Raising the Dead Page 9

  Christian’s Sacrifice

  Chad’s massive round of chemotherapy at M. D. Anderson had the desired effect of reducing his white count, but only during the actual course of treatment. His leukemia attacked again as the terrorizing cells came out of hiding. The doctors found leukemia in his spinal fluid, and this was such a bad sign that they wondered if anything more could be done other than palliative care—simply treating Chad’s pain.

  By this time Deborah and I were ready to consider a bone marrow transplant. Chad’s doctors wondered if he could survive the procedure. I argued that he was strong—I knew that his body still had an underlying strength because of his fitness as a tennis player. I pressed the staff at M. D. Anderson to let Chad receive a bone marrow transplant from his brother, Christian, and they finally agreed. I’m pretty sure they thought Chad wouldn’t survive the procedure.

  We had resisted a bone marrow transplant for so long because of the risks, as I’ve said. The procedure has nasty effects on the donor as well, and I knew too well what Christian was facing when I picked him up from Saint Andrew’s and brought him once more to Houston.

  Christian received injections for a week prior to the transplant that encouraged the production of stem cells. A fourteen-year-old boy has a healthy quantity of stem cells to begin with. The shots resulted in the hyperproduction of stem cells, causing joint pain. This can’t be avoided, but it’s no fun to go through. Christian was in a lot of pain. As Christ gave His blood for the life of the world, Christian was being asked to give his blood, his marrow, the life within him for his brother.

  As Christian was being turned into a stem cell factory, Chad received more chemotherapy and then his body was irradiated, destroying his stem cells and his entire immune system. In a controlled manner, the doctors had performed the equivalent of exposing Chad to a Hiroshima, a nuclear blast. He was then isolated in a clean room, as his body would be unable to fight off the least infection. He was, in fact, slowly dying from the therapy itself, as the elimination of his diseased stem cells entailed destroying his normal stem cells as well. Unless the transplant worked, he’d be unable to produce any blood cells at all.

  Once the injections had done their work in Christian’s body, he was hooked up to a filtration system that harvested his stem cells as his blood was recycled. The nurse put a huge IV in one arm and a huge IV in the other arm and sent his blood from one vein through the machine into another vein. Or that was what was supposed to happen.

  After the beginning of the procedure, I went to check on Deborah, who was watching over Chad in the clean room. When I returned to see about Christian, he was screaming. He was tied down to the table in a cruciform posture, each arm out to the side, and he could barely lift his head. But once he heard my voice in the room, he directed his cries at me. “Dad! They are killing me! They are killing me! Help me!”

  The nurse was cooing, “Oh, he’s all right. He’s all right.”

  But I saw that the return IV hadn’t been properly inserted, and his blood was not flowing back into his vein but diffusing through the flesh of his arm, which had by then swollen to the size of a ham. “You’re infiltrating him!” I screamed to the nurse. “Can’t you see that?”

  She quickly removed the IVs and suspended the procedure. Christian lay strapped to the gurney, writhing in pain and fighting his tears.

  I called up the supervising physician and let him have it. “You’re M. D. Anderson. You’re supposed to be the best in the world! How in the world can we trust you? I want an incident report filled out about this.”

  Accidents in medicine happen—all the time. I’m more appreciative now of what my patients tell me about their difficult experiences and attentive to their reactions. I warn myself against being dismissive because things can go awry in a hurry and, particularly in cardiology, there’s no room for error. Right then I experienced in full measure what any distraught parent would, my love of the medical profession notwithstanding.

  The hardest thing was telling Christian he would have to go through the same procedure again. “Dad, they were trying to kill me in there,” he said. “I can’t go through that again!”

  I had to explain that not only would he have to go through it again, he’d have to be reprepped with more injections to boost his stem cell production. The joint pain would come back over the weekend. But at the beginning of the next week, when they harvested his stem cells again, I’d be there. Every moment.

  And I was, and this time I saw to it that the IVs were inserted properly. Christian didn’t experience anything worse than discomfort and impatience as his blood was cycled and his stem cells harvested over a period of three to four hours.

  But he was off balance for the next week, as the procedure destroyed his emotional equilibrium. He was disoriented and imagined things: anxious at one moment, enraged the next, finding himself weeping and lost. He could not be reasoned with. We just had to hold on to him until the normal balance of his blood chemistry was restored. Christian had done such a brave thing, but he was hardly aware of it for days afterward. After all he’d been through, taking him back to the boarding school was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.

  Chad’s long nightmare went on even as Christian’s stem cells were finding their way into Chad’s bone marrow and regenerating his blood supply and his immune system. Chad was nauseated and couldn’t eat for a couple of weeks, as the radiation continued to destroy cells and his body struggled to cope with this living death. White sores formed on his lips and around his mouth. The only nourishment he was able to take was through an IV.

  During this time, Deborah and I became even more radical in our prayers. We prayed over the blood transfusions that carried Christian’s stem cells into Chad. “Lord, Father, give new life to our boy. In the name of Jesus we command all abnormal cells to die, and Lord, Father, we ask that these stem cells bring life to Chad. In Your Scriptures, You tell us that life is found in the marrow. May this bone marrow bring life to our son, Holy God. Honor our prayer, Lord, Father. In the name of Jesus.”

