By my faith, I was healed

Hi, my name is Jenny. I'm from Schenectady, New York, and this is my testimony.

I was brought up in the Catholic Church, and we never missed a Sunday Mass. We went every week. My parents and my family were very involved in the church growing up, so I always had that faith surrounding me in my life. When I got to be older, I decided I was going to go on my own path a bit. I didn't always agree with everything I was learning in church.

I found my husband, and we got married and we had our family. We started bringing the kids to church. We had three children. Our oldest was a boy, then we had another girl a year later, and then four years later we had our little girl.

A Season of Loss

Our lives got turned upside down when she was 18 months old and was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. From there, life became very difficult. We tried to go to church when we could, and I had my faith. I knew I had to pray to God, and I wanted God to heal her, and I believed in miracles. But I was faced with that death and that horrific life of battling cancer day in and day out, and it was very difficult to deal with.

She did well with treatment, and a year and a half after starting treatment, she was cancer-free—"no evidence of disease," as they like to say. During that year, I decided I'd go back to school and become a nurse. I had a one-year program. During that year, it got hard for me. All of a sudden, I started having a lot of headaches. A few months after I graduated, my husband talked me into going to the doctor, and that's when I got diagnosed with a neurological condition called Chiari malformation, where my skull was too small for my brain. The lowest part of my brain, the cerebellar tonsils, were coming out of my skull and down into my spinal canal, pressing against my brainstem. It was causing some severe headaches and some neurological issues, but we kind of got things under control and I started doing better.

I was finally able to get my first nursing job. A month after I started working, I went for one of my daughter's regular three-month checkups to make sure she was doing well with her cancer. As I sat in the room with her, like I always did, watching the screen, I saw a new tumor. She had her first relapse, and we went right back down to New York City, where she had been getting treatment before. We thought we got it all, and she did well. That was May. Come November, she got tested again, and no cancer. We thought she was doing really well.

Then, two days before Christmas, she started complaining about pain, and then she woke up with a fever. I brought her to the hospital, and again, looking at the screen with her, I saw yet another new tumor. She relapsed a second time. Right after Christmas, the day after Christmas, we drove down—the whole family—to New York City for more treatment. By the end of January, after doing chemotherapy and getting ready for what was supposed to be surgery to remove what was left, we looked at the screen and it looked like a Christmas tree. She was full of tumors and had progressed quite rapidly through treatment.

From there, it was a search for what we thought might be her saving grace, because they didn't have a lot of hope for her. We found a trial down in the National Institute of Health down in DC. We went there, and three weeks into it, I had gone home for a weekend because it was my oldest son's birthday and we wanted to surprise him. I knew the kids just needed to be with each other. I went home for the weekend, and it just was on my heart to take the other two back with me. I took all three kids back down to DC so Ayla could finish her trial. But within a few days, we could see something just wasn't right. We did more scans to find out that she was now progressing even more so through this clinical trial, so it wasn't working and it was stopped.

They gave me a few days to see if I could find anything. They looked themselves, and out of the six trials I found she was eligible for, every single one of them denied her. I was told to take her home. So I took her home. We did some palliative radiation at home. It was supposed to be for 10 days, but after five days, it was obvious it was time. We stopped treatment, and we brought her home. The following day, she passed away in my arms.

Lost in Grief

Life would never be the same. For a while, we got very lost. We tried to go back to church, hoping we'd find comfort there. But what we found is that something was gone, something was missing in the church. At that point, the Catholic Church just felt to us as if it was just going through the motions week after week, and we weren't getting anything out of it. It just felt empty to us. So we decided to stop going to church. At that point, we became a little lost in our grief for a while and didn't really know what direction to turn to for our faith. We had our faith in God—we believed in God, we believed in Jesus—we just didn't know what to do with it or where to go.

After a few years, I started to get more involved with work and raising my other two kids. They were getting into high school, they were growing up, and a lot of stuff was going on. Life became busy again, started to feel a little bit normal again. I had a few issues here and there with my health.

It actually ended up being only a year after she passed away, the following January, I was in my new job and loving it, and suddenly I had severe dizziness. Then I couldn't walk within a couple of days. I had to stop working and went to a few different specialists. I finally ended up at a specialist in Long Island, which was a little over three hours from our home. They told me I needed to have surgery. I was having trouble walking.

In May, about 13 months after she passed away, I had brain surgery. Waiting to go into surgery, I was wondering what the doctor was taking so long. He came in, and my six-hour surgery turned into a 13-hour surgery, and my seven-week recovery turned into a five-month recovery because they found more problems. I had my cerebellar tonsils removed that day, and I had two rods and screws put in from my skull to the top two vertebrae of my back. That was rough, but we got through that and I recovered well. It was a long recovery, but I recovered well and I was able to go back to work.

