Raising the Dead Read online

  After I related to Deborah some of what had happened in Mexico, I said, “Our Lord is real. We will make it through this.”

  “I know we will,” she said.

  “I’ve seen Him, Deborah. I’ve felt Him. It’s different now. I know that He’s real.” That night Deborah and I went to the boys’ bedroom. They slept in bunk beds, Chad on the top. Deborah and I began praying for him, pouring out our hearts, praising God for all He had done for Chad and asking Him to continue to bless him. Our prayers turned into a vigil, as we stayed with the boys for the next three hours, adoring God’s greatness, extolling His majesty, thanking God for His generosity.

  “Where Are My Indians?”

  As I’ve indicated before, spiritual enthusiasm waxes and wanes. About three months after my return from Mexico, I became discouraged once more. This time I didn’t doubt what I had seen in Mexico. I was simply all too aware of what a contrast it made to my life in Palm Beach. Everywhere Greg and his fellow missionaries went the favor of God was on them. The villagers, as poor as they were, were glad to hear of God’s love for them and responded with open hearts. In contrast, so many in my world seemed completely indifferent to God’s love, if not actively in rebellion against it. They found God’s reaching out to them an affront to their dignity.

  I actually began thinking about leaving medicine altogether and becoming a missionary. I felt the urge to pack up the whole family and move to our own Gulf Coast Mexican hacienda.

  I talked to Deborah one night about this. “No one gets excited about Jesus in Palm Beach,” I said. “Our neighbors have all the money, the fame. They don’t want Jesus, Deborah. But I do. And I want my Indians, Deborah. I want to minister to people, proclaiming the name of Jesus. People who will be receptive.”

  In my private prayers, I kept crying out to God, “Where are my Indians? Where are the people to whom I have been called? Who wants to hear the Word of God and will rejoice in it?”

  One morning about seven thirty I was on the bottom floor of Good Samaritan Hospital where the morgue is located. Most of the lights were out and I was standing in the shadows, waiting for the elevator. I pushed the button several times to go up. The thought that had been nagging me came up once more. Where are my Indians, Lord? I need my Indians, because I can’t keep going on without my people group. You need to identify who they are, where I need to go, what I need to do. I hit the button again. Where are my Indians?

  All of a sudden the Lord spoke to me. I heard an audible voice. I’ve heard the Lord speak audibly only a few times. The Lord said, “Your Indians are your patients. I’ve given them to you, and I haven’t given them to anyone else. If you don’t get them saved, no one else will. If you don’t get them healed, no one else will. I’ve given them to you.”

  That was a total revelation in my life—and eventually made for revolutionary changes in my medical practice.

  I took off like a rocket that morning, praying all day long. “Lord, You’ve given me these patients? You’ve given me these people, here? They say they don’t want You, but You’ve given them to me? And now they’re mine, and if I don’t witness to them, they won’t receive Jesus?

  “I don’t have to leave medicine? I don’t have to go someplace else? You’ve given me these people?”

  What really woke me up was that He said, “If you don’t get them saved, no one else will.” That rocked me. It changed my whole outlook on ministry, on life.

  I instantly became comfortable with what I was doing, where I was. All I had to do was work within the medical system with my patients, and within my own community. My Indians were the people around me; the people I worked with every day. (Now when I speak to churches and other audiences, I make a point of how we’ve all been given the people around us, at work, in our offices, and neighborhoods. We are all where we are for a reason.) I might have known this all along, of course, but hearing God’s voice finally convinced me to open my eyes and see the tremendous need of people around me.

  Praying for My Patients

  Several months before Chad became sick I had thought of praying for my patients and began doing so in a general way. But now I knew I had to pray for them specifically and in their presence, if they consented. I promised the Lord I would pray aloud for one person a week and asked Him to lead me to the right person. I wondered whether the principle of exchange would continue to apply. If I prayed for my patients, would my own family be blessed—would Chad continue to improve?

  While I had made the resolution to pray aloud for at least one patient a week, I was nervous and embarrassed and put it off. At the end of the first week I told myself that I absolutely must pray for one patient that very day. Still, I waited until the very last patient of the day. I figured if she became upset, no one else would be in the office and there wouldn’t be a scene.

  My last patient was a woman in her eighties who had enjoyed a celebrated career in the New York fashion world. Mrs. Green had some heart issues; nothing terribly serious. She was still an attractive woman with thick silver hair brushed back behind her ears, large, deep-set eyes, and a slim, erect carriage. She was soft-spoken but direct—a woman who had taken care of herself for many years and still could. She was my last opportunity, if I was going to carry through with my commitment.

  I finally asked, “Do you mind if I pray for you? I’d like to. Would you mind?”

  “Oh, no; you can pray for me,” she said. She seemed truly grateful to be asked.

  I took her hand and I said, “Father God, in the name of Jesus, I pray for Mrs. Green. I pray that she will be well, Father, and I pray blessings over her, in the name of Jesus.”

  That’s all I prayed.

  She started crying.

  I thought, Oh, no! I’ve offended her. I’ve hurt her in some way. What’s happened?

