BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

B V O V : 1 3 by Melanie Hemry but they didn't get the message. Her doctor ran test after test but was unable to nd the cause. Finally, he scheduled her to see a neurologist. On March 28, 2007, while preparing to go see the doctor, Sarah took a bath. When she could not get out of the bathtub, she had to call on her mother for assistance. Walking into the kitchen to eat lunch, suddenly she was unable to lift her left leg. When she sat down to eat, she couldn't cut her food with a knife and needed to be fed by her mother. In just a few short weeks, Sarah had gone from excellent health to being an invalid. The excruciating pain caused her to despair of life. Once the neurologist nished his exam, he told Sarah: "You have Guillain-Barré syndrome. "It's an autoimmune disorder that causes the body to attack itself," the doctor explained. "It damages the protective sheath around the nerves, or sometimes the nerves themselves. That's what's causing your pain." A rare disease that usually attacked older people, Guillain-Barré is often triggered by vaccines, the doctor said. "Have you had the u vaccine?" Sarah had not. "I'm going to admit you to the hospital, and tomorrow we'll start treatment." "If you're not going to start treatment until tomorrow, couldn't I take her home tonight?" Sarah's mother asked. "If I send her home and her diaphragm becomes paralyzed, she could die in her sleep." Sarah pondered his words. Death sounded like sweet relief. A Fight for Life "When we got to the hospital, I was shocked because they admitted me to the ICU," Sarah remembers. "Nurses were waiting on me. Soon I was hooked up to all kinds of monitors. The respiratory therapist made me breathe into a machine that measured the level of my breathing. "She kept saying, 'You've got to do it harder!' I felt like I was giving it everything I had, but it wasn't much. If I breathed less than 30%, I had to be put on a ventilator. She pushed like a drill sergeant to keep me o it. It took every ounce of strength within me but I nally met the mark— I reached 30%." "The treatment they gave me was called plasmapheresis. They ran my blood through a machine that ltered it. I was in the ICU for four days before moving to a regular room. My family lived in the small town of Hartwell, Ga. The neurologist and the hospital were an hour away. "A family from Hartwell came to visit because they had a son who'd also been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. It's extremely rare for young people to get this disease. Rarer still that two young people from the same small town got it. Thankfully, he survived too. "When I was nally discharged, I thought I'd go home and everything would go back to normal. That's not what happened. It took a full two and a half months for me to be able to smile again. There were other lingering e ects like weakness and fatigue. I took naps every day. "Cognitively, my mind was also messed up. While I was talking, I would get stuck on a word or sentence and repeat it three times. And I couldn't always comprehend what people were saying. It was embarrassing." New Medicine Sarah had been raised in a Christian home and was in church seemingly every time the doors were open. She loved the Lord and served Him. But she had never been taught about God's divine healing. She didn't know that God still does miracles today. That changed when, three years after her diagnosis, Sarah's mother gave her a book by Gloria Copeland titled God's Prescription for Divine Health. The book explained that God's Word could work like medicine. "If a doctor's prescription required the medication to be taken three times a day, then you might take it morning, noon and night," Sarah explains. Following that rationale, Sarah began reading and confessing healing scriptures listed in the book three times a day—like medicine. Several months after starting this practice, she had a revelation. She couldn't remember the last time that she'd taken a nap. As she renewed her mind by confessing those healing scriptures, Sarah noticed that every Sarah could no longer smile. Half of her face had become paralyzed.

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