Medicine and Miracles: One Family's Remarkable Journey of Faith and Healing

By Judith Greer

Staying Strong When Illness Strikes: Ten Insights

Love is the most important part of life support. It can have a profound effect on the healing process.

The patients who improve tend to have a strong network of family and friends.

Families need care as well and may need TLC for years to come.

Even when the patient makes a full recovery, families have to deal with loss and grief.

It's important to find others who have survived the medical combat zone and tell your battle stories. This will help you bear the load.

There's nothing like a sick room to reorder your priorities.

Every person in your family will be changed by this.

Caregiving isn't for the faint of heart.

It will always require more resources than you have to give.

You can't do it alone. Ask a hospital social worker for a list of support groups and family counselors, and reach out to trusted friends. Create your own circle of faith.

Accept the bad days with the good and remember that progress is not a linear thing. It usually takes a zigzag path.

Never give up and always be open to surprises.

Remember that healing isn't just a onetime thing.

Miracles keep occurring every day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887514925

Book preview

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Medicine and Miracles

One Family's Remarkable Journey of Faith and Healing

Judith Greer

ISBN 979-8-88751-491-8 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88751-492-5 (digital)

Copyright © 2023 by Judith Greer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Healing Power of Hope

Sheresa's Story

Chapter One

Childhood Interrupted

Chapter Two

A Father's Care

Chapter Three

Living Full Tilt

Chapter Four

An Unexpected Crisis

Chapter Five

A Mother's Prayers

Chapter Six

A Husband's Devotion

Chapter Seven

Coming Back to Life

Chapter Eight

The Final Crisis

Chapter Nine

Circle of Faith

How Our Family Coped

Chapter Ten

Looking for Our Sister

Chapter Eleven

Love Knits

Chapter Twelve

Coming Home Again

Staying Strong When Illness Strikes

Chapter Thirteen

Creating a Healing Environment

Chapter Fourteen

Healing Acts and Attitudes

Chapter Fifteen

Resources for Families

Accurate Medical Information

Coping with Disabilities

Recommended Reading: Medicine and Miracles

Love Knits: Making Hats for Children with Cancer

Love Knits Cap

Inspirational Books on Knitting, Spirituality, and Women's Friendship

Acknowledgments

Book Proposal: Medicine and Miracles

About the Author

There are two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle.

—Albert Einstein

Introduction

The Healing Power of Hope

When the world says, Give up, Hope whispers, Try it one more time.

—Author Unknown

Our family has learned firsthand that there is a role for faith and hope in the healing process. We nearly lost our daughter Sheresa three times: to lymphoma when she was only nine, to a cardiac arrest and coma when she was twenty-five, and to advanced leukemia when she was thirty-one.

Each time we were told she wouldn't make it, and each time we were blessed with a miracle that brought her back to life.

Sheresa was one of those patients who defied conventional medical wisdom. She had two forms of cancer, but she had them in reverse order. As a child, she had a rare non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that normally strikes adults. As a young woman, she contracted a form of leukemia more commonly found in children. In both instances, the doctors warned us that Sheresa's cancer would be more difficult to treat because she was in the wrong age bracket. Her cardiac arrest came out of the blue as well; her heart stopped five times in a row, and she fell into a coma for nearly a month. Her recovery was hard and long, but each day was a miracle, bringing new and unexpected improvements. Today she is a vibrant and beautiful woman whose story has many others facing a difficult diagnosis or debilitating illness.

We wrote this book to support families who are facing an ongoing medical crisis. In the last two decades, we have dealt with one life-threatening situation after another, yet one thing always saw us through: our decision never to give up. Sheresa is doing so well today because we never doubted her—and because we encouraged her physicians and nurses to believe in her as well.

Modern science needs to start exploring such medical miracles. We need to know more about the circumstances that lead to unexpected healings. If we study exceptional diseases, why shouldn't we study exceptional recoveries?

Since Sheresa had three life-threatening illnesses, you may think this puts us in a special category. Yet the problems we faced are universal. When your loved ones are ill, you have a choice. You can simply hand them over to the doctors—or you can become an equal partner in their care by creating a positive environment and doing everything you can to engage their will to live.

