Miracles of Love, Faith and Hope

By Jennifer Angelee

Jennifer and Joe were the picture of health. When they had their first child, Nicholas, they have no idea he was the only one in the world with his genetic disease. One of 7 billion people on the planet! After the death of their second child, Joseph, who had the same disease, they learned of this startling fact.
Through Nicholas’ suffering, they turned to God for answers and prayed for miracles. As they navigated medical science through the unknown, each setback tested their love, faith and hope and through each setback a miracle is made.
At age fourteen, Nicholas urgently needs a lifesaving kidney transplant. Only his father can save his life, but will Nicholas survive his terrible obstacles and have a successful outcome?
Jennifer takes the reader into a journey of a mother on a medical odyssey where her love, faith and hope are tested against incredible odds. At the end, a surprising revelation is made, one that could change the face of humanity forever.
Could what they have learned from Jennifer’s sons lead to a cure for the most prolific disease in our times? Could her son’s genetic disorder lead scientists to the cure for cancer?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Angelee
• Release date: Oct 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370355631

Book preview

This book is dedicated to Joe, my beloved late husband and father of my children. Thank you for taking this journey with me and always standing by my side. When I was lost, you reflected the beauty of my soul back to me. You were my only confidant in writing this book. At last - Miracles of Love, Faith and Hope is out for the world to read. I’m saddened you are not here to hold my hand on the remainder of the journey, but you hold my heart and soul forever.

Most of all, thank you for giving our son back to us with your Gift of Life. I am eternally grateful for your love.

All My Love,

Jen

Acknowledgments

Thank you to The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto for providing our son with outstanding medical care. Nicholas would not be here today without this amazing place and the dedicated expertise of the people dedicated to the work inside these walls. There were times on this eighteen year journey when, despite the fact I did not want my son to be in the hospital, there was comfort knowing this incredible facility was the safest place in the world for my son to be. I want the world to know that The Hospital for Sick Kids is a place of miracles for our precious sick children of the world. Thank you for being there for my son.

To Dr. Chitayat, thank you for being the angel doctor you are. Your dedication gave us comfort and hope beyond words. You showed us faith in our abilities as parents when we felt discouraged. Although you have many patients in your busy practice, you made us feel special. We will never forget you.

To Dr. Moalem, thank you for inspiring me to bring this story to the light by your wonderful example. You helped us see the extraordinary in what was a long and painful journey and proved to me that all adversity has a silver lining. The best kind of teacher is one that freely empowers others to reach their potential. I am forever grateful to you for introducing to me the impact my son’s journey can have for others.

To Nicholas, thank you for teaching me about unconditional love through your amazing example. I wish I could have taken all of your pain away and ended all of your suffering with my love for you. To me, you were the cutest patient in the world. What an adorable boy you were. How time has flown and now you’re my little man, off to College. Sometimes I wish I could turn back time and do it all over and know that everything was going to be okay. Thank you for your steadfast patience with me, we are all learning in this life together. Often those who challenge us the most are our greatest teachers. I know this is the case with you. My wish is that your success is as great as your determination. I’m proud of you my son.

To Jordan, our faithful sister in the light, thank you for giving me the faith to move forward at the most difficult times of our lives. You are a brilliant angel. Thank you for all of your help and support as this book came to completion. You are such a gift to our family. We adore you and know that you are destined for great things in life. God bless you, my beautiful child.

To Olivia, my hope, my muse, my best friend, never has there been a wiser and a sweeter child than you. You have given us so much joy and I would live this life over a thousand times with you. You are my hope and reason for choosing to create the best in life. Even when life seems full of valleys, you are the reason I choose to reach for the pinnacle.

To Joseph, my beloved son in spirit, thank you for being a loving, dedicated member of our family in spirit, for being our guide and our friend. I am so grateful for what you taught me about life and the other side of the veil. You are the kindest of souls and a wonderful teacher. I was so blessed to have your spirit with me when writing this book. You are such an inspiration. Daddy is blessed to have you with him in Heaven. You are loved beyond words.