  “Mrs. Green, are you okay?” I handed her a tissue.

  She said, “Oh, Dr. Crandall, I’m fine.”

  “Then why are you crying? Is something wrong?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “No one has prayed for me for forty years. That was so nice. It was like I felt the hand of God on me when you prayed. Thank you. Thank you for praying for me.”

  After she left the office, I was tremendously pumped. Who’s next? Where was the next patient? I couldn’t wait to do it again!

  A couple of weeks later, I was in my office when I received a phone call from the emergency room. They had a patient with severe headaches.

  “Why are you calling me? I’m a heart doctor, not a headache doctor. Call his primary care physician.”

  “He doesn’t have one. We just need someone to take a look and we thought you might.”

  “Okay, get a CT scan of his brain. Let me know what you find and I’ll do what I can.”

  I was still working in my office when the emergency room physician called back. “He has brain tumors,” he said. “Multiple brain tumors. It doesn’t look good.”

  I asked that a chest X-ray be taken, since lung cancer often spreads to the brain. Sadly, I guessed right.

  “What do you want us to do?” the emergency room doctor asked once more.

  “Get the neurologist and the oncologist. I’ll come down and talk with him.”

  The patient was a relatively young man. I wondered what I could offer him; by the time lung cancer spreads to the brain there’s usually little that can be done.

  The patient’s name was Richard, and when I met him in the emergency room he was smiling. He asked for my recommendation. “It doesn’t look good, does it, Doctor?” he asked. He was trying his best to remain good-humored, even to the point of being kind to his doctor. I immediately felt tremendous sympathy for this man.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “it doesn’t. I’m going to get you the best doctor I can, though. Let’s see if we can beat this thing.” Then I added, “But you know, Richard, I’ve been reading my Bible, and it says in my Bible that we can pray for the sick. Would you mind if I just prayed for you?”

>   He said, “Sure, pray; do it.”

  He was on the examination table, sitting up. I went to the right side and took his hand. I prayed, “Father God, I ask that You heal Richard of his brain tumors and his lung tumors, and I ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.”

  Once again, I didn’t say much in my prayer, but I’ve found it doesn’t take much; God only wants to know what we are asking of Him. Our prayers are like a laser signal to heaven for God to enter the scene.

  Then I said, “Richard, I’ve done everything I can do. I’ve prayed for you. The Bible commands me to do that. I don’t understand why supernatural healing comes about sometimes, but I know we can always ask the Lord for it and we should do so believing the Lord can heal. So I’m going to get the best doctors and I’m going to believe that you will be healed.”

  I did get Richard the best doctors I could, but I have to admit that my belief in his supernatural healing was fleeting. When I walked out of the room, I couldn’t suppress the conviction that his life would soon be over.

  Six months went by. My nurse came running into the office one day. “Hey,” she said, “Richard’s back.”

  I was surprised he’d lasted this long. I could only imagine that he must look eaten up with cancer. “What does he look like?” I asked, not really wanting to hear her answer.

  “He looks pretty good,” she said brightly. “You have to see this.”

  So I walked into the examination room where he was waiting. He did look good. Really good. In fact, he looked great. “Richard, what’s going on? What happened?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Remember what?” I couldn’t suppress the thought—he should be dead!

  “Don’t you remember that day you came into the ER and prayed for me? I went to the doctors, and they gave me minimal treatment, and all those brain tumors and lung tumors disappeared. They call it a miracle.”

  After Richard (and how happy I was about Richard!), instead of praying for one patient a week, I began to pray for one patient a day and then more than one a day. I told myself, If I can pray for my son, I can pray for my patients. And maybe, if I keep praying for my patients, there’ll be an exchange, because someone will start praying for my son and he’ll get well, too.

  I was pumped. I started putting Bibles in all my exam rooms—gospel tracts, too. I began praying for about half my patients every day. It got so out of control that my office always ran overtime.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Perfect Couple?

  Not quite a year after Chad’s diagnosis, in May 2001, I received a call from Novartis Pharmaceuticals with the news we had been praying for: Gleevec had been approved by the FDA for the treatment of CML and would be available by the end of the month. Within four days of Chad’s beginning to take the medication, his blood counts were normal, his leukemia undetectable. As Dr. Brian Druker in Oregon had forecast, Gleevec stopped the disease dead in its tracks.

  We were grateful for this, on many levels! Prior treatment and prayer had controlled Chad’s leukemia but allowed for the possibility of new strains developing. Once another line of stem cells goes bad by virtue of slight mutations, the progress of the disease becomes almost impossible to stop. It metastasizes, producing tumors in different parts of the body. Chad had been healthy enough the last nine months to attend school, play tennis, and live the life of any other eleven-to twelve-year-old. I thought, Now he might live a long life, with his CML in remission for years to come!

  When I think of that happy time I remember especially the summer’s highlight: the finals of the Palm Beach Bath & Tennis Club’s junior championship. Once Chad started playing tennis seriously, he started dreaming of winning our club’s junior championship. The winner’s name is added to a plaque celebrating the club’s past champions, with the list going back generations. That roll call was Chad’s Hall of Fame.

