Raising the Dead Read online

  Before we moved to Palm Beach, I had been an assistant professor of medicine at the Medical College of Virginia (Richmond), where I had done consulting studies with Duke University Medicine. Duke’s health-care complex includes an outstanding children’s hospital as well as the university hospital. I thought Chad might receive better treatment there, and certainly a more thoughtful evaluation. Once again, the family flew with Chad to keep an appointment, this time in Durham, North Carolina.

  I was thankful that we were received with more consideration, but there was still, I hate to admit, a Keystone Cops element. Our blood work was lost, and just as we were about to depart the whole family had to be retested. By this time we were giving more serious consideration to a bone marrow transplant, even though Chad’s counts had been stabilized through chemotherapy and prayer. At Duke we discovered that Chad’s brother, Christian, was an ideal candidate as a bone marrow donor, close enough as a fraternal twin but with sufficient genetic differences for his stem cells to replace Chad’s in the graft-versus-host struggle. Still, when a transplant was recommended once more, we were hesitant.

  Our indecision was partially a result of the fact that I was beginning to learn about the research of Dr. Brian Druker. He was on staff at both the Cancer Institute of Oregon Health & Science University and at the nearby Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He had previously been an instructor and researcher at Harvard, where he studied a family of signaling proteins that resulted in the abnormal formation of blood cells, especially the proliferation of white blood cells, as in Chad’s CML. Dr. Druker discovered a way to detect the enzyme that led to this protein’s creation. He also had good reason to believe that he had found a drug that turned off the enzyme. In the lab this drug was known as ST1571. Two years before, in 1998, Dr. Druker had conducted the first clinical trials on human beings with ST1571 and found that within six months every patient with CML, drawn from a pool of CML victims who had exhausted all other options, had gone into remission.1 A 100 percent success rate is practically unknown in clinical trials—an amazing and incredibly promising result.

  Dr. Druker proved to be as kind and caring as he was brilliant. During his time at Harvard, he had become restless spending all his time in the lab. He began devoting half of each day to treating patients at a community cancer clinic; that’s how much he cared about people. He had moved to Oregon in 1993 to immerse himself in his patients’ cases, even as his research continued. Within four or five weeks of Chad’s diagnosis, we were off to Oregon to see him.

  When we met with Dr. Druker, he said, “The recommendation is still the same—a bone marrow transplant. But the drug I’ve been working on, which is now called Gleevec, is undergoing trials at the FDA. I don’t know how quickly it will be approved, or if it will be. I’m not promising anything. But it might be approved within the next year. Or we could try getting Chad entered in a future trial. Gleevec isn’t a cure, but from the evidence to date, it might be what you are looking for. Most of the patients to whom it has been given have remained in remission. If we can get Chad on Gleevec, he won’t need a bone marrow transplant and I believe he’ll live.” I could tell that Dr. Druker was now in the fight with us.

  I don’t know how high the plane was flying on the way home, but I was way above the clouds. I felt we had a possible solution in hand. I was still depending on Jesus, but I felt that this drug could be the means God would use to heal Chad or make CML a condition he could live with. Hadn’t Sister Briege said, “Keep taking your medicine”? Perhaps this was the medicine she meant, because chemotherapy is not ordinarily described as “medicine,” but Gleevec could be thought of that way—it came in pill form.

  I immediately went on a quest to obtain Gleevec for Chad. I called everyone I knew who had anything to do with the world of cancer research and networked to see if I could get Chad into a trial. I made contacts in Europe where drugs are often available before they are approved in the United States. I asked the senior President Bush through political contacts to write a letter on behalf of Chad, which he was kind enough to do. I called the company developing the drug, Novartis, every week for additional updates: What’s the FDA saying? When is it coming out? Are there any additional trials being run? How should Chad be prepared for possible inclusion? The Novartis people came to know me on a first-name basis. The quest for Gleevec continued through the fall of 2000 and the winter and spring of 2001.