To all those Spiritual Teachers that came before, thank you for your guidance. Like an intricate tapestry created over the years, I wove your eternal guidance into the fabric of my cloth.

To Jesus, thank you for being my light in the darkness and my anchor of truth and goodness.

To God, my almighty Creator, let my service be my teaching. Thank you for trusting me with this important job and not just getting me through it, but giving me the opportunity for my soul to grow through it. May your eternal light shine through me so that I can be a beacon of hope for others.

Blessed be.

In the Light,

Jennifer.

An Introduction to Parents

Miracles of Love, Faith and Hope is a story eighteen years in the making. Our journey began with the birth of my first child in 1997. As an infant, my son’s medical condition led to our first referral at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. I first started writing this book after the birth of my youngest child, Hope in 2006.

Having a child with a chronic illness is journey very different than having a healthy child. The range of emotions a parent goes through is a journey in itself. I reckon that for me, it was unending grief, fear and anxiety that never seemed to calm. The fears a parent has over their sick child are real and traumatic, and there is the ultimate fear of your child’s early mortality.

A child’s disease takes on a life of its own. It affects siblings, extended family members, the school and local community, and can test a marriage.

As a parent, you become a discerning judge of people’s character. Their behavior and reaction to your sick child becomes a measuring stick and a testament of their character, their empathy, understanding and ability to love unconditionally.

As a parent of a sick child, I became a better person. For me personally, it was a spiritual journey, but even if I did not become such a spiritual person in the process, there would be no denying the depths of the human emotion I experienced. It was only when I recognized that along my journey, my soul was evolving and I had learned about love, faith and hope. This was a spiritual journey for the evolution of my soul. I realized that I was not a victim of my child’s illness, but that God had a plan.

It wasn’t until 2014 and my first born son was already sixteen years old, that I learned that the SOX18 gene mutation my living and deceased sons had was being researched as a treatment and cure for cancer. When Dr. Moalem wrote about this in his book Inheritance, he described my son as a hero and a teacher because rare diseases teach us so much about our genetic blueprint and our bodies.

I believe in miracles, I believe that humans through their unity can find solutions to the most complex anomalies if our intent is loving and pure. I believe we are all divine and having said that, we can all be conscious creators of what we choose as our destiny. Surrendering to the divine will is not the same as mercy. Rather, the divine will is what we choose for the highest and best for all, and trusting in the process.

In writing and publishing this book, my ultimate goal is to help other parents with sick children. Undoubtedly, parents of sick children love their children and have fear and anxiety about their child’s chronic illness. I want to give these parents hope and faith to get through the adversity of having a sick child. I want my journey to be a beacon of hope of what could be a long and difficult process.

This book has been over a decade in the making and I have experienced so much personal growth, I am not the person I was at the beginning of this journey. I have become enlightened and have gained wisdom for life that could not have happened with only time. It took these experiences to make me the woman with the soul I have today. We are blessed to have these incredible children. I believe we as their parents are chosen to have the responsibility to care for these tender hearts in fragile bodies.

May you receive the miracles you need and may your journey be blessed with much love, faith and hope.

In the Light,

Jennifer

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the miraculous.

Albert Einstein.

Introduction

My son is one of only two people in the entire world known to have his genetic disorder. I know what it means to be alone - to be unique. I know the pain. I have learned how to transcend it. Follow me on my journey, a journey that has had a long and difficult road. I will show you the light in the darkness, the hope in the hopeless, faith in the sorrow and love in the fear.

If you have ever struggled to see the good in the bad, have lived through pain, trauma, loss or grief, or have even questioned your very existence, I will give you the map to God, and when you get to him, you will know his love. This map is unlike any other map you have known. It is a map revealed to me by each one of my children and is a spiritual journey of separateness to oneness with the universe.

My son, Nicholas, my oldest child of four is one of only two people in the world with his genetic disorder. My second son, Joseph passed away from the same exceedingly rare illness. I went on to have two healthy daughters and learned about the afterlife from my unborn child. I lived through an extraordinary medical journey with my son that tested my courage and was the fire around me that shaped my armour in the face of adversity.

