“It’s Not Your Time” is a song that encapsulates the personal testimony of Rev. Adette Atkinson Mitchell as she shares about the time when doctors had given up on her. The prognosis was not for her to live, but God turned it all around, resulting in a song that encourages all to embrace the report of the Lord when all seems hopeless.
In an interview with Freedom Come Rain, Mitchell relived the time in 2019 when everything began to change for her.
She recalled getting up to use the bathroom at about 3 a.m. when she felt an unusual heaviness in her chest. She went back to lying down because she did not like the way she was feeling. She said she heard herself making a “funny” sound. It was not normal for her, and her husband became concerned.
“I said, I don’t like how I feel, so heavy. He didn’t ask any more questions…and he just got up and took the olive oil and just anointed my chest and prayed for me until it subsided, and I went to sleep,” she shared.
At the time, Mitchell was teaching at May Day High School in Manchester. She got dressed and went to work, but while there, she started experiencing chest pains as well as pain in her abdominal area. She thought it was gas, as she normally suffered from it because she did not always eat on time.
The pain continued throughout the day, and she drank something hot, hoping it would stop. It was easy for her to continue drinking the hot beverage because she taught in the Home Economics Department.
Two or three hours before classes ended, the pain became so intense that one of her co-workers suggested that she ask for a ride to go to the doctor.
Her husband, Bishop Ronald Mitchell, who is now pastor of the Santa Cruz New Testament Church of God and was pastoring the Porus New Testament Church of God at the time, was expected to pick her up. However, that same day, he had gone to work with CXC at St Elizabeth Technical High School—the first day that CSEC examinations began.
“He went off because he supervised CXC at that school at the time. When I took sick, that was when he gave up the position after over 15 years,” she shared.
When she told him she was being taken to the doctor, he said he would wrap up quickly.
After conducting an ECG, her doctor told her that blood was not flowing properly through her left ventricle and highlighted other issues. He wrote a prescription and sent her to a pharmacy that was only a stone’s throw away.
Immediately after the pharmacist took the prescription from her hand, Mitchell said she felt the place becoming dark, as though she were dying. She knew she was going to fall and hit the ground.
“When I was going down, I saw a foot. It was my husband,” she recalled.
Her husband later told her that he had informed the people at the pharmacy that his wife was sick and that he was going to check on her.
“He [was] right in time to grab me before I fell!”
She recalled vomiting in the bathroom of the pharmacy for about an hour. Her doctor eventually arrived and informed her husband that she needed to be taken to the hospital.
She was taken to the emergency room at Mandeville Regional Hospital.
God showed up for her again. While she was in the emergency room, a church brother who worked at the hospital happened to walk by and saw her. After asking her husband, who was his bishop, what was wrong, he helped them to get immediate attention.
“They put me on the machine, and there it showed that I had suffered a massive heart attack,” she shared.
She also developed an infection and a temperature. She was transferred to a ward close to the nurses’ station. She later discovered that because she was so critical, she had to be placed where the nurses could keep a close eye on her.
She was later transferred to the University Hospital of the West Indies. Her husband was told to always travel with a friend or relative when he came to visit her. Mitchell later discovered that the doctors never thought she would make it and did not want her husband to be alone if he visited her and found that she had died.
Her condition worsened while she was in hospital. She developed pneumonia, her left lung was damaged, and her left ventricle could not pump blood properly. She had to be nebulised every day.
Looking back, Mitchell said she had no fear because she did not realise how critical her condition was. Only her husband knew the seriousness of her situation, and he kept it from her. She continued to expect that she would receive treatment and eventually be sent home.
Her lungs became so filled with fluid that she could not lie down flat. Prayers went up non-stop for Mitchell, as the fluid in her lungs could have suffocated her.
Mitchell recalled that during the five weeks she spent in hospital, different doctors were assigned to her in two-week periods. Dr Perez, who was not from University Hospital but had come from Kingston Public Hospital for a short time, was placed in charge of her care.
Dr Perez told her, “Mrs Mitchell, I’m going to try and help you.”
That help led to Mitchell being placed on a machine to drain the fluid from her lungs. Dr Perez held her hand throughout the painful ordeal, and Mitchell affectionately called her “my pretty Indian angel”.
During her five-week fight for life in hospital, prayers never ceased. At one point, she was unable to walk. That’s when she started to realise just how sick she had been and the road she still had to travel.
She eventually joined in the prayers for her complete recovery, even as she battled a persistent fever that refused to go away.
It was during that difficult period in hospital that Mitchell said she received the words of the song “It’s Not Your Time” from the Lord.
“ I had to declare life over my life because sometimes we go through some things…, she said.
Mitchell now encourages others not to feel defeated because the same God who came through for her can do the same for them.
“So let me tell you something. I am a miracle—talking, working, believing. Real. I’m real.”