There are now over forty million caregivers in America tending loved ones with a chronic terminal illness; each of them can benefit from Sheresa's story and from what medical researchers are now learning about belief and expectation and the healing powers of the mind. Medicine can only take you so far; the rest of the journey requires a blend of intuition, hope, and faith.

In Hope and Healing, Dr. Jerome Groopman notes that a parent's sixth sense can even be helpful in the early phase of diagnosis. Parents are often the first to know if their child is responding to a certain treatment because they can read subtle cues in their child's behavior. We noticed that Sheresa was rebounding very quickly from her chemotherapy with no side effects or nausea. She never lost the light in her eyes or seemed diminished by her cancer. She kept on smiling and reassured us in her quiet way. It was as if she were saying, Don't worry, Mom, I'll do whatever it takes to just get well. Sheresa has always been an optimist. Her positive attitude may have helped her to get benefit from her cancer drugs and just as quickly flush them out.

After Sheresa went into remission from her childhood cancer, she made up for the lost time. By high school, she excelled in everything from art and academics to sports and modern dance. She finished college early and married a young baseball player named Joe Ciccarella who was headed for the Major Leagues.

As they approached their third anniversary, Sheresa's heart stopped completely, and she went into a coma and which the doctors said could last forever. But Joe never doubted that she would come back to us. He believed that Sheresa's strong desire to live, her loving family, and her positive surroundings would make a difference. He sat with her and held her hand, whispering words of love and encouragement. And he dismissed the nurses who showed no interest in her case and replaced them with caregivers who were unusually compassionate, and he surrounded her with doctors who were willing to believe in miracles.

Joe also left his baseball career to design Sheresa's rehabilitation program. A disciplined athlete, he understood the impact of belief upon performance. So he looked for therapists who could provide strong emotional support, as well as the necessary training in speech, memory, and motion. He even found an innovative horseback-riding program at the Fran Joswick Center for people recovering from strokes and acquired brain injuries. Slowly Sheresa regained her balance, then her social skills and long-term memory came back.

In the spring of 2002, Joe and Sheresa were just getting back into a routine, when the next disaster struck: Sheresa was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. This was a grueling time for us. I was both angry and confused by this turn of events and couldn't understand why Sheresa had to suffer any longer. But my daughter set the tone for us again and gracefully underwent a series of difficult treatments. She would ultimately require a bone marrow transplant, a procedure that brings the body close to death. She showed up at the MDs Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, with her Country Western CDs and her silk leopard-skin pajamas. We put a large stuffed frog on her IV pole. Then we sat in the room with her while she received the gift of life from an unknown donor. Three months later, she returned to her new home in Southern California, and today, she is cancer-free.

There's a reason I'm still here, Sheresa says, to tell people to hang on, and to remind them that miracles do happen.

The first part of this book is devoted to Sheresa's remarkable recovery. It shows why she has the makings of an exceptional cancer patient and why she also beat the odds after her cardiac arrest. Yet the second part explores the toll her illness took on the other members of our family. As far as we know, ours is the first book to show how a long-term illness affects people in all age groups and the first to show how desperately the younger generation struggles with their sense of grief and loss. In these pages, you'll hear from Sheresa's parents and her other siblings, as well as the husband who worked so hard to create a supportive healing environment. And you'll hear what many people in our situation come to understand through grim experience: you somehow find the faith and stamina to get through the crisis, but your whole world crumbles later on. Healing journey doesn't end when the patient recovers: the rest of the family will experience some aftershocks. In fact, they are far more likely to be hospitalized in the following year for serious health problems of their own.

Sheresa's short-term memory is impaired so she has little recall of her recent treatments. Yet the rest of us are still struggling to recover from the trauma of nearly losing her three times.

Families are often shattered by the near-death of a child and marriages are often damaged beyond repair. When Sheresa was first diagnosed with cancer, Dudley and I withdrew from one another and began to deal with our grief in very different ways. Years later, when Sheresa fell into a coma, we had little time to tend to our other children's needs. Chad is now thirty-seven while Derek and Breanne are in their twenties, and after growing up in a medical combat zone, all are bravely struggling to find a different focus for their lives. Chad misses the sister who used to keep him out of trouble and feels that without Sheresa, he's lost his place in the family and the world at large. Bree and Derek thought of Sheresa as their second mother; they went into deep mourning when she disappeared into a sea of illness. Today they face the daunting task of getting to know Sheresa all over again.