Follow me as we experience Miracles of Love, Faith and Hope.

To discover something is to look back at the beginning of the journey and wish you had known all along.

For to know is to love and find truth.

The unknown is fear and illusion.

Let us love and uncover the mysteries of life and discover the essence of God's creation.

Jennifer Angelee

The spirit has given us life Galatians 5:25

God provides the seed with the body he wishes; he gives each seed its own proper body. And there are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; the beauty that belongs to earthly bodies is different than beauty that belongs to heavenly bodies. Corinthians 15:38, 40

LOVE

Love is patient and kind; it is not jealous or conceited or proud; love is not ill-mannered or selfish or irritable; love does not keep a record of wrongs; love is not happy with evil, but is happy with the truth. Love never gives up; and its faith, hope and patience never fail. Love is eternal. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.

FAITH

To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see. It is by faith that we understand that the universe by God's word, so that what can be seen was made out of what cannot be seen. Hebrew 11:1-3

HOPE

Now that we have been justified by faith, we are at peace with God. Through him we have gained access by faith to the grace in we now stand, and we boast our hope for the glory of God and our afflictions. We know that affliction makes for endurance, and endurance for tested virtue, and tested virtue for hope. And this hope will not leave us disappointed, because of the love God has poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Romans 5:1-5

Miracles

Everyone has heard the term miracle. But what is a miracle? Not everyone believes in miracles and some only attribute miracles to strictly religious phenomena such as when Jesus performed miracles in the Bible or as Moses parted the Red Sea. Of course, many doubt the existence of these miracles completely.

Throughout history the Catholic Church has acknowledged miracles only after rigorous scrutiny. Although this is an irony of faith, the miracles known in the Catholic Church such as the Miracle of Our Lady Fatima are extraordinary and beyond intellectual comprehension and the laws of physics. This miracle at Fatima involved a vision of the sun swirling, then falling from the sky to the Earth and was witnessed by thousands of people whose rain soaked clothes immediately became dry.

Einstein said, there are two ways to live your life, as if everything is a miracle, or nothing is a miracle. The dictionary definition of a miracle is: An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and is held to be supernatural in origin or a divine act of God, a very amazing or unusual event, thing or achievement, a wonder.

Some say the birth of a baby is a miracle. I believe all of life is a miracle. It is amazing all the trillions of things that happen at a microscopic level for life to occur. But what happens when things go wrong? Is there an opposite word for miracle? Can nature mess up? Can God make mistakes? If so, why would he?

When we have love, faith and hope when things go wrong, it goes beyond our biology. It is what defines us, sets us apart from all other species on the planet. It makes us human. We are emotional creatures living energetically with one another and all of life. What defines us as human is what lies within our physical bodies - our soul.

It is this connection to the divine or what some call the Source that is a miracle. A distinctive part of God is in each one of us. We are all gifts from God.

My son's biology makes him the most unique person on the planet. For years I asked God why he did this to a child, my son and me. Why me? For years I beat myself up for ‘messing up’ the biology that made my son. Of course doctors told me I did nothing wrong, but I always felt guilt deep within my soul, even after I processed the biological information. I did not realize that God was creating a miracle in me, in my son as a gift to the world.

After my son was healed from a kidney transplant from my husband in 2012, I realized the devastating effect that my son's illness had on my health. I knew that I was still biologically healthy. I had medical tests and blood work to prove it. But still I was unhealthy, in actual physical pain. It was not in my head. It was real. After over fifteen years of trauma from watching my son suffer from his chronic illness, I was sick. I explored all external ways of healing. Nothing worked. Then one day I looked at things differently. What if everything was God's plan? What if God created a miracle through my son to help others? I began to recognize the extraordinary and unusual events around my son's illness and healing as miracles.

I had been writing a book called Love, Faith and Hope about how I had been guided by the virtues learned from my children through adversity since the birth of my youngest child Olivia. The ideas came many years before, and I carefully remembered every detail. When it seemed my son could live a better quality of life, I said to myself, it is time to forget. I must write the details down for others and allow myself