Although the event I am about to describe happened 24 years ago it is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that stays with you as if it happened yesterday. Although I have not used real names and I have dramatized it to make it readable, everything I am about to describe is a true and accurate account of very real events that happened when I was a recently qualified GP in the Monks Park Surgery in Horfield, Bristol in 1990.

The Husband and the Patient

I need my next patient. I go to the waiting room and call him. “John?” With a smile he closes his book and follows me from the waiting room into my consulting room.

“How are you?” I ask as he settles into the chair next to my desk.

“Very well, thank you,” he replies. He’s a generally fit man in his early fifties. What comes next is not unexpected. I have met John a couple of times and he has told me similar things.

“I’ve been busy healing people, especially children with cancer” he relates, leaning forward and smiling broadly. “It’s amazing what God can do! I lay my hands on them, pray for the Holy Spirit to do his work, and they are healed. Praise God!”

He tells me where he has been to do these miracles, and how God has led him to the right people, particularly the children. John, a passionate Christian, is a bit of an individual and is not affiliated to any particular church or denomination. I know little about his background although Mike, my GP partner, knows of him and his stories of miraculous healings.

John has high blood pressure and I have him on medication. I check his blood pressure, we chat about his blood tests and when to see me next, I issue a prescription and he departs with a cheery smile.

I won’t see John again for several months. In the meantime the surgery is being redeveloped and two temporary “Portakabins” are put onto the adjacent land for us to work from while the building work is done. There’s a reception desk, a small waiting room and two consulting rooms.

One morning I notice Ann, John’s wife, has an appointment at 11am. At 10:30am as I’m busy with a patient there is a knock on my door and Sandra the receptionist pokes her head in. “Excuse me Dr Griffin, but your 11am appointment has arrived early. Would you see her next please? She’s a bit breathless.” I finish with my current patient and call Ann in. John is with her. She is certainly breathless; one look at her and I suggest she sit down. A few questions later and the diagnosis is pretty obvious. As John lays her on the couch, I call Sandra back in and give her my car key.

“Sandra, would you go to my car and get the orange case out of the boot and bring it in here straight away please?” Sandra hurries off, aware of the urgency of the situation by the look on my face.

Ann is laying on the couch now; pale, breathless at rest and slightly blotchy. John stands by her, anxious and not sure what I am doing. I try to feel her pulse – weak, fast and thready. A blood pressure is hard to get – possibly 80/50? I’m not sure. What I am sure about is that she has had a pulmonary embolus – a blood clot blocking blood flow to her lungs. My pulse quickens. I’ve never had to resuscitate someone in my consulting room, but that’s about to change. Sandra comes in with the orange emergency bag; Mike spots this and pops in. “Is everything OK?” he asks, eyeing the emergency bag and Ann on the couch. “At the moment,” I reply, “I’ll call you in a minute.”

Resuscitation

Southmead hospital is a short way up the road and Ann needs to get there as soon as possible. Rapidly I explain to her and John that she is seriously unwell and needs to go to hospital immediately. I pick up the phone and call Sandra.

“Sandra, could you call 999 and get an ambulance here immediately please? Thank you”.

I dial the hospital and ask the receptionist to bleep the on-call doctor. She answers quickly and as I am telling her about Ann I notice what John is doing. More accurately I hear what John is doing. He is laying hands on his sick wife, and is praying – in “tongues”. Urgency rises in his voice as an incomprehensible and progressively louder stream of sound comes from him – to the point that I am struggling to hold a phone conversation. I finish the phone call and begin writing a letter to accompany her to the hospital when the inevitable happens – with a groan you will only ever hear when somebody is dying Ann stops breathing and loses consciousness.

“MIKE!” I yell as I dash to the couch, detach John from his attempts to miraculously heal his wife, send him to the waiting room and feel for her pulse – nothing. Mike comes in. Between us we haul her from the couch to the floor. Mike starts resuscitation while I get the emergency bag open. Now comes one of those once in a career moments - I have to do something in an emergency I have only done once as a student several years ago and under close supervision. I have to intubate her. I’ve intubated numerous children in my days in paediatrics, but never an adult. Now I must. Scope and tube in hand, no doubt with a bit of a tremor, I successfully and with huge relief get a tube into her trachea at the first attempt . Bag attached, Mike still compressing her chest, I pump air into her lungs. After what was probably only a few minutes but felt like an eternity her pulse returns. Now we wait for the ambulance.

