Raising the Dead Read online

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  Copyright Page

  To my wife, Deborah, my sons Christian and Chad,

  and for “my Indians,” the patients the Lord has entrusted to my care.

  All to the glory of God.

  Beginning in the Middle:

  An Introduction

  This is the story of a doctor, a skeptical scientist by nature, who came to believe in supernatural healing. It’s the story of how a Yale-trained physician and cardiologist learned about God’s heart—the way its beating gives life and sustains us even in the worst of times. It’s my story.

  It’s a lot more than my story, too, because the miracles that have taken place before my eyes and underneath my hands are evidence not only of God’s healing power but of God’s intention, through Jesus Christ, to save and eventually heal everyone. God is at work restoring all things. It’s an ultimate promise. Even death cannot defeat God’s power, as I’ve seen through watching more than one person be raised from the dead: tremendous miracles that are signs of every believer’s resurrection to eternal life—the ultimate miracle.

  Every story has a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order, as the saying goes. Many stories begin in the middle of things as this one does. It begins with a man being raised from the dead, a miracle in which I played a significant part. This astounding event was used by God to open up many new avenues of service and ministry, and in ways I could never have anticipated it brought my own story to prominence. It’s often what people know about me.

  My role in the miracle cannot be understood, though, apart from how I learned to join God in His healing work—and in the real, spiritual battle of this life—through seeking healing for my son when he became desperately ill with leukemia. That’s why the quest for my son’s healing follows right on the heels of the account of this widely known miracle, as an explanation of how I was prepared to see people raised from the dead.

  The hard, even crucifying, lessons that I learned through my son’s illness taught me to recognize evil when I saw it and join Christ in His fight against it. I was a believer long before my son became ill, but I didn’t really see life for the spiritual battle it is or know how to fight the battle. Through my son’s illness I learned how “to put on the whole armor of God”—how to use the spiritual exercises and disciplines that God gives us.

  Once I found myself on the front lines, I learned to fight as hard and fast as I possibly could. I sought every gift God could give me. I went from being a run-of-the-mill believer to being a radicalized Christian. This did not make me a humorless fanatic. It actually gave me joy and delight in doing God’s work.

  Once I committed myself to remaining at Christ’s side despite the most devastating loss any parent can know, God began using me to assure people of His salvation through a double-healing ministry: I began offering my patients and those I met through speaking engagements the best of Christ and the best of medicine.

  Some Christian readers may already be tempted to pigeonhole this story as “charismatic” or “Pentecostal.” Non-Christian readers may wonder whether I really have the credentials I claim. I invite the skeptics to look up my medical board certifications.

  I would ask evangelical and other Christians to consider whether the whole church should not be considered “charismatic,” in the sense of being sustained through God’s “gifts,” His “charisma.” The whole church must also be “pentecostal,” born at Pentecost through the power of the Holy Spirit. I cannot deny that I have been influenced by these particular strains of Christianity—nor would I want to. And every strain of Christianity has its own particular vocabulary, some of which you will encounter here, although I’ve tried to keep the “church talk” to a minimum. But I think that any believer or even non-Christian who gives my story half a chance will find a meaning that is faithful to Jesus’s teaching and His work—to His good news. Few “Pentecostal” books take sufficient account of the Cross, for example. My story would be meaningless without it.

  Let what I’ve experienced—my eyewitness testimony—speak for itself. Please suspend judgment until you’ve heard the whole story. It’s not something I could have possibly made up.

  Why should any of you consider it incredible that

  God raises the dead?

  —Acts 26:8

  CHAPTER 1

  “Shock Him One More

  Time”—Raising the Dead

  On October 20, 2006, a heavyset fifty-three-year-old man with red hair walked through the entrance of the emergency room at the Palm Beach Gardens Hospital and approached the admissions desk. Earlier that morning, suffering from an upset stomach and sweat-inducing anxiety, he had called a fellow mechanic to tell him he’d be late to work and headed for the ER. On the way he began experiencing chest pain and shortness of breath. A big, powerful guy, he had a hawkish look, his eyes keen and watchful. But as he told the nurse his name, Jeff Markin, and described his symptoms, he looked as if he were about to become the prey of a descending terror: his eyes bulged and he began breathing more quickly through a half-opened mouth.

  He fumbled out his wallet to retrieve his insurance ID card, then collapsed in a heap, his head smacking the linoleum floor. The female security guard rushed over and cradled him, praying for his life, while the nurse at the reception desk summoned emergency personnel, who came running.

  I was in another part of the hospital, the operating room wing, where I had what we call a “runway” of patients prepped for angioplasties, stent insertions, heart catheterizations, intra-aortic balloon pumps, and pacemakers. Each patient had a family waiting to know the outcome and their loved one’s prognosis. So when I heard over the hospital intercom “Code blue,” which indicated a cardiopulmonary emergency, and my name being called—“Dr. Chauncey Crandall… Dr. Chauncey Crandall… Please report immediately”—I was not eager to head for the ER. As the senior cardiologist on duty, my job is to ensure that the emergency room physician and his team have done everything possible on the patient’s behalf and make a final assessment of the case. When I was younger, I used to run to such emergencies, but now, in middle age and with more trust in my colleagues, I walk. To tell the truth, I was hoping the case would be resolved by the time I arrived, even if that meant the worst.