  Every time a new bag of “ringers” came in—fluids enriched with electrolytes administered by IV—and every time a new medication came in, I’d grab it from the nurse and pray over it. “Father God, in the name of Jesus, I pray over this, that no harm will come to my son, that only life will come into his body.” Then I’d place sticky notes on the bag, with Bible verses like this one from the book of Acts: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all” (10:38 KJV).

  Writing on the Wall

  After the transplant, Chad stayed in his hospital room for a month. He gradually improved, making steady progress. He began to eat on his own again, although he could keep down only the blandest food imaginable.

  Deborah stayed with him night and day. She was the mother lion, fighting for her cub. I burned out occasionally and had to retreat to the apartment for rest. Once I went to the apartment in the afternoon, took a nap, then showered and returned in the early evening. I spruced up, put on a jacket and tie, and slapped on some cologne, thinking I’d take Deborah out to dinner—or at least to the commissary.

  When I entered Chad’s room, I came to the side of his bed and greeted him, “Hey, buddy.”

  He immediately started vomiting. Once he had thrown up the little in his stomach, he continued to retch, dry heaving. He waved me away between gags. “Your cologne! I can’t take it. Get out of the room!”

  Deborah, as mother lion, simply roared: “Do you know how hard we’ve worked to get his stomach settled? Look at him! How long do you think it’s going to be before he can eat again? How will he get better? You had to know what that cologne would do to him. What were you thinking?”

  I muttered about trying to freshen up and make it nice for everyone as I skipped back out the door.

  That’s what a month of watching a fourteen-year-old hang between life and death will do to you—and what the frustrations that build
up can do to a couple. Deborah and I were both emotionally exhausted. We wondered why God was taking so long answering our prayers. We wondered whether God was with us at all. Could there be any meaning to Chad’s suffering? What could possibly be accomplished through it that could justify so much hurt and pain?

  M. D. Anderson takes in many patients from overseas, particularly from Saudi Arabia. The parents of these Muslim children would spread out their prayer rugs in their rooms and pray all day, crying out to Allah for the lives of their children. Deborah and I had no one at that time who would pray for us—we felt alone. I’d send out e-mail blasts and sometimes receive encouraging notes, which were tremendously appreciated, but the bedside of a sick child must be one of the loneliest places on earth, even when you are standing right next to the wife you love more than life itself. Grief and fear seemed our only company; so much so that we began losing the will to reach out to each other, if not to God. In those moments following the cologne fracas, I was wasted; I was at the bottom.

  I went to the bathroom and washed off the scent. When I came back into Chad’s room, the nurse asked me, “Dr. Crandall, where’s the prayer on the wall?”

  I didn’t know what she meant.

  “Right there, opposite the foot of his bed. Every day when I come in there’s a prayer written on that wall. Something from the Word of God—Bible verses, but like a prayer. The other nurses and I talk about it at lunch. We don’t know quite how you do it. The cleaning people talk about it. But you haven’t written anything there today.”

  “I’ve never written anything on the wall,” I said.

  “Oh yes, you have. Stop kidding me.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, I’m not making it up. You wait a minute.” The nurse went out and brought in another nurse. “Tell him,” she said.

  The other nurse commented that she had seen the prayers, too. A new one. Every day.

  Deborah turned to me from where she was sitting beside Chad’s bed, tears welling in her eyes. “God must’ve been here. He was here and we didn’t even know it. We couldn’t see it. But everyone who came in here could. They could read the Word of God on the wall.”

  I looked at Deborah and I worried that if I started then, I’d cry so hard I’d howl. I wanted to hold her, but I was afraid to.

  “Strife broke the anointing,” she said, her eyes downcast. “But God’s been here—all the time.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Battle

  After the bone marrow transplant, Chad made steady improvement. He gained weight and his color started coming back. When his blood counts improved sufficiently, we flew back home, with a sense of tremendous gratitude. The bone marrow transplant turned out not to be that bad after all, we thought. Slowly, we gained confidence that Chad was going to make it—that this nightmare was coming to an end. Once home, Chad was able to take part in a wedding and soon thereafter was back hitting tennis balls.

  What Chad and the rest of the family had been through at M. D. Anderson taught us so much about practicing our faith in the midst of a battle with evil. Cancer is an evil; just because you can see malignant cells under a microscope doesn’t mean they aren’t an expression of Satan’s will to destroy God’s creation. The thorns on a vine, which anyone can see with the naked eye, are the result of evil influence, as Genesis tells us (3:18). Satan comes to kill, steal, and destroy. Cancer is a demonic spirit; like so many things that reflect Satan’s character, cancer takes a good thing—cell reproduction—and introduces subtle twists that make it destructive, in fact, a killing machine.

  Cancer opens one’s eyes, in a sense, to the spiritual battle in which we are all engaged at every moment. When are we not being assaulted, in one way or another, by evil? It’s vital that we learn to act on what God tells us—to play our part in the establishment of God’s kingdom—even as we suffer all “the wiles of the devil” (Eph. 6:11 KJV).

