Answered Prayer #1590
When I was born my parents knew that there was something drastically wrong, but the hospital wrote them off as neurotic. It was only later that they would find out that I had been sent home to die. By the time I was 4 years old, I’d had 4 heart attacks. Tests showed that not only did my heart have so many holes that it looked like a sponge, part of it was missing, and what was there was the wrong way around. The delay in diagnosis meant I’d also developed irreparable lung damage. Around 1 in 60 million children are born with this combination of heart defects. It was surprising that I’d made it this far, but with children under 10 not being able to have transplants in those days, there was nothing that could be done. Surviving until I was 10 would need a miracle. When my dad told my teacher that I’d be off school for a while, she said she was a Christian and had started a prayer circle for me. He dismissed Jesus as nothing more than an imaginary friend and forgot about her statement. I had my 4th heart attack whilst visiting Grandma, 100 miles from home, so the ambulance took me to a different hospital. It was there that one of the doctors was on placement from America, from the only place in the world that had ever tried to save children like me. She’d only ever watched, but she asked if she could have a go. Research showed the operation had been banned because the children all died either on the table or shortly afterwards. My days were numbered. Somehow permission was granted for my operation to go ahead. Not only did I survive, I made it until I was 16 and had outgrown all the artificial bits they’d put in. At which point I had another dance with death, having only 40% chance of making it through. I went on to become the first person in the world to survive to adulthood with my condition. I’ve had numerous operations, but at the age of 38, my own patchwork heart is still going. Sometimes the bad things blind us to the miracles. God arranged everything. He kept me alive, bought the American surgeon here and then arranged for the heart attack to happen at just the right moment for me to land in her arms. He arranged permission to try the banned operation, made me the first survivor even though the team openly admitted that they didn’t know what they were doing and well and truly answered my teachers’ prayers.