I recently learned an important lesson about how important it is to trust our instincts. It is something that may even have saved my life. Perhaps trusting our instincts will not always involve life-threatening issues but, all the same, when we learn to trust our bodies and instincts, we will be doing ourselves a world of good.

It was my daughter’s birthday and so she got to choose where we would all go for dinner, so we went to a Mexican restaurant that she likes. Immediately after finishing our food, I started to get sharp pains in my upper abdomen. We went home but, as the night wore on, my stomach pain became worse. I began to feel as though I had food poisoning, but didn’t think too much of it.

By 5 in the morning, my husband heard me at the other end of the house and came to check in on me. I had been up, vomiting and in extreme pain, the entire night. He took one look at me and said I needed to get to the hospital. I was lying on the floor, sweating profusely and in the worst pain I’ve ever felt (and I’ve given birth to two children!).

My response was that I would go to the emergency room once I got the kids off to school, which was three hours later. In typical motherly fashion, my plan was to make sure that everyone else was taken care of before turning the focus on myself.

Just 45 minutes later, however, I couldn’t take it any longer. I was beyond the point of thinking that I had food poisoning; I felt as if there must be something wrong with some organ in my body. I grabbed the phone and called a close friend to arrange to drop my kids off at her house, so she could get them off to school, so that I could go straight to the emergency room without having to worry about getting them there myself.

Twenty minutes later, I reached the emergency room. The horrible shooting pain and vomiting continued, and I was thankful that those in the ER were quick to run tests and provide relief. What they found out was that I had a small-bowel obstruction. How it happened is still a mystery, although one of the doctors believed that I did also have food poisoning.

I spent the night in the hospital, with a nasogastric tube pumping everything out of my intestines. I couldn’t help but think about what might have happened if I hadn’t trusted my instincts. Part of me had wanted to just lay there on the floor that night and wait for whatever was wrong to pass, so that I would avoid inconveniencing anyone, spending time at a hospital, and incurring a medical bill. But the other part of me, my instinctual part, insisted that this was something too big for me to kick on my own. And my instincts were right!

After spending 24 hours with the tube, and a day and half in the hospital, I was given two prescriptions to take at home, along with my walking papers. Before leaving, I asked the doctor what would have happened if I hadn’t come to the hospital and had instead waited for the pain and symptoms to pass. The doctor promptly replied that I would have died.

I went home and did some research on small-bowel obstructions and, sure enough, it’s a life-threatening condition wherein the intestine (and then the person) begins to die without treatment. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life that I followed my instincts.

If you find your instincts sending you a message, whether about a medical condition, an emergency, a parenting issue or anything else, listen to it. You just never know how serious it could be, making it that much more important to trust ourselves, even if you can’t really pinpoint why. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.”

By Jacqueline Bodnar

MyTurn.com