My friend Maria Portillo wrote this. I met her after her heart surgery and she told me part of this story. It is so good, it was worth saving and repeating:
By Maria Portillo (from a Facebook post)
I know it is almost midnight and this day is almost over; but today February 7th was National Wear Red Day for awareness of heart disease, and I did not want this day to pass without posting something about it.
So I wore red all day today, because in March of 2008 I had quadruple open heart bypass surgery in McAllen, at Doctors Hospital Renaissance; all four of my arteries were 99 percent blocked. I was 58 years old. I only survived because of the Grace of God and the skill of my cardiac surgeon, Dr. Jorge De La Garza, and I know that God guides the hands of all doctors.
So the story I am about to tell you is about heart disease, but it is also a story of how God never leaves us if we trust Him. And I want to tell all my women friends and family members, please take care of yourself; be careful what you eat. Before my open heart surgery I had let myself gain over 200 pounds, and I am barely 5 feet tall. It was too much stress on my heart, and I ate nothing but fried foods and carbs, I am posting some pictures of myself so you can see how I looked in 2008 when I weighed 205 pounds.
I was very unhealthy, could barely walk. I had a heart attack at work, at the time I was teaching paralegal courses at South Texas Vo-Tech and it happened in class; an ambulance was called; I barely made it alive to the ER, and I was sent to a cardiac surgeon. I will not go into the details of that night before my surgery; all I will tell you is that I was sure I was going to die; I convinced myself that I was not going to survive. My beloved cousin Carmina never left my side. And my nephew Alex whom I love with all my heart, never left my side either. My brother Raul came from Dallas to be with me and arrived in the middle of the night. I was so happy to see him.
That night, I did not sleep at all because of the fear. Now I will relate something that happened and I hope you believe me, because it happened. Around 3 o'clock in the morning, I started feeling a tingling sensation coming from my toes all up my body. I felt extreme fear and I knew that if that tingling came all the way to my chest it would consume me. Suddenly at the foot of my bed I saw 2 figures of people, they were gray and they did not have any features, no eyes, no nose, no mouth, nothing, only gray faces. I knew they were evil. I started screaming for my brother Raul who had fallen asleep on a chair. He woke up and said what is wrong? And I said "Those people, those gray people at the foot of my bed!" And he said, "There is nothing there!" But only I could see them.
So my brother started praying for me, and he said "By the grace of God, by the stripes of Jesus, all evil disappear!" And when he said that, those figures slowly started fading away till they were gone. My brother, who is a much better Christian than I will ever be, told me that because of my fear the enemy was attacking me, that Satan was trying to get me because I had lost all my faith and had decided in my mind that I going to die. Then he said, "Don't you remember what Jesus said?" And I said "What?" and he said "In John 10:10 Jesus said "I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly!" "You will have life, Elena, and you will have an abundant life, but you have to trust in Jesus." So all of a sudden I felt peace, but I still felt a little fear, I still had a little unfaith.
Then right at 5:30a.m. the nurses came to take me to the operating room. My fear came back; I did not want to go. As an excuse I said, "Wait, please let me read my bible before you take me." The nurse said hurry up because the doctor is already waiting for you in the operating room with his mask on. My brother brought me my bible, which was an old bible that used to belong to someone else and it was all marked with notes written all over it; I just opened it without looking for any particular page, and it opened to a page that had a verse circled in red ink. Of course I looked at it because it was circled in red. Do you know what the verse said? It said "Create in my a clean heart, oh Lord, and renew my spirit." It was Psalm 51, Verse 10.
I suddenly knew that God was speaking directly to me. He was telling me right before surgery, that he was going to give me a clean heart and renew my spirit, the two things I needed most because my heart had disease and my spirit was way down. So I said, "Okay Lord, you have given me a message, and I am going to trust you." T hen I told the nurses, "Okay, I am ready to go." As the nurses wheeled me down the hall to the operating room, and as I stared up at the lights as I was being rolled down the halls, I kept repeating out loud, "Lord, I am going to trust you, I humble myself before you, but first clean my heart of my sins and then of my disease." And I kept repeating "First clean my heart of my sins, and then of my disease."
I remember going into the operating room, I saw the doctor with his mask, and another doctor with a mask, it was bitterly cold, and there were huge tall columns of some type of metal; they transferred me to the operating table, and I barely remember the anesthesiologist telling me to start counting, then I was out. The surgery lasted 8 hours. I woke up at 1:30pm, alive! My brother was there, cousin Carmina was there, my brother said "You made it Elena, you're alive!" I was intubated and asked them to take the tube out so I could talk. I felt no pain whatsoever! No pain at all. Of course, I was thanking God over and I made a promise that I would tell everyone I met the story of how he saved me and gave me a verse to read at the very last minute before my surgery. And so to everyone that walked into my room, I would tell them this story, to the janitor, to the nurses aide, to the laboratory tech who came to take my blood, to every person that walked in my room, I would not let them leave until they heard my story.
I was in ICU for 10 days. I was walking by the next day after the surgery, and I never felt any pain in my scar and they did not have to give me any pain medicine. Nobody understood it. But I knew. However, this is not the end of the story. After being in ICU for 10 days, I kept on telling everyone who walked in my room or visited me, the story of how God gave me that verse just before my surgery, how I just found it marked in red. I must have told the story 100 times in those 10 days.
Well, on the last night I was there it happened again. I was awake and I suddenly started feeling that tingling sensation on my toes, it started to come up my body again, I looked at the foot of my bed, and those gray figures were there again! No faces, just all gray, this time I could tell it was a man and a woman and she was carrying a baby. But they were all gray and I could sense extreme evil. My brother had left, no one was in the room with me. I started screaming "Help, help me, help!" A nurse came running in. I remember it was a Filipino nurse. She said "What is wrong, Ms. Portillo, all of a sudden your blood pressure shot up really high on the screen!" And I told her "It's those gray people at the foot of my bed!" and she said she did not see anything, But I kept telling her I could see them.
So she said, "Okay, I am going to do something, but you must not tell anyone or I will get fired." She closed the door to the room and got on her knees by my bed, And she started to pray, and she said "By the stripes of Jesus, all evil go away!" The same words my brother had said. And once again, once those words were spoken, the figures started slowly fading till they disappeared and the tingling stopped. So she asked me if I wanted to talk to the hospital minister, and I said yes. So she promised to send him to me in the morning before I was checked out.
At 6:00am the hospital chaplain came in and I told him everything that had happened and I asked him why it happened again after God had saved me and I believed, and he said that he thought it happened because I had been praising God too much, telling everyone my story over and over, and that it made the enemy of our Lord very angry because he knew I had regained my faith and believed in the Lord again, and so he wanted to try to get me one more time. But the Lord was merciful and he made sure that the nurse who was outside my room was a Christian who believed in Jesus, the kind of nurse that would risk her job by kneeling by the side of a hospital bed and praying for a patient.
So I went home. And the first Sunday I told my story at church. And ever since then I try to tell it to every new person I meet. I thought I would tell it on Facebook to all my new Facebook friends whom I have not met in person because we live so far away from each other. So in honor of Heart Disease Awareness Day, and in honor of our great Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, this is my story. So as you look at my pictures and you see my scar, and you see me smiling with my big old scar, it is because I am so grateful God let me live!
P.S. - Some other day I will tell you of my cancer and stroke which came later, and how the Lord continues to be merciful to this sinner. In the meantime, take care of your bodies and what you eat and drink, because on this earth we are only flesh and blood, and God gave us our bodies for a gift, not to abuse them. God bless everyone!