A New Diagnosis

Five years after she died, I was at work one day and suddenly I couldn't walk again. That was added on top of the headache I had had for a few days, so I knew something was wrong. I went to my doctor, who didn't know what was wrong, and back to the specialist who did my surgery. No one could figure out what was wrong. Within a month of me not being able to walk, I suddenly developed full-body tremors, I had difficulty talking, and my function was getting less and less. The doctors didn't know why. I kept going through different testing, doctor to doctor, and no one could figure out what was wrong or what was causing this.

What I had found on my own, through talking with some friends, was the possibility that marijuana could help me. I started using marijuana and found that it gave me some function back with my body. I was able to walk better and talk better, so I became very dependent on that.

It was a year and a half after everything started that I finally ended up in a new doctor's office, and he had a diagnosis for me. They diagnosed me with another neurological condition: Functional Neurological Disorder. It was explained to me as a disconnect in my brain where things didn't communicate properly, so any stress, emotions, or anything I was dealing with psychologically would manifest with neurological symptoms. To say my life had stress was an understatement for everything we've been through, so that was difficult to come to terms with.

They said it only had a 13% recovery rate, and even if I did everything I needed to do therapy-wise, it didn't change that 13% recovery rate, and most people just live with this the rest of their life. I wasn't given much hope at that point. Having depression as part of my life already since losing my daughter, although not severe, it became severe at that point. For the first time in my life, I wanted to kill myself. I got very suicidal. I was becoming a very big burden, in my eyes, to my family. We lived on a second floor, so it was hard for me. I couldn't even get up the stairs at times, and they practically had to carry me, which is not fun to have to watch your son carry you up the stairs.

I was done. I didn't want to live this life anymore. But I had that foundation, that belief in God. The one thing I was taught growing up is if you take your own life, you don't go to heaven. I have a little girl there that's waiting for me, so that's what stopped me every time.

Healed by Faith

It was during that time that I'm crying out to God for help, and He answered. I got this overwhelming feeling to read my Bible. I started reading the Bible for the first time in my life, and I just suddenly was seeing truth. So many things I didn't know, so many things I realized I was not being taught biblically, so it was very eye-opening for me. I started to change, and I knew I wanted to get closer to God, and I wanted Jesus to come in and take over my life. At that point, I realized I needed to be baptized. Although I didn't understand all the repentance that went into it at that point, I knew I wanted Jesus to take control of my life.

When I got baptized that June, I was ready for Jesus to take over, and He did in a big way. I suddenly grew very intolerant of sin in my life, and I didn't want anything to do with it. The way I talked, the way I acted, my thoughts, the music I listened to, the TV shows I watched—everything changed. My husband's watching me go through this change, and he's not quite sure what's going on, but he's happy that I seem to be getting happier.

I was having, at this point, paralysis episodes three or four times a day, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more, where I couldn't move and couldn't talk. It would come out of nowhere. I was always reading my Bible every night before I went to bed. It was November 7th, and I got to the scripture where Jesus is walking through the crowd, and the woman just reached down and touched His garment. The power moved through Him and He felt it, and He asked who touched Him. She came forward and said how she knew by touching His garment she would be healed. He said those words: "By your faith, you are healed."

It just clicked for me, and I just understood. It's my faith. It's me—I have to believe and trust in God that He'll heal me. So I said that night, "Lord, I know You're going to heal me. I'm not going to touch the marijuana, I'm not going to touch anything again, any drugs at all. I'm completely going to rely on You to heal me of this so I can go on forward and do better."

I went to sleep, and I woke up, and I was healed. I could walk, I could talk, I wasn't shaking, and I didn't have any pain. I was kind of in shock from it and wasn't quite sure what was going on at first. Did He heal me? I was kind of quiet, and my husband was like, "Wow, you're doing really good today." I'm like, "Yeah, I am."

Later on that night, he asked me, "Wow, today was a great day." I'm like, "Yeah, I prayed. I prayed for healing last night, and I think He might be healing me. I think He might have healed me." We read the Bible again that night, like I always did at bedtime, and I woke up the next day and still the same—I'm doing great. Day after day, the week went on, and it started to sink in that, wow, I am healed. I wasn't having any pain, wasn't having any paralysis, no tremors. I could walk normal, could talk normal. All the physical symptoms were completely gone, completely gone.

After seven days, my husband was convinced. The shock wore off for him, and he was like, "That's it. I want to join you on this journey." I had gotten baptized that summer, and now my husband was ready, and I baptized him. We just decided we wanted to fully dedicate our lives to God. We wanted to put the Book of Acts—everything we were reading about in the Bible—we wanted to put it into action.

We really started living our lives for God, and we'd get out there and pray for people. We'd pray for healing and see people healed, and we'd pray for people to get the Holy Spirit and they'd be filled with the Holy Spirit. We did some baptisms; it was just beautiful. And amongst that, deliverances. Everything we were seeing is everything we were learning about in the Bible. To see it come to life in your own life, through your own hands—Jesus working through your hands—is just amazing and life-changing. We felt God put it on our hearts to sell everything and dedicate our lives to Him, and that's what we're doing. It's been a long process, but we're happy to get through it and look forward to our future serving God in the Kingdom.