Patient Stories #1: A Miracle in Time

During my inpatient pediatrics rotation, my team had a patient whose situation was almost unsolvable. The poor child in question was a 16-year-old male from a country outside the US. Like many other high school students, he had come to the US for a foreign exchange program at an American high school, only to come down with intractable nausea, vertigo and vomiting in his first week. By the time he was transferred to our hospital, he was vomiting several times a day and he was so dizzy that he could hardly move.

When I joined the team, they had come up with an entire workup for his symptoms and had tried to treat every possible cause, but the patient wasn’t improving. The first time I rounded on him with the team, he lay flat in bed with his arm over his head, barely even able to open his eyes or talk to the team without starting to feel like vomiting. His mother, who didn’t speak English, was there beside him, and neither of them looked like they’d slept in days. For the umpteenth time since I’d started pediatrics, my heart broke.

Later that day, as we were going about our business, my attending, who was one of the nicest doctors i’d met up to that point, mused on what we could do for him. “I wonder if we could bring something from the toy room for him? He says he likes soccer and tennis, and gospel music…”

The last two words almost exploded in my brain. Gospel music? I put two and two together: if the kid listens to gospel music on his own…he must be a Christian. My heart broke for literally every child I saw on that service, but from then on, I couldn’t get this kid off my brain. I prayed for him as much as I could. Lord have mercy on this kid, he’s one of your own! It was the least I could do as a fellow Christian!

After weeks of exhausting every option, the team started our patient on a five-day course of pulse steroids. A couple days later, we were on our daily rounds and had reached this patient’s room. Our attending went in to check on the patient and came back out right away. “He and his mother are praying. We probably shouldn’t interrupt them,” she said. Good, I thought. Silently, I offered one more prayer for him while preparing to round.

When we finally got permission and went into the patient’s room, it was as if he had transformed. The patient was sitting up in bed, he had shaved for the first time in weeks, and he was smiling. He was still nauseous, but he was able to talk to us a lot more than he had before. To drive the point home, the neurology team came in behind us, and the attending neurologist performed a full neurologic examination on him in bed, as we’d seen him do before. The patient did better than he had ever done before on the neuro exam! That convinced me. I was witnessing a miracle right before my eyes!

From then on, every day brought good news of this patient’s progress.

“Our patient vomited only once last night.”

“He was able to eat an entire meal today without vomiting!”

“He was able to get up and walk to the bathroom today!”

Before long our team was greeting him on rounds as he and his mother walked around the wards and to the cafeteria and back. He didn’t completely recover while on our service; he still had some balance problems, which required him to go to inpatient rehab—but overall, his improvement was dramatic.

Some would argue that it was the prayers that healed him; others would argue that it was only the steroid course, and that none of our prayers helped anything. My question is why not both? As a Christian and a doctor (in training), I certainly believe that God can perform miracles without doctors’ intervention, but I also fully believe that God can use us to help bring about miracles. I shudder to think about what would have happened to our patient had he not been at our children’s hospital with all of its resources when this sudden illness threatened to take his life. Would he have lived? What would his life be like now? But I also can’t deny that even with all of the brilliant minds and training and resources at its disposal, our children’s hospital still couldn’t exactly figure out his case. The pulse steroid course was at least a very educated guess and at most a divinely inspired idea. I also know that at least three people (likely more) prayed for him to be healed, and he got healed. A prayer that God answered—it’s that simple.