  Quest for Christ

  As I mentioned, the first round of chemotherapy in Florida and our initial prayer sessions brought Chad’s white blood cell count down. He started feeling better, gained back a few pounds, and had more energy. By September he was able to attend school and could even play tennis again, if on a reduced schedule.

  As part of my effort to shield the family from dealing with doctors and callous medical personnel, I drew Chad’s blood every week, ran it through the lab, and came home with the test results. This eventually made me, as I’ve mentioned, the face of the disease for the family, and I was more and more received—and avoided—like doom. But it was this or waiting for the phone to ring, and I never wanted to receive another call like the first one about Chad’s white blood cell count. For the most part the news was good; the counts stayed down, and we borrowed time as we waited for what we hoped would be Chad’s miracle drug, Gleevec.

  During this time I continued my quest to draw closer to Christ, wanting every gift He could give me, as I explained to anybody who would listen. Few would. I’m sure they saw me as a father who couldn’t deal with his son’s illness and was compensating by becoming a religious fanatic. But couldn’t many of the men of God in the Scriptures be described this way? John the Baptist wasn’t anybody’s idea of normal. I kept looking for people who believed God’s power to heal through prayer was as available today as in biblical times.

  I found one class of Christians who generally acknowledged the reality of miracles in the present day more readily: missionaries. I took to attending missionary conferences and talking with those who had been on the front lines of spiritual battles. I preferred those, as Isaiah says of the Messiah, who had “no form nor comeliness… no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2 KJV). In fact, I sought out the least charismatic and, frankly, least attractive men and women of God at missionary conferences, the ones sitting alone in church halls behind folding tables waiting to speak to someone—anyone—about their ministries. I avoided missionaries who naturally drew crowds, like the young evangelist who had recently spoken to tens of thousands in Sierra Leone or the vivacious blonde from Hong Kong with the hairdo of a TV anchorwoman. I wanted to know that God could bestow His power on anybody.

  Dancing Through a Minefield

  I found my man behind one of those folding tables at Maranatha Church, a corpulent fellow who ministered in what most would consider a godforsaken country, Zimbabwe—the site of recent presidential elections where the winner had to go into hiding from his outraged opponent. When I walked up to this missionary’s table, he asked me, unused to the attention, “What are you doing here?”

  “Have you seen miracles?”

  His whole countenance changed. “Yes, I have.”

  “Are they real?”

  “They are real. What’s your name?”

  I introduced myself.

  “I can tell you a lot of stories, Dr. Crandall,” he said.

  “Tell me the most profound one.”

  He said, “Dr. Crandall, the power of God fell on our service one night. The power of God was so heavy, Dr. Crandall.”

  “What happened?”

  He said, “We were in the small church—no more than a single room—we use for services, and there was only one lightbulb in the middle, hanging by a wire. I had the Word of God open and I was preaching, and the power of the Holy Spirit came on that room, and people started weeping, and it was like a thick cloud of the Holy Ghost filled the room—the Shechinah glory. As I walked about preaching, my shadow would fall on people from that one single light
and they would be slain in the Spirit. They would collapse into a peaceful rest—the peace that passes all understanding.”

  “Really? You aren’t exaggerating?”

  He said, “Dr. Crandall, it was so powerful that my shadow would touch people, and just my shadow holding the Bible, the Word of God, would cover someone and the Holy Spirit would touch them.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, what you have to understand is that the church was in the middle of a minefield. You can only get to it on a path that’s been cleared. The mines left from previous wars have been marked but not all. It’s still dangerous. We don’t go into certain fields. But the Spirit of God hit us that night, and we were so full of joy, and the power of God was on us, and we started singing and dancing. We went out the door and started dancing in those fields, through the minefields, not knowing where we were going, but everyone came back safely. We danced through the minefields without one explosion.”

