A Treasury of Miracles for Women (8 page)

“I feel great,” Laura assured her husband, Jake. “I'm sure everything will be fine.”

Jake, thirty-eight, needed reassuring because his work took him away from home so often. He was a pilot with a major airlines stationed in Tulsa. His skill was widely known because of his years as a fighter pilot and his routes sometimes included international flights. During those jaunts he might be away from home for five days at a time.

Weeks passed, and Jake was in the middle of a flight to Europe when Laura began bleeding. At first the flow of blood was relatively light, and as she checked herself into the hospital that day, Laura's concern was only for her un born baby. There were still more than three months left until her due date.

Within hours doctors realized that Laura's placenta had not corrected its position. Instead, it had grown through her uterine wall, causing bleeding from her uterus.

“The baby is fine,” the doctor told her. “But we're sending you by ambulance to the hospital in Tulsa. They're better equipped to watch you until they can safely deliver your baby.”

Jake West didn't learn of the troubles with Laura until he landed in France on the afternoon of June 24 and tried to contact Laura. A neighbor friend was watching the chil dren and explained that Laura had been taken to the hos pital in Tulsa. Immediately Jake put a call in to Laura.

“Honey, everything's okay,” she said calmly. “I'm having a little bleeding, that's all. They're going to keep me here just in case there's a problem.”

“Do you want me there?” Jake was ten thousand miles from home, but he could be back in two days if there was an emergency.

“No.” Laura was firm. “You'll be home at the end of the week anyway. If anything goes wrong, they'll call you. And in the meantime, I'm in good hands here at the university hospital. Don't worry.”

“I
am
worried,” Jake said, frustrated that he was so far away. “I wish I were with you.”

“Really, Jake. I'll be fine.” She paused for a moment. “But please pray for the baby. He's too little to be born yet.”

Jake felt tears well up in his eyes, and he swallowed hard. “I'll be praying, sweetheart. Hang in there until I get home.”

For two weeks doctors monitored Laura's condition, checking often to see if her body was handling the prob lems with the placenta.

Then, on June 25, Laura began to hemorrhage. Imme diately doctors rushed her into surgery and performed a ce sarean section to remove the baby.

“It's a boy and he's alive,” one of the doctors an nounced as others worked frantically about the room preparing for the surgery that would come now that the baby had been delivered. The infant was handed to neona tal specialists, cleaned, and rushed into an incubator where he was hooked up to a respirator. He weighed one pound, fourteen ounces.

For Laura, everything had become a blur the moment they rushed her into surgery. She knew there was a problem and that doctors were about to do a cesarean section. But because she was bleeding so badly, they could not do a spinal block. Instead they administered a general anes thetic, and minutes before the baby was born Laura could feel herself losing consciousness.

“She's bleeding badly,” she heard someone say. “Looks like DIC.” Another voice filled the room, then another, and all of it blended into a distant humming.

At that instant Laura felt a tremendous shock of pain searing through her insides as the baby was removed before the painkiller had time to take effect. She tried to talk, but her body would not respond. Instead, Laura felt herself falling, slipping further and further from consciousness. She wanted desperately to ask someone the only question that really mattered.

“Is my baby alive?” She struggled to say the words, to find the answer from one of the doctors in the room. But her lips remained motionless, and then, before she could learn the answer to her question, everything went black.

It was pitch dark—a moonless night in Paris—and Jake West was sleeping soundly when the phone rang.

Groggy and unsteady, he automatically flipped on the light and grabbed the receiver. It was Laura's doctor.

“I've got some bad news for you.” Suddenly Jake was wide awake. “Is it Laura?”

The doctor sighed. “She began hemorrhaging and we performed an emergency C-section. Your baby boy is just under two pounds. He's not going to make it.”

Jake's shoulders slouched forward as he took the blow. “How's Laura?”

“Not good, Mr. West. She's bleeding uncontrollably. We have her in surgery right now trying to find a way to stop it. It doesn't look good for either of them. We think you should get here as soon as possible.”

