This is what happened:
healing prayers
Published on 11/13/05
BY JENNIFER BERRY HAWES
The Post and Courier
It's 3 p.m., and the elementary school bus has just let off a bunch of kids at the corner by WCIV anchorman Dean Stephens' house. It's a cute two-story home in a big Mount Pleasant neighborhood, where the kids and their parents create a little block party every day after school gets out.
Dean's wife, Caroline, tries to hustle their oldest son, Jack, 8, into the house. She's determined to get him started on homework early today to avoid the usual evening rush and aggravation.
Dean's co-anchor, Nina Sossamon, eases her car around the corner and parks on the street to pick up her son from the bus stop. She lives nearby, and the boys are friends. Jack begs to play. Caroline gives in. Homework will wait. Again.
Caroline's two younger boys, 3-year-old Charlie and 11-month-old Sam, play outside as the big kids head off. Nina pulls into the driveway to turn around. Suddenly, Caroline shrieks. Jack watches. A car tire runs over Sam's head. Caroline gasps at her baby, face down, blood dripping from his mouth. She races over, gathers him up and jumps into Nina's car.
Jack runs inside to call 911 and his dad. He grabs his younger brother, Charlie, and won't let go.
Nina races down Long Point Road toward a nearby emergency room, blaring her horn at the after-school traffic. Caroline can't bear to look at Sam. But she hears him moan.
"Please, Nina, hurry." That's all she'll remember saying later.
Soon Sam lies in an ambulance as it wails toward the Medical University of South Carolina, the area's highest-level trauma center. The crew hurries Sam inside. An enormous rainbow stretches across the sky above the hospital.
It's the biblical sign of God's covenant with his people.
Hour by hour
Nobody ever said, "Sam might die." But everyone knew it.
Instead, his doctors said things like, "Let's take it hour by hour."
Once doctors stabilized Sam, they moved him to the pediatric ICU, where he lay restrained, sedated, on morphine and a ventilator. He didn't move. When Dean saw him, he almost felt relieved that Sam didn't appear to know what was going on, that he didn't seem to feel anything. That, hopefully, he wouldn't remember any of this.
Sam was alive, but he had so many broken bones in his head and face that doctors stopped counting. His frontal lobe was bruised. Swelling and bruising on his face left him barely looking like Sam.
Caroline just sobbed to see her baby like this. Dean turned to her. "You see these toes? These are his toes. You see these fingers? These are his fingers." Sam was still in there. Sam was alive.
Doctors explained that over the next 72 hours, their main concern was that pressure could build inside Sam's skull, risking brain damage. They showed Caroline a monitor for vital signs such as blood pressure. At the bottom, in purple lights, was the most critical number for Sam: his intracranial pressure. If it went up and came back down, that was fine. But if it went up and stayed up, that would indicate dangerous pressure building.
So Caroline sat silent for what felt like hours and hours, staring at the purple lights. The numbers inched up, up, up. Her heart raced faster and faster.
Then, mercifully, the numbers sank back down. She'd breathe again.
As she watched, her mind raced. Over and over, she saw Sam. She saw the car. She saw him laying on the driveway. She saw the blood.
She shook her head. She walked around. Still, over and over it played in her head until she wanted to scream.
Caroline walked outside the pediatric ICU. It was about 11 p.m., and the hallway was quiet. Dean's mother, a counselor, came down the hall. She'd rushed to Charleston from her home in Houston after hearing about the accident.
When Caroline saw her, she lost it. "I'm just before snapping. You've got to help me," she cried. "What can I replace this image with?"
"Replace it with the image of God," Dean's mother replied.
Caroline closed her eyes. She saw only blackness. Her heart sank.
She had no image of God.
Sitting vigil
A former co-worker of Caroline's arrived at the hospital that night. Greg Banks was an acquaintance, a friend even, but not someone they had over for dinner every weekend. Still, he hurried to MUSC when he heard about Sam.
Banks arrived in the darkness and sat, silent, in a corner. All night. At 2:30 a.m., as the exhaustion hit Dean, he went to lie down and close his eyes. He walked over to Banks and thanked him for coming.
"But please don't feel like you need to stay."
"I'm going to sit vigil with Sam all night," Banks said.
Just before the sun rose on the next day, Banks got up and walked over to Caroline. Sam still was alive, so far without life-threatening problems.
Caroline sat in the hushed room, numb.
"I'm going to read something. I'm going to pray over you. Then I'm going to leave," Banks told her.
He opened his Bible to a letter the Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians, a group of the earliest Christians trying to figure out how to live in this new faith. Banks read out loud.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Then he wrote it on a Dry-Erase board. He said a prayer. And he left.
Caroline and Dean attended church regularly but didn't consider themselves especially religious. But the passage Banks left behind struck Caroline. She read it over again. She didn't hear Banks' footsteps as he left.
