Today I want to talk a little about my health and childhood as it relates to this painting series.

When I was born, I was a blue baby and was baptized immediately. As an infant, my father regularly rushed me to the hospital because I would turn blue. The doctors would give me steroid injections and send me home. I remained sick throughout my childhood, and at one point my pediatrician began giving me regular gamma globulin shots because he simply didn’t know what else to do.

It was common for me to miss more than 100 days of school each year. Years later, I would learn that the cause was my heart condition, coarctation of the aorta. My aorta had been completely closed since birth. The chief thoracic surgeon who eventually operated on me said I should have died on the seventh day of life and that there was no medical explanation for why I survived.

What is even more remarkable is that my heart condition was not discovered until after I had carried and delivered my two children. It is amazing that I survived.

Over the years, doctors would also discover that I have Chiari Malformation Type I, kyphosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and an acquired terminal lung disease caused by mold exposure. After that diagnosis, I was advised to move across the country to get away from the environment we were living in back in Pennsylvania.

We discovered the mold just eight months after my son passed away. We were broken, but we pressed on.

Who would have thought that years later I would be forced to prove that I have the very medical conditions that have shaped my entire life? Medical records have gone missing. Tests have been ordered under incorrect diagnoses. Time and time again, I find myself having to prove my medical history and the conditions I have lived with for decades.

I believe I am being bullied, plain and simple. The very people who are supposed to help me navigate my healthcare have become a significant part of the problem. I am too sick to keep fighting these battles, and treatment has been delayed for so long that my future feels uncertain.

So I paint, and I pray.

In fact, this entire series came to me while I was praying the Novena to the Holy Spirit. You might call it divine inspiration. Through these paintings, I will revisit the memories that shaped me and work through the trauma my family and I have endured.

It is not an easy journey, but it is a necessary one.

Sometimes all you can do is place your trust in the Lord and believe He will guide you safely through the storm.