Jake was stunned. He stared at the hotel wall, knowing that the first flight out of Paris wouldn't leave for ten hours. Suddenly, in the terrifying quiet that surrounded him, he remembered the way he'd once prayed and loved God. He had been a youth leader at his church for three years before joining the military. Now, although he had remained morally strong, he had become distant from God.

While Laura and the boys attended church every week, he was more of a visitor, making an appearance on occa sional Sundays. There was always a good excuse why he didn't go. Pilots led a busy life with a particularly demanding schedule. Many Sundays there were things he felt ob ligated to put before church.

He was still considering these things when the phone rang again. It was the hospital chaplain, this time with ominous news.

“They can't stop her bleeding, Mr. West,” the chaplain said. “She's back in surgery again. The doctors are doing all they can, but they don't think she's going to make it. You need to hurry.”

Left alone, Jake cried and prayed as he hadn't in a decade. “Lord, take me if you have to take someone,” he railed. “Our boys need Laura. She hasn't even seen her newborn son, Lord. Please, let her live.”

The next morning he told the airlines what had hap pened and was allowed to ride as a passenger on the 10:00 A.M. flight to New York. The entire flight he prayed and wondered whether Laura or their little boy were dying, even at that moment. When he arrived at LaGuardia air port, weather became an issue. He was informed that no flights would be leaving for at least four hours—until the dangerous weather had passed.

Immediately Jake called the hospital for an update.

“She's in surgery again,” he was told by a doctor. “She's still alive but she's bleeding from everywhere in her body. It's a complication of severe shock. Her blood is not clot ting as it should and so she's bleeding from all her major or gans.”

“What does it mean?” Jake was frantic.

“It means you need to hurry.”

Jake hung up the phone, angry and frustrated. There was nothing he could do about the weather, and even if they al lowed flights out in four hours, he wouldn't be at the hospi tal for at least another eight.

A fellow pilot and friend who had flown the plane from Paris found Jake and asked if there was anything he could do to help.

“Yes,” Jake said. His eyes were swollen from crying, his voice dejected. “Is there a prayer room nearby?”

The man nodded. “I think so.”

“Take me there. Please.”

The men walked down the concourse until they found the quiet airport chapel. Inside was a peaceful man who greeted them and explained that he was a pastor. “Flight's de layed,” he said. “Figured I could catch up with God in here.”

Jake's friend excused himself and left alone with the pas tor, Jake explained the situation.

“Just a minute,” the pastor said, picking up his tele phone. “Let me make a few phone calls.”

Within fifteen minutes the pastor had called the elders at his church and asked them to start people praying. When the man hung up, he looked at Jake. “Can I pray with you?”

Jake nodded, feeling numb and panicked. “I … I haven't been right with God for a while.”

The pastor's eyes were kind. “Maybe it's time to change that.”

“Yes.” Jake nodded, smiling weakly through his tears. He was exhausted from the emotional and physical journey, and still there remained another flight. The two men prayed and talked for several hours until finally Jake was able to board a plane for Tulsa.

On the airplane he sat next to a man who had lost his wife a year earlier in an accident. Jake turned away and stared out the window at the endless blue sky, wondering if he would be in that man's position in a year's time.

“Lord, I can't make it without her,” he prayed silently, fresh tears springing to his eyes. “Please let her live, dear God. Please.”

Every moment for the rest of the flight Jake stayed in constant prayer for Laura and their baby. By the time he arrived at the hospital she was in surgery for a fourth time. Jake had said more prayers in the past twenty-four hours than he had in the past decade.

When he finally arrived at the hospital, Jake saw Pastor Ryan Rowden from Hope Community Church.

“Ryan, how is she?” he asked, hurrying into the waiting room and pulling up a chair.

“She's on a respirator, Jake. We've been praying for her and we've called everyone on the church prayer chain. But it's very, very serious.”

Jake nodded, too choked up to speak. After a while he said, “I'm going to go see her.”

“She doesn't look like herself,” Ryan warned.