The next morning, Matt Ralston, a good friend of Dean's, was cleaning out his desk at home and came across a piece of paper about the size of a business card. On it was written a Bible verse. Philippians 4:6-7.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God ...
He brought it to the hospital and gave it to Caroline. She quickly recognized it from the passage Banks had left. Dean taped the paper to the metal headboard above Sam's head.
As the week wore on, Sam stabilized. That Sunday, Dean took Jack and Charlie to Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, where they're members. Dean sat in a pew and flipped open the program. He glanced at the topic of the Rev. Gary Bullard's sermon, planned more than a year earlier.
Bullard would preach about a Bible verse: Philippians, chapter 4.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God ...
'That's faith!'
Before the accident, Caroline's life had taken a turn for the busier, selling real estate and juggling a third young child. She and Dean had hired Delores Jones to help with housekeeping.
The accident happened on a Monday. The next afternoon, Dean and Caroline went home to change clothes. Dean collapsed on their bed. Caroline curled up at the bottom. Delores came in.
"You've got to have faith," she said gently.
Caroline groaned. How many times had she heard that now? "I don't know what that is."
Delores would hear none of it.
"You've got to close your eyes and see that boy crawl across this room," Delores said, her voice rising.
"That's faith!"
"You've got to close your eyes and see that boy walking up those stairs.
"That's faith!
"You've got to close your eyes and see him playing with his brothers!
"That's faith!"
Caroline closed her eyes. The darkness left, the image of the car and Sam left, and she saw Sam crawling across the floor. She saw him walking. She saw him playing with his brothers.
Caroline knew what to pray for.
She wasn't alone. Mount Pleasant Presbyterian has about 2,800 active adult members. The grown-ups, and many of the children, had heard about Sam. Because Dean and Nina are high profile and because what happened to Sam is every parent's nightmare, news of the accident made headlines and broadcasts for days.
And so the prayers of a church rose with Caroline and Dean. So, too, rose the prayers of a community as word got out about a terrible accident involving a little boy most folks had never met.
They prayed for Sam because they saw in him their own children. Because they saw in Dean and Caroline themselves.
The power of prayer
The prayers, it seemed, were working. Teams of doctors — intensivists, pediatricians, plastic surgeons, neurosurgeons — came and went from Sam's bedside. Caroline hung on their words.
Most seemed amazed at how well Sam was doing.
Four days after the accident, Sam got off the ventilator. His parents could hold him to their chests and rock him again. They could give him a bath. Sam drank a bottle. He smiled. He said, "Mama."
That night, Dean and Caroline went to their room at the hospital to sleep. They felt hope. They'd seen a miracle.
But late into the night, the phone rang. It was one of Sam's nurses. Sam had a seizure.
Soon, she called back. Sam had another seizure. "Why don't you come down."
They sat at Sam's bedside and waited for him to return from a scan to see whether he was bleeding around his brain. Dean and Caroline saw the little paper taped on his headboard:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God ...
They prayed hard.
The scan showed no bleeding. Sam's sodium level had dropped. It was a problem his doctors could correct, and by Monday he was doing well again. In fact, Sam was well enough to undergo major reconstructive surgery.
Eight days after the accident, a surgeon made an incision across the top of Sam's head, from ear to ear. He also went in through the roof of Sam's mouth. The main problem was his nose. They repositioned it and insert-
ed two plates to repair his fractured right cheekbone and jawbone.
When the surgery was over, a doctor told Dean that the damage wasn't as severe as he'd expected. The surgery had gone smoothly. Sam's prognosis looked good.
Four days later, Sam left the pediatric ICU for a standard hospital room.
A golden ring
Later that Saturday, Dean noticed a little fluid drip from Sam's nose. The next day, when Sam woke from a nap, a ring of clear golden fluid had pooled on the pillow under his nose. On Monday, another ring.
It was cerebrospinal fluid. The jagged edge of a broken bone probably had poked a hole in the dura, a thick protective membrane between his brain and skull. Sam might need a craniotomy, a major surgery in which his neurosurgeon would remove a piece of skull and find the hole to repair it.
Dean and Caroline looked at their little boy who'd already endured so much. Their hope vanished into a dark fog.
The fluid continued to leak. Yet, Sam's neurosurgeon decided first to try inserting a narrow tube in his lower back. If he could drain off some fluid, it just might reduce the pressure in Sam's brain enough to stop the leak and allow the dura to repair itself.
Still, Dean couldn't stand the thought of Sam going through more.
"How can we avoid surgery?" he asked the doctor.
"If it stops leaking overnight."
Through the stress, Caroline noticed an ulcer on her tongue. An old college friend, Lauren Tinder, offered to sit with Sam so Caroline could run to the drugstore.
Sam's area of the pediatric ICU was quiet when Lauren sat down.
"Tell me what you need," Lauren said.
