Prayer was Everything in Wife's Survival

“She just started flailing at me, and hitting me, and making all kinds of weird noises. I just thought, she's having a bad dream.” Greg Bell had been concerned when his wife, Glenda, went to bed early with a headache. The sixty-three-year-old wasn’t usually one to complain. “She's had headaches but nothing like this one. This headache just was piercing.”

Then, at 1:30 that morning, Glenda began thrashing in bed. “So, I reached over and kind of tapped her and said, ‘Hey, it's okay. You're just having a bad dream.’ And she wouldn't wake up. It scared me. I jumped outta bed and my son was here in the basement, so I hollered at him to call 911. I was trying to wake her, and she was just having convulsions or something. I was pretty panicky.”

When the ambulance arrived, Glenda was still unresponsive, so paramedics had her airlifted to Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, a hundred miles away. “That really concerned me. They was strapping her down in the gurney and this whole time she never would wake up. She just was still out of it.”

Greg and his son, Josh, began the two-hour drive to Springfield. Greg recalled, “We was definitely praying on the way up there. I was just really scared ‘cause I didn't know what was gonna happen. Trying not to drive 90 to a hundred mile an hour. I just wanted to get there as quick as I could.”

By the time they arrived at Mercy, it was four a.m. Josh had already started reaching out to family and friends for prayer. Now, they waited for an update on Glenda’s condition. “It was just me and him in that empty room, with my wife. I felt like I couldn't pray myself, I was going through so much emotions at that time. I broke down and what was on my mind, I thought, my son's never seen me cry.”

A few minutes later, the doctor came in. He told Greg that Glenda had a large intraparenchymal hemorrhage--- bleeding deep in the brain from a ruptured blood vessel. The only course of action would be to put her in a medically induced coma and wait for the bleeding and swelling to subside. They weren’t sure if she would ever recover. "I said, ‘Look, I said, I just lost my mom two months ago. And it was unexpected.’ I just point blank asked him, 'Could she die?' And he said ‘Yes, she could.’”

After the doctor left, Greg asked Josh to pray. Moments later…“She just kinda spoke up and said, ‘What's going on?’ So, we explained to her what had happened and everything and she's like, ‘Well, I feel fine, I'm good. The doctor walked in, and he looked at her and he said, ‘What's going on here?’ but the shock on his face is like, you know, something was going on here and he wasn't telling me everything that was happening."

Her doctor asked Greg into his office and pulled up the scans of Glenda’s brain that showed a 6-centimeter brain bleed. “He said, ‘I want you to see this. This is just bad.’ He was in a state of shock. He just like couldn't believe it. I think he realized that there was more at work because they'd not touched her yet. They hadn’t done a thing to her. And uh, she's just talking away. She was just like chatty and carrying on."

Now, there was no need to put Glenda in a coma. Soon, their family and friends started coming in to pray and show their support. “We had a room full there in the waiting room. That comforted me as much as anything,” said Greg.

Glenda was in her element. “I'm like, 'why are you here?' This is pretty awesome. I didn't have any pain. I was good. I didn't, I just didn't know, you know, why all those people were there.”

Other than slight memory loss, Glenda was back to her old self. ‘‘I think she could have gone up and got up and run around the building, but they wouldn't let her outta the bed,” Greg recalls. “They wouldn't let her move. They threatened to tie her down even because she was like, I need to do this, or I need to do that. She was just like, she was wired.”

By the end of the week, the brain bleed and memory loss had resolved, so after a short stay in rehab, she went home. Greg was overjoyed. “I was just amazed and, and you know, so thankful that everything had come through like this.”

Glenda is now completely back to normal and more active than ever. Her family are grateful for the prayers that brought her through. “Prayer was everything in my wife's survival,” Greg says. “I don't think she'd be here today if it hadn't been for the prayers going up and not just my prayers, but so many prayers that was going up that day. We're going stronger now than we ever have. God's the only one that could have done this.”

Glenda agrees. “If they hadn't prayed, I don't think I would've made it. God is so good. Ask big! He's a great big, big, big God.”