  Going into the championship, Chad was playing his best tennis and was expected to do well. But the club has many fine young players who receive instruction from former touring professionals. The club’s juniors always include a number of players with high rankings in the state of Florida. In a place like Palm Beach achievement isn’t virtually a religion; it’s far more important than that. You can imagine the lengths to which many parents, with money to burn, go in forwarding their children’s tennis careers.

  Deborah and I didn’t have to work all that hard with our boys, since Chad would recruit his brother into marathon all-day sessions and, failing this, would beat a ball against a backboard for hours at a time. Still, we knew he would face stiff competition.

  What we did not know was that his brother, Christian, would make one of the runs of his life through the draw. In the semifinals he met a boy who was among those favored to win the entire championship and Christian pulled off a huge upset. This meant Chad and Christian would face each other in the finals.

  For most parents, I would suppose, this would be an occasion of anxiety. Whom to root for? How to celebrate the winner while simultaneously consoling the loser?

  Deborah and I felt the conflict, but, honestly, as we sat at a parasol table by the feature court, watching our boys trying to beat each other, we enjoyed the perspective we had gained during the previous months. Towheaded Chad, with his consistent groundies and scurrying defense, versus taller, dark-haired Christian with his bombing serve and killer forehand: they were such complements, even on the tennis court! And they were both healthy, vital, full of life. I could have watched that match until the end of time. How I loved my boys.

  At a changeover, I remember taking Deborah’s hand and exchanging a look illuminated by our life together—a look that expressed our oneness. Through the years we have truly become each other’s life.

  I suppose to an outside observer we must have looked at that moment like the perfect cinematic family. For one thing, Deborah is quite beautiful, a woman who might have stepped out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. And there I was, Yale-educated, a former university professor and now a cardiologist in a community that controls 25 percent of the wealth in the entire country. At a prestigious club. Watching our boys play for the junior championship. What could be more palmy?

  Knowing about Chad’s illness changed the picture, but there was much more. The look Deborah and I shared recalled a challenging history that was anything but celluloid perfect. “I will find a way” had been my motto, in part because doing so had been such an enormous struggle. In making our life together, we had overcome family history, early mistakes, spiritual naïveté, and the world’s resistance to our hopes and dreams. We had fought not only against flesh and blood, as the apostle Paul wrote, but against principalities and powers and the rulers of the air. We had come along far enough, at this point, for “I will find a way” to be replaced with “God, please show us the way.”

  Leukemia wasn’t the first evil we had encountered. As I mentioned, we thought we might never have children and prayed for ten years before seeing our sons born.

  I didn’t exactly sail into the medical profession, either, and while I was struggling to become a doctor, Deborah confronted her own health struggles.

  So what we felt at that moment—watching our boys battle it out on the court—wasn’t so much triumph as being brought into a period of rest. Deborah and I had been through too much to imagine we had just “arrived,” as we foolishly once might have.

  The Girl of My Dreams

  I have to admit, though, that we started out in life as the ideal high school couple. Not exactly the high school quarterback and the head cheerleader, but close. I played middle linebacker and was named All-State. Deborah could have been a star athlete herself; however, she was interested not in sports but fashion, as she told the coaches who were always trying to recruit her. She did some modeling and could have made it her career but decided otherwise. We were voted the “best dressed” couple of our senior class.

  It was love at first sight—at least for me. I saw her at a high school football game and in
stantly told my friend, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” She had piercing blue eyes. She was tall, five feet, seven inches, and thin, with long blond hair that draped over her shoulders and down her back. She was fair-complexioned but tanned in a way that highlighted her coloring. The girl of my dreams.

  From that moment I began pursuing her relentlessly, with all the charm a sixteen-year-old boy could muster. I had more energy than I knew what to do with and worked every odd job I could find so I always had cash, which I spent freely on Deborah, taking her out to nice restaurants and giving her small gifts such as records and turquoise earrings and leather bracelets. (Remember those?)

  The social setting in which we grew up made finding our way confusing. Since we lived just outside Washington, D.C., in a suburb inhabited by high government officials—one of our neighbors was the CIA director—we came of age under the guidance of people who had achieved much in life. My father was a high-ranking military officer before he started a very successful real-estate development company. Deborah’s dad managed the business side of Foundry United Methodist Church in D.C.

  But the pleasure-seeking atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s led me to put more emphasis on having fun and partying than attending to my studies. Somehow, though, I always felt I would attend medical school and become a doctor, and looking back, I see my aptitude for medicine was clear. My high school teacher for chemistry and biology noted I had a gift for these subjects and encouraged me to take them more seriously. Like many future scientists and doctors, I liked putting together collections and roamed the nearby woods collecting animal skeletons, insect specimens, and historical artifacts like old bottles, crockery, buttons, and the Civil War bullets that would pop up now and again.

  Deborah and I graduated from high school in 1972. Deborah decided to attend college in Northern Virginia—she felt more comfortable staying home for the first couple of years before venturing out. The education offered at Northern Virginia was far superior to most state colleges, as PhDs who worked for governmental agencies like the State Department and the Centers for Disease Control served as adjunct faculty.