At the age of 13, my eldest son, Timothy, was already showing signs of the determined adventurer he would become.
I had the boys in swimming lessons for the summer at a pristine little lake in Central Ontario. One day, as the lesson time drew to a close, the instructor said, “OK – we’ve got a few minutes left until the end of the class. Let’s see who can swim the furthest under water. Naturally, Tim won, but came out of the water with a whopper of a headache. For a boy who was not prone to headaches, it was cause for concern. Little did we know that he had broken a blood vessel in his head.
With Tim in such agony that he “just wanted to die,” I rushed him to the Orilia hospital. “Just give him a couple of Tylenol, Mrs. Lee,” the doctor said. “Bring him back tomorrow if he still has a problem.”
“No!” I said. “This is not like Tim! You need to do some tests right now and find out what’s going on!”
The doctor did a bit of a double take, and realized that he needed to listen to mama bear. When the nuclear brain scans came back, they showed a patch of blood in the right quadrant. (See photo.) A helicopter was summoned to fly Tim to St. Mike’s in Toronto for microsurgery to relieve some of the pressure on the brain. He was not given the weekend to live.
The head of Radiology in Orillia was a Christian by the name of Andre Lussier. When I was not allowed to go in the air ambulance with Tim, Andre took me into the chapel where we prayed desperately for God to heal Tim.
From there, I drove to meet my husband for the two hour drive to Toronto. I could not speak. I had no words. I remember staring out the car window as the scenery passed, thinking, “It’s your move, God.” I knew there was nothing I could do for my precious, precious son. Little did I know that God had already answered those desperate prayers in the hospital chapel and had already healed Tim in the air ambulance.
When we arrived in Toronto, the doctor came out and met us, saying, “We’re not sure what happened, but we can’t find the bleeding. It’s there on the scans, but we’ve done a lumbar puncture and a catscan and can’t find a thing. The only test left is a neural angiogram and that’s way too dangerous a test. Your son could be left a vegetable for life if anything went wrong with that test. You might as well take him home.”
We were stunned – but thrilled to be able to drive home with our son in the car. He told us about how his headache had suddenly left up in the air.
That was Friday of the long weekend. When Tuesday morning rolled around, Dr. Baer, Chief of Neurology at St. Mike’s (who had not been on duty on the weekend), called me. “Mrs. Lee – you’ve got to get your son right down here. I don’t know why the tests didn’t show anything, but these things don’t just go away. Your son could be dead in five minutes – that’s how critical this is. You’ve got to get him down here for a neural angiogram. That’s the only way we’re going to know what’s going on!”
Well, I thought, if God healed Tim, He’s got to have a special reason and He’s not going to let him become a vegetable through a test. Besides, I believed that if God really does a miracle, it should be open to scientific investigation. And so, Tim and I got in the car and drove down to St. Mikes, where we met my husband. We were conscious of the possibility that Tim could suddenly die and it was very scary—in a normal kind of a way—but deep down, we all knew that God was at work and we could trust Him.
After completing the dangerous test, Dr. Baer met us in the hallway, shaking his head. He couldn’t explain why there was no bleeding. He only knew that, “these things just don’t go away.” When I pushed him to admit to the possibility of a miracle, he simply said that he’d never seen anything like that and didn’t have an answer.
Long story short, Tim entered Grade Nine that fall and played High School football. In later years, he went on to become a fire fighter and thought nothing of running up the steps to the top of the CN Tower in full gear, wearing a Scott Pack as a fund raiser for United Way. Now he lives in BC where he’s an avid rock climber and adventurer. If there had been any weakness where the blood vessel ruptured, we would have certainly known it by now!
Thank God! He is awesome—by design.
