DR IK or A GOOD PAIN?

December 20, 2010 Monday

Last Friday after just normal p-day activities, I stood up and experienced a terrible pain in the calf of my leg. I began limping and carried on with our regular activities. It didn’t hurt when I wasn’t putting weight on it. It only hurt when I flexed my foot with weight on it when I walked. So later that night I called my sister-in-law, Marjorie, an RN, and then my sister, Nancy, a sonographer. They both indicated that I should get it checked as it might be a deep vein thrombosis. So on Saturday we went to the ER. The clerk there said that even if I did need an ultrasound, it wouldn’t be done until next week because they only did emergencies on weekends. So we went back home and I stayed off of it as much as I could for the rest of the weekend. This morning it was still bothering me a little, so we went out to do a little missionary work. By noon, it was hurting a lot more, so we went to the clinic next to the hospital. (We had found out it would be $80 cheaper if a GP ordered the ultrasound than if we went to the ER for it.) As a walk-in, we got to take “pot-luck” on the doctor. The receptionist told me I would see Dr. IK (pronounced eye-kay). He turned out to be from Nigeria and has been in Broome only two months. He practiced in Botswana for 5 years before coming here. His real name is very long so he’d shortened it to IK. He was very sharp and as we talked it came up that we were here as missionaries for the church. He’d not heard of the church before and had been raised a Catholic but had switched over to being a Pentacostal. A bit later in the exam he asked me, “So what’s the difference between the Mormons and the other churches out there?” What a dream question that was! He received the short version of a 1st lesson which includes the Book of Mormon. He asked how long it is and then said, “I’d like to take a look at that book.” (Missionary swoons right here!) I told him I’d bring him one. He ordered an ultrasound (still waiting to hear back from the Imaging Department at the hospital as to when my appointment is) and told me to get a fasting blood test. So tomorrow we go back to the clinic to have that done and drop off a Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith pamphlet to the good doctor. I’m thinking it was worth a pain in the leg.
Later today we returned to Matt Wilson, a J-dub that Orson had found tracting. We explained we would like to talk to him about some things we’d learned about his church and its statements about Mormonism. He said he could give us 5 minutes. An hour and 20 minutes later, we left. He was very attentive and told us that he had left his church for a while and then come back to it and was comfortable there. But he was surprised to see all the falsehoods that had been printed in the Watch Tower about our church. We invited him to read the Book of Mormon but he didn’t take us up on that. We figure we’ve planted a lot of seeds for him to ponder. When we left, he said we could come back to talk anytime. We are planning to take him a copy of the Family Proclamation and the Living Christ in a couple of weeks.