  When I arrived, the emergency room where the code team was treating Jeff looked like a war zone. The physician on duty had pulled in all available personnel. The patient’s blood work for the standard Toponin I test had been run to the lab, although there was little doubt from the electrocardiogram results that he had suffered an acute myocardial infarction—a massive heart attack. Nurses ran two IV lines, administering standard drugs—ASA (aspirin), heparin, a beta-blocker, and thrombolytics to dissolve clots. Jeff was bagged to get some oxygen into his lungs, but when that didn’t work he was quickly intubated and hooked up to a ventilator, and a nasogastric tube was inserted to clear his stomach of air and secretions. The ER physician ordered atropine and epinephrine injected to aid the beating of the patient’s heart. In Jeff’s case, ventricular fibrillation—the irregular beating of his heart at hyperspeed—was quickly followed by cardiac arrest; he flatlined.

  The ECG electrodes on the patient’s upper torso were cleared so that he could be shocked with the defibrillator—the paddles everyone’s seen on television. “Clear!” Wham! The shock was so intense it caused Jeff’s body to jump above the stretcher. By the time I arrived, the team had shocked the patient six times, and I watched them administer the seventh. The doctors and nurses had already been working on the patient for nearly forty minutes. I noticed that his head, especially his lips, and his fingers and toes were cyanotic—black with death from lack of oxygen. When cyan
osis appears, there’s little hope. His arms lolled at either side of the examination table; his pupils were dilated and fixed; he had been down for too long. The ER physician asked me for my assessment, looking for confirmation of what everyone in that room already knew.

  Once I arrived on the scene, I had begun to root for the patient and the heroic fight the ER team was waging for his life. But the appropriate conclusion was unavoidable: it was time to call the Code on the patient, declaring the time of his death, according to advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) protocol. Jeff Markin was officially declared dead at 8:05 a.m.

  Once the Code was ended, the doctors and nurses in the room left quickly. No one likes to hang around death—the sight and smell are repulsive. I still had to write up my final assessment, which I did on a small table at one side of the room. Only one nurse remained, who was in charge of preparing the body for his family to see and processing by the morgue. She removed the tubes from his throat and the IVs from his arms, then began sponging off the yellow stains of antiseptic and traces of blood.

  With my report complete, I headed toward the door and back to my runway of patients. Before I crossed its threshold, however, I sensed God was telling me to turn around and pray for that man. This seemed foolish—an idle thought caused by the stress of the situation or even mischievous influence. But then my sense of God telling me this occurred a second time and more forcefully. But what would I pray? And to what purpose? I did not know this man, and, frankly, I felt embarrassed by the impulse to pray for him. But I knew that when I had ignored such impulses in the past I never felt at peace afterward.

  I stood beside the body, and although the words I said came through me, I had no sense of devising them. It was more as if I were God’s intercom, relaying a “divine code.” “Father God,” I said, under my breath, “I cry out for this man’s soul. If he does not know You as his Lord and Savior, raise him from the dead now, in Jesus’ name.”

  The nurse gave me a look that said, You are weird!

  Then something happened that was truly weird. Of its own accord my right arm shot up as if to catch a gift from above, in a gesture of prayer and praise. I didn’t feel much of anything, and yet I knew that God had entered the scene in a surprising way.

  At that moment, the ER doctor walked back into the room, and I pointed to the patient and said, “Shock this man one more time.”

  “Dr. Crandall,” he said in disbelief, “I can’t shock the patient one more time. I’ve shocked him again and again. He’s dead.”

  “Please, for me,” I said, “shock him one more time.”

  He looked at me, puzzled, as if he might need to call in a psychiatrist. But, thinking it best to humor me first, he did as I asked.

  Boom!

  Blip… blip… blip. The remaining ECG leads registered a heartbeat. A perfect heartbeat! About seventy-five of them a minute, in a perfectly normal rhythm. In my more than twenty years as a cardiologist, I have never seen a heartbeat restored so completely and suddenly—a heart that restarts usually beats irregularly if not erratically before it settles into a normal rhythm.

  I looked at Jeff Markin. His abdomen started to tremble and move and then his chest started to rise and fall. He was breathing on his own! Then his black, cyanotic fingers twitched. Next his toes. In almost no time he was mumbling.

  The nurse screamed—a long, piercing wail right out of the movies. “Doctor,” she asked, “what have you done? What are we supposed to do?” She was not only terrified but angry, her face red and blotchy. This was not a miracle to her, as I found out later, but more like the creation of Frankenstein. She couldn’t be expected to handle a situation like this. What was she to do?

  “Let’s get him into ICU,” I said. “Immediately. Now!”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Unspoken Question

  While suffering from cardiogenic shock, Jeff fully stabilized in the ICU, and I was able to entrust his care to another physician over the weekend. When I looked in on him on Monday, Jeff was sitting up in his bed talking. He might have been mistaken for another person, except that his fingers and toes were still cyanotic, bruised by death.