Nothing could have prepared Jake for the way Laura looked. She had tubing running in and out of various areas on her face and upper body, and she was bloated from the blood and other fluids being pumped into her. Her skin was gray and lifeless. Jake remained frozen in place, working up the courage to go near her.

“Honey,” he whispered, finally, inching toward her as if she would break if he moved too quickly. “It's me. Every thing's going to be okay. God's going to help you, Laura. We're all praying for you and the baby.”

He stood there a few minutes more, holding her limp hand and begging God to be merciful with her life. Then, when he could not stand another minute, he went searching for his son. Again he was unprepared for what he found.

The child was so small he looked lost in the neonatal intensive care incubator, swimming in a sea of wires and mon itors. His fingers were frail, no thicker than matchsticks.

“He's doing all right,” the nurse whispered with a smile. “Your pastor prayed over him a couple hours after he was born. Everything's been very stable ever since then.”

Jake's lips turned upward in a sad smile as he considered the nurse's words. Prayer, again. The same thing he'd done so little of in the last ten years. He gazed at his son—his lungs not yet developed, struggling against the odds to survive— and he made a decision. If prayer was what it would take, then he would see to it that as many people as possible were praying for them.

“God's going to take care of you, son,” he whispered, still looking at the infant. He thought about the pastor in the air port chapel. “We'll have people praying for you across this whole country.”

The phone calls began right away. Jake contacted friends in New Jersey and Kansas and asked them to pray.

“And please have your church pray for them,” he'd tell the people he spoke with. “Ask your friends to call people they know and then have their churches start praying. Please. We need everyone praying.”

The prayer chain grew. Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan. Military bases across the country. By that night, thousands of people were praying for Laura and their newborn baby. The prayers were so many that Jake was not surprised that evening when doctors were finally able to stop Laura's bleeding. In the past four days she'd been transfused with more than one hundred units of blood. “Everything is not as good as it seems,” the doctor told Jake. “She's lost so much blood, there's a strong possibility she'll have brain damage. Also, many of her organ functions have shut down. Everything ex cept her heart and her brain at this point.”

“Okay, so how long will it be before she can be out of here?” Jake said.

The doctor stared blankly at Jake. “What I'm saying is that she has less than a 1 percent chance of living. If she does live, she could be brain damaged. She could be bedridden the rest of her life.”

Jake was silent, soaking in the news. His entire life had changed in less than a week. But even as the doctor waited for him to react, he began praying again, silently asking God to heal his wife. The doctor cleared his throat and contin ued.

“Another thing, Jake. She's going to need a lot more blood. Maybe you could put a call in to your church friends and see if some of them might be willing to donate.”

Jake made the call that night, and within two days there were more than four hundred units of blood in Laura's ac count. At least the blood problem was solved.

“What else can we do?” one of their church friends asked Jake. “We feel so helpless out here.”

“Pray,” Jake said simply.

He had never been one to openly discuss his faith. It hadn't come naturally as a fighter pilot, nor as a pilot for the airlines. In those worlds a man needed to be cocksure and confident, macho in every way. Not dependent on prayer.

But now he found it the most natural thing in the world.The doctors were taking care of Laura's physical needs. The others needed to pray.

For the next ten days Jake and Laura's mother alternated taking twelve hour shifts with Laura and then back at home with the boys. Although she did not regain consciousness during that time, Laura made a steady recovery.

Then, almost three weeks after the baby's birth, Laura's condition suddenly took a drastic turn for the worse. Once again she began bleeding uncontrollably throughout her body. Because her organs were already weak, her stomach ruptured, forcing doctors to perform emergency surgery. They removed more than half of Laura's stomach and at tempted to close off the areas where she was bleeding. She survived surgery, but doctors gave her almost no chance to live.

“It's miraculous that she's made it this far, Jake, but the truth is very clear. She's dying,” the doctor said when the surgery was done. “You'll need to tell the boys.”

The next morning, Jake pulled his sons close to him and told them that their mother was expected to die. With tears in their innocent eyes, the boys immediately joined hands with their father and prayed that God would let their mommy live.