Letter No. 2: The Day the Floor Dropped Out

After five years of silence, the story of the aneurysm that nearly killed me — and the peace that didn't leave.

I had a sinus infection.

That part wasn’t unusual. I get them. Bad ones, sometimes. But this one came with something I had never had before — odd little neurological symptoms I couldn’t explain. Stumbling when I walked. Trouble finding ordinary words. Moments of confusion. The strange inability to hold more than one thought in my head at a time. It troubled me enough that I went to my doctor. He listened, and then he ordered a scan to see whether the sinus infection had breached the bone of my skull and infected my brain. That would have been quite serious.

What the scan found instead was something else entirely. Something fatal.

A dolichoectasia — a very large aneurysm in one of the two major arteries supplying blood to my brain. It had grown inside the small space of my brainstem, pressing against the medulla, effectively flattening it and destroying its function. The medulla is the part of the brain that runs the things you never think about: breathing, sleeping, heartbeat, swallowing, blood pressure, the quiet machinery that keeps you alive. Mine had stopped working. Miraculously, other parts of my brain had quietly stepped in to do the medulla’s job — the doctors were astonished I was still alive, and more astonished that my body had improvised this hard while I was busy being annoyed about another sinus infection. This diagnosis is so rare that mine is the only case the Mayo Clinic has ever seen.

We made plans for life-saving surgery. I came home from the Mayo and met with my two grown sons and had the conversation a father hopes he never has to have. Then I went back to Rochester. Both my sons, my daughter-in-law, and my wife, Sherry, were there for the surgery.

I want you to know about the minute before that surgery began. I have spoken of it before — but not like this, in a quiet letter, to those of you I may have lost touch with along the way. It is important to me to tell you.

They wheeled me into the operating theater. It was very large and filled with doctors who had come to observe — I have never seen such a scene, even depicted in movies or on television — a standing room only crowd of people, all wearing sterile scrubs, caps, and masks. I was the only person in the room not incognito. The anesthesiologist prepared to put the mask on my face. I would soon lose consciousness. I knew what was coming. I knew the surgeon would have to take the back of my head off, cut his way down to the brainstem, and try to place a small sling that would hopefully pull the offending artery back from the tissue it was crushing. The chances were that I would not wake up, and I knew that.

And what did I feel, lying there on my face?

Peace.

Not bravery. Not resignation. Peace. I knew that God and I were good. I knew that if I did not open my eyes again in that hospital, I would open them seeing my Savior’s face, and nothing would ever be wrong again. That was it. That was the whole interior weather. The deepest peace I have ever known in my life. It was as though I was already in His physical presence; and indeed, I believe I was.

A line from a hymn keeps coming back to me when I try to describe it. Keith Getty and Stuart Townend wrote it in the song In Christ Alone. “What heights of love, what depths of peace, when fears are stilled, when strivings cease.” That was me. The fears were stilled. The strivings ceased. Christ was there, and that was enough, and the next thing did not have to be controlled by me. There is a lot of striving in this life — and there is a real measure of relief in knowing that, one day, it will be over. I did not know whether that last day of September 2021 would be the day my striving ceased. But I felt a foreshadowing of the peace that would come if it did. It felt good.

The surgery wasn’t fully completed. During the operation, my vitals went too far the wrong way; they had to stop after completing only a small part of what they hoped to do. I came out almost completely disabled — no walking, almost no talking, my right arm and shoulder mostly paralyzed, the right side of my vocal mechanism paralyzed too. I was at Mayo as an inpatient for nearly two months after that, with daily therapies of one kind and another. Then I came home, and the therapies kept going. A wheelchair ramp went up at our house. The government declared me disabled. My financial-services licenses, the ones I had spent decades earning, quietly expired. Our income was cut by more than half. The cost of living did not get the memo.

I am a singer. Was a singer. And a worship leader. The whole arc of my life had a guitar in it, and after the surgery I could barely hold the guitar and I could not sing at all. While much of my speaking voice has returned, my singing voice has not. That loss is still a loss, and I would be lying to you if I told you otherwise.

But here is what I want you to know, and it is the reason I am writing this letter at all.

By the grace of God, I am slowly making progress. Why is this remarkable? Because I was told that nerves stop healing after about 18 months. After that, one shouldn’t expect any more natural healing. Eighteen months after my surgery, I still had a long — very long — way to go. But when I sat with my surgeon three years post-surgery and raised my right arm in the air, he gasped and declared it a miracle. He’s a renowned man of science who follows Jesus and knows a miracle when he sees one.

At one time, I couldn’t leave the house without the wheelchair ramp. Now, I don’t need it at all — in fact, workers recently took that ramp away. I’m walking with one cane these days, and the progress continues. You can hear me talk just fine without a headset microphone and a portable speaker around my neck. And I am preaching. I will tell you — I preached even after the surgery, with a voice that sounded like a chain-smoking bullfrog with a cold. It wouldn’t have happened without a very loving and patient church family.

That little home fellowship has carried Sherry and me through this in ways I cannot describe without my eyes filling — the prayer, the fasting, the snow removal, the lawn, the meals, the showing up, the words of love and encouragement. They are so much more than family. And in every part of it, in every hard inch, the thing I felt on that operating-room table has been true.

Christ has been sufficient.

Not in the way you might print on a coffee mug and hold with a saccharin smile. But in the way you actually mean it, after five years of living inside a body that does not work as it once did. Christ has been the friend that sticks closer than a brother. The Comforter. The Paraclete. He has been enough on the days when nothing else was, and He has not stopped being enough.

I am not the man I was five years ago. I never will be. Some things did not come back, and may never. But in some ways, I am now far more than I ever was. And I will tell you a strange thing, and it is the truest sentence in this letter:

I have never been more content. I have never been more at peace.

The hearth is warm. I’m glad you came.

Grace and peace,

Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor’s Hearth

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Letters on Love, Loss, Failure, and the Long Road of Discipleship