  I didn’t quite know what to make of the minefield part of the story, although I certainly felt as if I were trying to dance through a minefield of my own. But the missionary’s shadow having such a powerful effect was right in line with something that happened in the New Testament’s book of Acts, where the people brought their sick out into the street so the apostle Peter’s shadow could pass over them. “And all of them were healed,” the book of Acts tells us (Acts 5:16). This man wasn’t one to compare himself to Peter, and I had to think the similarity of the two phenomena was God-inspired. If it was true, the experience was certainly evidence that the power of God was as active today as in New Testament times, which was underlined by the similarity of the events taking place two thousand years apart.

  I went home and told Deborah the missionary’s story. “Miracles are happening, Deborah. Happening today. I know many of the people around us don’t believe it, but I’m meeting men and women of God who do—people who have put their lives on the line. Why would they do that if it’s not true?

  “Chad can be cured if we cry out in Jesus’ name!” I exclaimed. “I’m really starting to believe that. I don’t quite know how to do it yet—or whether I have sufficient faith. I’m not sure that we can do this right by ourselves, but I’m searching for what God requires of us. I’m searching for God’s power in healing Chad.”

  A lull in developments followed, as happens so many times in the spiritual life. And with it, discouragement, doubts about what I’d heard, suspicions that I was, as many of my friends concluded, resorting to religious fanaticism out of desperation. Three months later, I was almost out of hope. We had not found a way to obtain Gleevec for Chad. We didn’t have anyone around us, really, who believed that Chad could be healed through prayer. Or at least it seemed that way, although I know our friends were praying for us—I just didn’t get the sense that they thought their prayers would work; or I didn’t believe enough myself that they would. That’s the way discouragement works: it makes everything seem impossible.

  A Man of God

  One afternoon, very down, I told Deborah, “I just can’t find any more people that believe.”

  She said, “There’s a man of God who is coming to speak not far away in the town of Jupiter, and maybe he’ll give you the answers or the inspiration or whatever it is you need—we need.”

  “A man of God?” The phrase struck me as hokey. “I don’t know. No one believes anymore.”

  Discouraged as I was, I still agreed to attend the meeting, which took place after-hours at a private elementary school. I was on call that day, as it happened, in charge of all the heart attacks coming in—and were they ever coming in! It was the craziest day. It was like a battle in the heavens was being waged. Medevac helicopters arrived almost hourly with heart attack victims, and more came via ambulance. I spent all day and into the early evening ushering patients into operating rooms, supervising their treatment. One right after another.

  The meeting was to start at 7:00 p.m. That hour came and went and I was still in the midst of caring for patients. “Lord, I need a break,” I started praying. “I’m worn out and I’d like to get to this meeting. I promised Deborah, after all.”

  At around nine the new arrivals finally stopped. I jumped into my car still in my scrubs and headed north to Jupiter.

  When I walked into the school I was glad to see the meeting was still in progress. Up front I saw the “man of God” for the first time, the missionary David Hogan. He looked like an older John the Baptist, if John the Baptist had worn country-and-western gear. He was tall and strong—an ox of a man. He wore a cowboy shirt with pearl buttons, blue jeans, a big ol’ cowboy belt buckle, and sand-colored alligator-skin boots. He had a shock of white, coarse hair combed back from his forehead, a mustache and blunt-cut beard framing his mouth, and big, bottle-rim glasses behind which his eyes danced.

  His preaching consisted of going through the Bible and its stories of healing, which he expanded by telling of miracles he had witnessed. He was detailing everything I had been studying, and he was grounded, orthodox, in his interpretations. I was impressed and attracted and at the same time overwhelmed.

  The service was over before I knew it. I remained dumbstruck in my chair as people lined up for David Hogan to pray for them. Soon they started passing out in front of him—“slain in the Spirit.” I knew what that was, although I had never seen it before. Never, ever, and it freaked me out. I looked more closely at the people lying on the floor, and their eyes were rolled back in their heads. I had to get out of there. This was too much. I was a Presbyterian! A doctor. Not someone to be hoodwinked through mass hypnosis by a backwoods evangelist dressed for a Grand Ole Opry audition.