It took Caroline a second to realize that Lauren was asking what she should pray for while she sat with Sam.
"We need his dura to seal up and stop leaking."
Caroline passed Sam to Lauren and left.
The healing
Dean and Caroline returned after an hour. Sam was napping peacefully. Caroline checked the sheet under his head. Where she had seen golden spinal fluid form a perfect circle on his sheet hours earlier, now she saw none.
Sam slept for another hour. Still, no fluid.
All evening, no fluid. And through the night, as nurses checked Sam's sheet every hour, no fluid.
Early the next morning, nurses got Sam ready for surgery to insert the lumbar drain. Dean and Caroline's pastor arrived at 7 a.m. to pray over Sam. The medical staff moved him from his eighth-floor room to a surgery holding area. When the anesthesiologist came in, Dean and Caroline told him that no fluid had drained from Sam's nose in 18 hours. He called the neurosurgeon.
"There's no more fluid!" Dean explained.
"Are you kidding me?" the doctor asked.
He checked Sam but didn't see any sign of fluid. He sent Sam back to his room.
Two more days passed, and still no fluid. Again, the neurosurgeon examined Sam. Less than three weeks had passed since the accident, and he saw no reason for Sam to stay in the hospital.
"Let's get him out of here!"
Homecoming
At the entrance to Mount Pleasant's sprawling neighborhood, Longpoint Plantation, is a sign that usually announces swim meets and homeowners meetings.
Today it reads: WELCOME HOME SAM!
Colorful balloons sway in the bright sunlight. They lead the way to Sam's street. At his house, signs welcome him home. They thank people for prayers. They are sites of joy where 19 days earlier was sorrow.
Inside, Caroline holds a large white basket with the hundreds of cards they've received, most from strangers.
"This is how I hope I'll be different forever," she says, running a finger over them.
She read them each night when she came home from the hospital. Instead of collapsing, she opened the mail. Every day, more cards and letters waited. Most begin something like, "You don't know me, but ..."
She plans to read them over and over.
Some notes included small gifts like a key chain with passages from Psalms engraved in it. Others had gift cards. People left meals with their neighbors. Dean's news director brought over a stack of e-mails the station received.
One night, Jack asked his dad why he thought this had happened to Sam.
Dean wasn't sure.
Maybe Sam will become a doctor one day because of all this and find a cure for cancer.
Maybe God wants us to know the power of prayer. Maybe God wanted to touch all of these people who've reached out.
Dean stopped. He'd given Jack honest answers to his questions, about the severity of Sam's injuries, about what might happen.
So he added: "Maybe we'll never know."
But Caroline said quietly, "I sorta know."
"We'll be different forever."
'Everyone else is changed'
Different in so many ways.
Dean points to a friend who hadn't been to temple in 20 years. He went to pray for Sam. A co-worker felt pulled back to church after attending a healing service for Sam. Another friend was visiting the Vatican and prayed for Sam. Family and friends put their lives on hold to fly in from all over the country to help.
"I believe Sam will be as happy and healthy as his brothers," Dean says. "Sam is fine. But everyone else is changed."
Yet, one way that Caroline has been changed by all this threatens to drag her into an abyss of guilt.
"I feel like as Sam gets better, I get worse," Caroline admits.
So many mothers have said what is so true. "It could have happened to me ..."
Caroline hears their words. But she does not, cannot listen. She begins to cry and calls herself a terrible mother.
"It did happen to me."
Now their prayers have changed. They pray that they can accept what happened, so they can be good parents, so their marriage stays strong, so Caroline doesn't lose it. And they pray for all the children left at MUSC whose parents aren't beautiful and well-known, who don't have thousands of people praying for them, who don't have anyone so much as visit.
A church's prayers
Dean stands outside the heavy church doors with Sam in his arms. Mount Pleasant Presbyterian is a historic church in the town's Old Village. It's bursting with children and upper-middle-class families.
Sam intently watches the masses hurrying in for the packed 9:45 a.m. service. Dean asks an usher to scout out seats up front.
Soon, he and Caroline juggle the wonderfully normal job of entertaining a near-toddler in a church pew while trying to get a little something out of worship themselves.
Sam smiles flirtatiously when people say hello. He waves and says, "ba!" He fusses. He crawls and tries to stand up. The area around his eyes remains swollen. Wounds on his head are healing. His stitches still stand out. But his doctors are hopeful he didn't suffer permanent brain damage, although that won't be clear for a few years.
For now, Sam protests his confinement to a church pew. Caroline carries him outside.
After the hymns and the sermon, Bullard steps up to lead the prayers of the people. He walks out and returns with Sam in his arms highlighted against his black robe. Sam fiddles with the tiny microphone clipped to Bullard's chest.
Bullard walks up the center aisle like a proud new daddy and tells the people:
"This is what your prayers have done."
healing prayers