The surgery is attached to Mike’s house, and Cherry, Mike’s wife, has taken John to their lounge to comfort and pray with him. Sandra has cleared the waiting room and sent everyone else home. So when the ambulance crew arrives they have easy access to Ann on the floor of my consulting room. They expertly take over her life support and load her into the van. Southmead Hospital A&E department is awaiting her.

A little while later I go into the house and through to the lounge to talk to John. He’s beside himself, eyes brimming with tears. “She can’t die, she can’t die!” he keeps repeating. “God still has lots for us to do! Her work isn’t finished - God told me! She mustn’t die!” I discuss the medical situation with him and advise him I will take him to the hospital so he can be with her.

The Hospital

It’s a short drive to the hospital. I settle John into the waiting area and go to find Ann. She’s in the resuscitation area, with a heartbeat and a low blood pressure and although still unconscious is breathing on her own. The doctor and I shake hands and she describes the current, rather dire, situation.

“By the way” she says, gently folding back the sheet covering Ann, “did you see her groin?”

“No” I reply. We had been feeling for a carotid pulse in her neck, not in her groin – she had trousers on. Now removed, an egg-shaped mass several centimetres long was obvious in her right groin. “What’s that?” I ask. “We don’t know” replies the casualty officer, “but we suspect it’s malignant”. Whatever it is, the cause of the morning’s events is now clear – this groin mass was pressing on her femoral vein and had caused a thrombosis that had broken off and circulated to her lung.

The casualty officer and I know the outlook is grim. There’s a big clot in the main artery to both lungs, caused by a probable cancer in her groin. My first (and 24 years later still my only) attempt at resuscitation as a GP had been successful, but I held little hope that she would live.

Leaving John at Southmead, I return to the surgery to clear up after such a dramatic morning, and to debrief with Mike.

My fears were correct - later that afternoon, Ann died.

After my evening surgery was over, I phoned the casualty officer to see what had happened. They had tried their best to keep her breathing and with a pulse, but Ann had suffered a fatal cardiac arrest and was not resuscitatable a second time.

“That’s so sad” I said, “thank you for all you did.”

“Sad, yes,” replied the casualty officer, “but the nursing staff in A&E are still very upset”.

“Why?” I enquired.

“Because when he was told she had died, her husband came in and tried to revive her. He was sitting her up, putting his hands on her and was praying loudly for her to wake up. She was dead. It was awful”.

Follow-up

A couple of weeks later I had received the post mortem report on Ann and was waiting to see John for bereavement follow-up. The mass in her groin was indeed cancer – a lymphoma. As suspected it had caused the blood clot that had killed her.

John came in. We talked about how he was managing, and about the events of that fateful day. He cried.

“John, when I saw Ann in the A&E department, they showed me a lump in her groin. Did you know about that?”

“Of course!” he replied. “It had been there for some time. We were praying about it and it was getting smaller”.

I continued to see John every now and then to manage his blood pressure. He recovered from the bereavement surprisingly quickly, and six months later had remarried. Whether he continued his healing ministry I will never know, as a few months later I moved surgeries and lost touch.

Commentary

The event described above has left an indelible impression on me, both as a doctor and a Christian. I was faced with someone who told me he had done many miraculous healings. He and his wife had a ministry particularly to children, and he believed God had told him they had much more work to do. When she developed a medical problem they didn’t seek medical help – they prayed about the condition and John at least was convinced it was getting smaller and would be healed. As a result of not seeking medical care, she suffered a fatal complication of the mass. Now, lymphomas are not always curable, but it is common to be able to get them into remission - often for several years. It is highly likely that had they come to me when the lump first appeared that the blood clot would have been prevented and Ann would have lived for some while longer; complete and prolonged remission was one possible outcome. Instead, relying on their faith and prayers, she died. John also mistakenly believed he would be able to raise her from the dead.

I am left with a string of unanswerable questions. Over the years since these events I have reached a state of contentment that I will not know the answers:

• Were the miraculous healings John told me about on several occasions genuine?
• What was the purpose of the praying in “tongues” he did in my consulting room as I was on the phone? How is the gift of “tongues” related to healing? And why?
• Why could he apparently heal childhood cancers and not his wife’s cancer?
• Was the mass getting smaller? If so, why would God shrink the mass only to then allow a fatal complication, despite their faith, prayers and John’s gift of healing?
• Why would God apparently ignore John’s pleas for healing and resurrection, having already told him her work was not yet complete?
• Why, in the face of all this, did John not lose his faith completely?

I offer no answers. This was a distressing and formative personal experience that I cannot forget. But as you can imagine, it feeds into my musings on the whole subject of spiritual gifts and healing.

Dr Phil Griffin
10^th September 2014