  As much of our time at M. D. Anderson was spent waiting—waiting between tests, for the next treatment, for enough time to pass for another procedure to be performed—I became restless and felt called to be doing the Lord’s work in some way if I couldn’t be helping patients as a doctor.

  One of the books I was reading about miraculous healing, How to Heal the Sick, was written by Charles and Frances Hunter. I found their ministry was based just outside Houston in a northern suburb called Kingwood. Charles and Frances have often been called the “healing Hunters” and were used greatly in the charismatic movement of the 1970s and since.

  Being a pushy kind of guy, I called Frances Hunter one day out of the blue. “Frances,” I said, “I don’t know you, but I need your help. My son is sick, and all I want to do is volunteer for your ministry. Can we do that? If it’s okay, I’ll bring him to you, let him rest in a sleeping bag, and we will do whatever you want us to do.”

  Frances said, “Sure, come ahead. We’ll pray for him.”

  We Don’t Have to Fight Alone

  The first time we visited the Hunters, Christian as well as Chad was with us, and the four of us went together. The Hunters took one look at Chad and said, “You can have our bed.” They had a small office with a daybed where they would sometimes take naps in the afternoons. We felt that daybed had a special anointing on it—it was a prophet’s bed. Chad camped out there while the rest of us worked.

  We helped the Hunters send out books, tapes, and CDs from their ministry. My son Christian loved burning the disks, and he spent hours manufacturing copies of the Hunters’ video and audio presentations.

  Others worked in the offices as well, of course, and the core group of people associated with the ministry came to know Chad and love him. They’d often prepare special dishes for him. And the Hunters, the other workers, and we would pray over Chad every day.

  At one point, Chad had a frozen shoulder from the radiation. “Frozen shoulder” might not sound like a serious diagnosis, but anyone who has ever had one knows what a world of problems it can cause and how painful such a condition can be. Otherwise healthy adults with frozen shoulders find it agonizing. Chad could not raise his right arm at all, and this was particularly dispiriting to him as it meant he could not play tennis, even if his CML went into remission.

  One day Charles Hunter walked right up to where Chad was lying, and he asked, “Chad, do you want that shoulder healed so that you can use it?”

  Chad said, “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to pray for your shoulder, that it will be healed today.” He put both his hands on Chad’s shoulder and cried out in the name of Jesus for Chad to be healed. I’m not sure what inspired him to do this; he must have been particularly convinced through his prayers that God had appointed this day for the healing of Chad’s shoulder.

  With Charles Hunter’s prayer, by the power of God, Chad’s frozen shoulder came loose, and he could use it normally once more. Chad’s eyes nearly popped out of his head and his faith lifted up.

  Every extra moment we had while we were in Houston, we took the family to the Hunters’ ministry and worked. We were in a battle, and if we were in a battle we were going to fight it, and part of fighting it meant doing the work of the Lord on behalf of others. Soldiers fight not merely to survive but to prevail in the service of those they are protecting over the enemy. We had to adopt this attitude ourselves.

  Through our work with the Hunters we learned—to our great relief—that we did not have to fight the battle alone and should not try. I remember the lonely days at M. D. Anderson as I watched Muslims pray together constantly for their children—how abandoned I felt; how alone I felt with no one to pray with me other than Deborah. But as we reached out to the Hunters, other Christians began reaching out to us.

  Fellow Soldiers

  Initially, the ministry of others came to us through books, as with the Hunters. Deborah was particularly helped by Dodie Osteen’s book, Healed of Cancer—the story of her own battle with the disease. Healed of Cancer is filled with Bible verses about God’s healing
work, and Deborah ended up memorizing almost all these verses through constantly repeating them in her prayers. Dodie Osteen is the mother of Joel Osteen, the pastor of the huge Lakewood Church in Houston, and because of her book we contacted the church and an associate pastor named Steve came to pray with us, which was tremendously helpful.

  I was especially helped, as I’ve mentioned, by T. L. Osborn’s book Healing the Sick and Reinhard Bonnke’s Mighty Manifestations. At the time I first started reading these books I had no idea I would soon become friends with people like the Hunters and Pastor Bonnke.

  Once we met the Hunters, though, and understood what a difference Christian community could make in our struggle, we became so eager to know and pray with other Christians that we bought a second little house close by our own where missionaries could stay on short furloughs and other men and women of God could visit us.

  Looking back, I see that I had been running after everything God could give me since the onset of Chad’s illness. I wanted to be reassured of God’s power by meeting missionaries and others who had experienced it. I encountered David Hogan and was literally “blown back” by the power of the Holy Spirit. I journeyed to Mexico to join Greg Rider and his team as they took the gospel to tribal peoples. But in these first inquiries, I was most concerned to see God work directly in ways that would convince me that God had the power and will to heal today, just as we read in the Bible.

  Later, as the battle unfolded, I became more concerned to join with others in fighting the battle. I started seeing Chad’s illness as part of the greater battle to make manifest God’s goodness on the earth—the battle all Christians are called to fight together. Once Deborah and I became eager to join with our fellow Christians in God’s work, God sent a virtual army of people to pray with us, often in surprising ways.