I was also backup Op 1 in that theatre at 8:30 am I had to fast from 7 pm. So I did not eat again till 1:30 am Weds 28 June.
Looking back, I shudder now, but because of my preparation I just fronted and went into it all
When I awoke in ICU the nurse was just pulling the last of anything left on me so all good. One of the first things I thought was, I don’t feel as bad as I thought, then I realized the anaesthetic and painkillers were making things much easier. The op took 4.5 hours then they kept me sleeping another 6 or 7 hours.
Then it was a long, long uncomfortable night.
In the morning they had to remove several long drains. One would not come out, so I said to the surgeon one last big pull and I will pray “Come out in Jesus Name NOW!” and whoops, out it came, with a thread attached – wrongly sewn on!
Went back to the ward 42 that day, I think.
4 in my room.
Day by day recovery, the suffering went on, it really changed me. Pain management was good, only Panadol after 4 or 5 days.
After 6 days I said, well, time to go home? “No Murray, you have an infection, you need to go back to theatre.” A bug must have flown in while the op was in progress. I did have an infection in the mole wound 3 weeks before but probably a different bug.
Fortunately when they opened me up again, the bone was not infected, that apparently gets very complicated. I also learned later that the normal survival rate from infection after CABG bypass surgery is only 50%, although Auckland boasts 60% rate of survival, or a 40 % death rate, still not good odds. I suspect the worst problem is for people who think they are infected after they get home but can’t face going back in again. By Gods grace my infection was discovered before I got out that door.
The next problem was that the recovery time in hospital was indefinite, 3 weeks +, for me it was 4 weeks. 2 weeks later after that small op I was sitting somewhere after my walk around the hospital, part of my rehab, when I just started to cry and heard myself saying “I can’t take any more”. Then I had a picture of me diving over the 1.3 metre glass walls into the abyss in the well of the building. I knew I wasn’t suicidal and it was the devil attacking me. I rebuked him in the Name of Jesus. Then I worked back and realized the depression was also demonic and I rebuked that as well. If the devil hadn’t overstepped the mark who knows if I would have accepted the depression attack. Be awake and aware, some depression is from the devil. Maybe more than most think, but I am no expert on depression and will leave it there. Suicide often has a demonic input.
Near the same time, maybe just before, I had an encounter with Jesus. It was like it was in my imagination, but very real. From later research it was a spiritual vision. 2 weeks after my heart op I had a call from a nurse at Middlemore Hospital Plastic Surgery about the cancerous mole removal.. When it was removed late May 2017 I asked the surgeon, Bryce, how much he had removed. He said they predetermined how much to cut. Either he or his boss had told my heart surgeon Breckon they believed they had taken it all out. Now the nurse said they wanted to remove another 2 cm (an inch is 2.54 cm) around the whole area. This is standard procedure to make sure no more cancer remains. My sister Val has had this done. Anyway, I was lying in my hospital bed when I saw a picture where I was outside a Module waiting room at Manukau Super Clinic. I looked in the window and saw Jesus there. I can’t really tell you much about how He looked, I just knew it was Jesus. I walked into the room and He said, “Well Murray, what have you decided”. I said “I have had enough, I don’t wan’t this extra op.” He said, “Well, you know my principles and laws” and then turned around and walked away. When I kind of came to again, I realized what had happened and I cried for perhaps 20 minutes, just a man cry and sniffles. I talked to Plastics again a few days later and said no to any more ops. Since then they have put me on 3 monthly review and its all good, 18 months later. I have researched melanoma and skin cancer, there are horror stories, so I understand the doctors playing safe with everyone. I am not everyone, I have a get out of op card. I did the heart op as obedience to Jesus. All healing comes from God. We have to discern His delivery system in each situation. That’s why we need our own personal relationship with God. We can’t rely on the pastor, or a prophet, or a doctor, or your wife, they can help you discern Gods will in any situation, but Me and Jesus have all the votes.
In Dec 2017 I had another 6 days in Auckland Hospital due to 2 of the wires inserted to hold my sternum bone together getting twisted and poking thru my chest. I had 1 hour general surgery where they were pulled out then I had another 5 days for the bone to heal.
Through my stays in hospital I got to talk to many people about Jesus, got to pray for several people, but I still can’t see the whole picture that God sees. So, I just trust Him that it was all for good
So now its Jan 2019, 18 months after the op. My weight is still within 1 kg of the 89.4 kg (197 lbs) weight when I left hospital after 5 weeks, thanks to my vegetarian diet, lots of exercise and, I suspect, a raised metabolism. I am much better, back at work, playing golf, swimming, gardening and looking forward to the rest of my life as being even more fruitful for Jesus. I believe even more now in Jesus sacrifice and provision for our full healing, body, mind and spirit and sharing that with many more who don’t realise yet how loving God is and how much He desires to love you more!