  That morning the nurse who was cleaning Jeff up when he came back to life came running up to me to explain why she had been not only terrified but angry. “I was so mad at you, Dr. Crandall. I thought he’d be brain-dead, but now look at him!” She went on to express her complete amazement at his recovery. Eventually, she stopped talking and stared at me, her eyes searching mine. I could see that she wanted to ask me a question that she could not voice. All I could say was, “We have a great God, don’t we?”

  The nurse’s unstated question, I would guess, is the one many of my colleagues harbor. How does a doctor, a cardiologist—a man of science—come to believe in praying for healing, to the point of asking God to raise a man from the dead? That I now complement the best of traditional medicine with praying for my patients is a scandal.

  Why I Began Running After God

  I was a Christian, but a conventional one who kept his faith and his profession mostly separate, until June 2000. Late one night as my wife, Deborah, and I were about to go to bed, I received a phone call from the hospital’s testing lab. “Dr. Crandall,” the lab technician said, “we have an alert value that we need to let you know about. The patient’s white [blood cell] count is very high.”

  “How high?”

  “Over eighty thousand.”

  Anything over ten thousand is abnormal. That guy’s dead, I thought. He had leukemia. “Well, who is the patient?”

  “Dr. Crandall,” the technician said, “it’s your son Chad.”

  The shock made my whole body go limp. My face probably went ashen, as Deborah gave me a look that asked, What’s going on?

  “Are you sure? You have the right patient?”

  “Yes, Dr. Crandall, we’ve checked it many times. I’m so sorry.”

  Our boys, eleven-year-old fraternal twins, Chad and Christian, were our lives. Chad was a flaxen-haired sprite, with blue eyes and freckles. Christian was dark-haired, olive-skinned. Both were avid tennis players and competed in area tournaments. They were complementary in almost every way. While Christian was the natural leader, Chad was the shy charmer, the one everyone wanted to be around once they came to know him. How could Chad be dying? At that moment, he and his brother were sleeping in their room.

  Chad had been hydrating more than usual, consuming a ton of cranberry juice. But dying? I was so shaken I couldn’t collect my thoughts. I couldn’t even exactly recall why Deborah had taken him in for blood work.

  When I hung up, Deborah asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s a problem with a patient and I have to go” was all I said. I didn’t want to tell her about Chad’s condition until I knew more, although what I expected to learn at that time of night I couldn’t say. I simply went into action.

  I walked out and got in my car and started hyperventilating. “What’s going on, Lord?” I prayed. “Why Chad?” For the next half hour or so I called every hematologist I knew, the blood doctors who could give me a better assessment of what the test results indicated. The only one I was able to contact was the one nearest at hand, my neighbor down the street, Dr. Robert Jacobson. I asked if I could come by.

  By this time it was well after eleven, and Dr. Jacobson greeted me in his pajamas. “Robert, they say Chad has leukemia. You have to help me, because I just can’t make sense of this, I can’t think.” The fear was so strong my vision tunneled and I couldn’t hold on to a thought, as one chaotic idea followed another.

  Robert kindly called the hospital lab and spoke with the technician. My friend confirmed the news, but he couldn’t tell me much more. He helped set up an appointment the next day with the hospital’s head pediatrician, Dr. MacArthur. “Like everyone else,” Robert said, counseling me, “you are going to have to take this one step at a time.”

  About midnight I arrived back home, where Deborah met me at the door. “I’ve
never seen you like this. Is it something with the practice? Did somebody make a mistake?”

  “Deborah, they say Chad has leukemia.”

  She put her hand to her mouth, stifling screams, and went straight out to the backyard. There was a full moon that night, a soft breeze, and she stayed out there for hours. She prayed over and over again: “Lord, this can’t be true. This can’t be true!”

  I watched her from a distance, not knowing how to comfort her or whether she wanted me to right then. I’m not sure either of us actually went to sleep that night.

  When the boys came down for breakfast the next morning, I saw what I had avoided seeing for the last couple of months. Chad was thin, pale. His brother was a good two inches taller, something I had chalked up to uneven growth spurts. But then I remembered sitting on the couch by Chad and noticing that he had lost muscle tone in his arms, something that didn’t make any sense for an eleven-year-old tennis fanatic. I had guessed he must be overdoing it—the weight loss the result of the Florida June heat. But now I saw how everything added up, including his outsized thirst, and I finally realized that he was as seriously ill as the test indicated. My fear turned to anguish.

  Deborah and I explained to the boys that we needed to go see the doctor that morning. Deborah took Chad aside and explained in slightly more detail, trying not to frighten him.

  Following his examination of Chad, all four of us went into Dr. MacArthur’s private office for the consultation. He did not mince words. Chad had leukemia. The exact type had yet to be determined. They would have to do a much more extensive blood workup. Chad would probably need a bone marrow transplant. Until then, he would be put on chemotherapy—a drug then known as hydroxyurea (now called hydroxycarbamide)—to get his blood counts under control. If his counts went any higher, Chad would have to be put in the hospital.