  I rose to leave, and all of a sudden I heard the Lord speak to me. I heard an actual voice: “Stay, this is for your son.”

  So I sat down. I thought I’d sit and watch. Hogan kept praying for people, many being slain in the Spirit. The more this happened, the greater his boldness in prayer. He spoke to people’s conditions and prayed about their needs as someone called by God to do so, someone with authority. As the line shortened, I thought I’d have him pray for Chad. I was there, after all. What did I care what it looked like? Or who I was? What did any of that matter if Chad could be helped, in any way, by David Hogan’s praying for him?

  I walked up to the front and joined the line, four people in front of me, others behind. My legs started vibrating. I could barely stand up. I had no idea what was happening. I started going through a differential diagnosis, applying the criteria I knew as a physician. What might be causing my legs to shake? Was I nervous? Suffering from anxiety or stage fright? Might I be having a stroke? Could it be a pinched nerve? Why was this happening? What was going on? Every time I took a step I felt that my legs might collapse like those of a newborn calf.

  Finally, I arrived at the front of the line. David Hogan held his hands out over my head, palms down. “What can I pray for you?” he asked.

  “David, my son Chad has leukemia, and I can’t find anyone to pray with who really believes that he can be healed. Will you pray for him?”

  He said, “Absolutely.” He started praying.

  I figured I’d bow my head—that’s what you do. As he prayed, I thought, I’ve never heard anybody pray with this authority, this determination, or this boldness.

  I opened my eyes and looked at his face. It was blanched white. A scene flashed in my mind. We were in WWI and David was in a trench with all his weapons. He was climbing up the trench, and the enemy was on the other side. The enemy was coming forward, charging. The enemy in this visionary flash was Satan. He was coming toward us. David was face-to-face with the enemy and I could see his determination to take him out. That’s what he looked like. He was battling for the life of my son!

  Then, in a loud voice David Hogan said, “In the name of Jesus, Chad be healed!”

  The next instant, I saw the tips of my feet up in the air as I was blown backward, landing about fifteen feet from where I had been standing. I lande
d on my back, unharmed, and in fact alert. I looked back toward David Hogan, wondering, What happened? Did you see what happened? How did I get here?

  David Hogan wasn’t fazed. He just went on and prayed for the next person who stepped up.

  For a few more moments I sat on the floor, wondering what had happened. I hadn’t been “slain in the Spirit” like the others—not exactly. I was far from enjoying a peaceful rest, which is how most people slain in the Spirit describe it. I felt weak—I could barely move—and again, strangely alert. I crawled over to a chair, where a little old lady was sitting, and as I pulled myself up and got back on my feet I asked her, “What happened?”

  She said, “Doctor, don’t ever forget this moment.” I must have looked flabbergasted as she went on to explain. “You’ve been touched by the Holy Spirit.”

  “I have?”

  “Yes, you have.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “I Need Everything Jesus Can

  Give Me”

  When I returned home that night, Deborah and I stayed up into the early morning hours discussing what had happened. I was always more skeptical of the supernatural than Deborah, and she readily accepted my being touched by the Holy Spirit.

  What came about in my life as a result of the Holy Spirit’s touch was as unexpected as the event itself, if less spectacular. I received a new boldness in pursuing the things of God—a release of spiritual enthusiasm. I couldn’t wait to discover what other gifts God might bestow, and I wanted to be as faithful as possible—to show up for any divine appointments that might be in the offing—whatever that demanded, and however it might look. As a Christian, I was becoming radicalized.

  As a family we began to attend a storefront Pentecostal church. There, the people with whom we were worshiping were in touch with their desperate need for Jesus, just as my family and I were. We knew how lost we would be without Him. There’s a strange privilege in being desperate—one missing or not felt so immediately in most conventional church circles. It’s why the tax collectors and prostitutes of Jesus’ day recognized Him so much more easily as their champion than did the religious authorities.