Psalm 121: "He's not breathing! Please come now!"

 This story was shared with permission from the patient and family

“He’s not breathing! Please come now!” The voice on the other end of the line was tense, close to panicked.

“I’m coming now.” I replied. I hung up the phone and ran out the door. I drove across the center, praying urgently for God’s wisdom and help. My car rattled to a stop at the end of the driveway and I could see people standing near the door. I jumped out of my car and ran up the drive and into the house. The patient was in the throes of a severe seizure and was surrounded by scared and desperate friends. My eyes took in the situation and my mind clicked over into assessment mode: watching his chest, feeling for pulse, checking for responses from the patient. Within two minutes it was clear the seizure was not going to stop.

“We need to get him to the clinic in my car.” I said. One of my friends grabbed my keys to open the doors of my car, and several strong guys came and picked up the patient. I guided them out of the house and to the car as I radioed the doctor who was on call with me. My adrenaline was high and my subconscious was pounding with prayer, begging for God’s help.

We got the patient down to the clinic and into our treatment room. I started oxygen and pulled out medications I anticipated the doctor would order. The patient was still seizing and I was beginning to think we were headed for real trouble. Usually seizures are fairly self limiting, but this looked and felt different. The doctor arrived and we started swinging into a new phase of action. There was a flurry of administering medications, doing blood draws, and using the tiny windows where the seizures stopped or abated to try to determine if there was more going on that we could work to resolve.  

At one point the doctor stopped after we had administered a medication that needed time to work. She turned to the little group of friends, family and church elders and said, “Let’s take the next minute and just pause to pray.” So we prayed. We prayed fervently, begging God to step in and do a miracle. Over the next few hours we did everything we could to stop the seizures and used every available medication we could safely give until there was nothing left that we could give. The patient continued to have small seizures every few minutes and we were powerless to stop them. And there we were, empty handed, left with nothing to give or do. Everything was in God’s hands.

At 1 o’clock in the morning the doctors traded out and the doctor that came on shift settled in to assess and wait and watch. As he did so, he prayed and after a while he turned to the anxious faces gathered around the bed.
“I think there’s something spiritual going on here as well as physical and we need to praise and sing.” We looked around at each other until someone in the group began to sing. Soon, worship and praise songs filled the room.

Since the first moment I had seen the patient he had been entirely unresponsive to anything but pain. He hadn’t spoken or tracked movements with his eyes, or really even reacted to any verbal stimuli. But suddenly, as we were all singing and praising God the patient began to sing! He started singing a song and as he sang he began sobbing. We joined in and he sang every verse of a worship song based on Psalm 121. The song says, “I look to the mountains, I look to the valleys, for help to come. I look to the north and the south, I look to the east and west, for help to come. Help will come from you, Jesus. Help will come from You, alone. I worship You, I worship You. You are the God of Israel. I worship You, I worship You, You are my God.” At the moment he began singing the presence of God began to feel even more tangible than it already had in the room and something shifted. Later, friends who were sitting outside the clinic would tell me that they could feel it even outside the building and knew something was moving and changing on the spiritual level.

After he sang the patient did not have any more seizures and began to sleep peacefully. We sat and watched the patient through the silent chilly hours of night and into the pre-dawn morning. At 0700 I traded out with another nurse and went home to sleep, exhausted and amazed at what God had done. It took several days for the patient to come back to his normal levels of functioning, but I’m convinced God did a mighty miracle that night, not because of us, but in spite of us, and He showed His incredible mercy and power.

To God be the glory!