People cope with loss in a variety of ways—from addiction to eating disorders to bouts of anxiety and depression. Individuals often have delayed reactions from deep mourning to survivor's guilt. That's why it's important to get counseling as soon as possible and to see any unusual behavior as a cry for help. We didn't, and we paid the price for it.

People who lose a loved one are generally referred to a bereavement support group. Yet, as we've discovered, there is little support for the family if the patient lives. It is simply assumed that you will be grateful for the miracle and somehow find the strength to go on at the very moment you have used up all of your resources.

And what about the self-help shelf? I looked in vain for books that would help us to recover from our three medical crises. I found books on exceptional cancer patients, on the gifts of suffering, and on the nature of resilience, but nothing that shows how the entire family is affected by a life-threatening illness or how to cope with fear, anger, and a growing sense of isolation. This was a strong motivation for us to write our own, even if that meant revealing a few things that we would have rather not revisited.

In the third section of this book, we share a list of medical institutions, alternative therapies, and support groups we wish we had known about when Sheresa was first diagnosed. There are now many more resources available for caregivers, and with the resources we have assembled, there is no reason for any family to suffer as we did, and feel they have to do it all alone.

Medicine and Miracles is ultimately about connection—the way we hold onto our loved ones and see them through a crisis, the way we reach out to other family members to help them understand their own emotional responses, the way we reach out to the community to create a larger web of faith and hope.

In this book, you'll hear from everyone connected with Sheresa's recovery—her parents and her siblings, her husband and her friends, and her therapists. Healing is always a team effort. And the most important thing for families to remember is that each person plays a special role. One may be good at communicating with the medical staff, another at keeping everybody's spirits up, another at listening, and yet another at making sure the entire family is fed and cared for. It's important to let friends pitch in as well. If there's one thing we have learned, it's that it takes many hands and hearts to support the recovery process.

Throughout this journey, Sheresa's marriage has been an inspiration to us all. Joe's commitment to her has never wavered, and their relationship is a rare model of fidelity and partnership.

We needed a way to channel Sheresa's creativity after her bone marrow transplant, so we turned to knitting, an art form that has been practiced in our family for generations. Our weekly knitting sessions connected us to Sheresa's grandmother, a resilient woman who taught us how to make something beautiful and useful out of our life challenges. They also helped Sheresa improve both her coordination and her concentration, and also gave her a new sense of purpose. With our friend and knitting teacher, Kim Guisness, we founded a group called Love Knits making hats for boys and girls with cancer. We now distribute them through Ronald McDonald House, a charity that helps families of children with serious illnesses. In the process, we have discovered that yet another form of healing takes place when you reach out to others.

Sheresa's journey touches upon some universal themes:

The role of positive beliefs in the healing process

How to create a healing environment

How illness affects the entire family

The need for support and community

How to form a creative partnership with the medical community

This last one is terribly important. While the miracles of science may help the body heal, we also need to believe in the miracles of the heart. We need to remind doctors and nurses that they are dealing not just with an illness but with an individual, and we need to find ways to engage a patient's preferences and personality in the healing process. The very best physicians know this intuitively. Others will be grateful for this reminder; it will help them to stop focusing on gray statistics and start responding to the bright spirit looking up at them from the confines of a hospital bed.

As Dr. Groopman shows in his latest book, The Anatomy of Hope, medical researchers are beginning to document the role of hope and faith in the recovery process. I hope one day they will also consider the mysteries of love. Sheresa's optimism kept her going each time she faced a serious illness. Our love for her empowered us to create a healing environment that supported her will to live. And our love for one another is now helping us to heal as a family and begin to mend our lives.

Judi Greer

Dana Point, California

January 2007

Part One

Sheresa's Story

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere in spite of overwhelming obstacles.

—Actor and patient activist Christopher Reeve

Chapter One

Childhood Interrupted

By Judi Greer

January 25

Life, once filled with sunlight and promise, has been colored by loss and is now all storm and shadow. Use my tears, Lord, as the showers needed to bring rainbows. Shine your love on me as the sun lift my eyes so I can see even the smallest curves