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No Explanation
Megan Conner’s X-rays showed as many as eighteen back fractures. So why did the MRI show nothing wrong?
At eleven years old, Megan Conner had everything going for her. She was a good student, organized, witty, and popular with her friends. She was growing up in sunny Southern California, where she could regularly play soccer, a sport she loved. She had an older sister and two younger brothers to enjoy. She was the daughter of a devoted mother and a father who served God as a pastor.
But as the saying goes, there was trouble in paradise.
The first hints that her idyllic world was about to crumble occurred in December 2008. She began to forget things. One day she walked into her classroom and couldn’t remember where to sit. In the following weeks she dissolved into crying fits. She insulted the boys in the school band, not at all her typical behavior. She grew panicky and withdrawn.
Early in 2009, her parents, Jim and Lynda, took her to an emergency room for tests. A neurologist said she was fine physically and referred her to a counselor. But ten days later they received a middle-of-the-night call from a youth leader. Megan, on a church youth retreat, had suffered a grand mal seizure. She’d bitten her tongue until it bled and temporarily lost consciousness.
Lynda drove through a stormy night to pick up Megan. After they went to an ER, they got back on an LA freeway to head home. However, in the car, Megan seemed lethargic. Suddenly she began shaking. She bit her tongue again. Her mouth bled and foamed.
Lynda, horrified and panicked, pulled off and called Jim.
“She’s having a seizure!” she cried. “What should I do? I can’t get through on 9-1-1! I don’t know what to do!”
Jim calmed his wife enough to help her find another ER, where doctors medicated and stabilized Megan. The following weeks were marked by more scares, more hospital visits, more tests, a new neurologist, and more questions. Gradually Megan declined until she lapsed into a mostly catatonic state.
Finally the Conners received a diagnosis. Megan had systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease that can lead to a host of lifelong complications, one in which antibodies mistakenly attack healthy tissue—in Megan’s case, her brain. Untreated, SLE could be lethal.
There was no cure.
They listened in shock and wept as doctors explained what lay ahead: aggressive treatment, including steroids and chemotherapy; weight gain; hair loss; missing one to three years of school; special tutors; a speech therapist; having to stay out of the sun; and the chance of sterilization.
No parents want to see their child suffer. Jim just wished he could trade places with his daughter. How, he wondered, could all of this be happening?
However, Megan’s family did have a “secret weapon” for fighting back: prayer. Jim asked God what they should pray for. He sensed the answer was to ask that Megan wake up from her coma-like condition. His church had a prayer chain of believers, so he made that single request and soon was amazed to find people praying for Megan in the hospital lobby. He found out they also prayed for his strength. He felt the result of their efforts—the “peace of Christ that passes all understanding.” It was a ray of hope in the midst of dark times.
After enduring terrifying hallucinations, Megan did slowly wake up, still frightened and confused. She couldn’t speak but was able to communicate via text messages. After twelve days in the hospital, she was given a hefty supply of medications and allowed to go home.
That first day she bawled because she gagged on her pills. She couldn’t swallow them. She felt panicked. How would she make it if she couldn’t even take her medicine?
Jim again prayed about the problem. “God,” he said, “what do you want us to do about this?” He felt led to ask the prayer chain to pray that his daughter would be able to take her medication.
For Megan, the next day was indeed a different story.
“I just swallowed my pills!” she told her parents, excited. “It was easy. It didn’t bother me at all.” These were her first complete sentences in weeks.
She continued to take her medications and applied sunscreen all over her body daily to ward off the lupus-triggering effects of sunlight. She had good and bad days. Her hair fell out and she gained considerable weight due to the steroids. Kids teased her at school. By June she also complained of back pain.
Yet she felt strong enough to accompany her family (minus Jim, preaching in Egypt) and her aunt’s family, including eight kids, to a vacation in the San Bernardino Mountains. They all ventured to an outdoor water park, and despite the discomfort in her back, Megan begged to go down the twisting, three-hundred-foot-long waterslide.
“I don’t know, honey,” Lynda said.
“I want to try,” Megan prodded. “I’ll be okay. I don’t want to just sit in the shade and do nothing.”
Lynda relented.
A few minutes later she regretted her decision. Megan came off the slide in tears. The pain was so intense that she cried for the next ninety minutes.
At the next checkup, Lynda mentioned Megan’s complaints. The doctor ordered a CT scan. When he looked at the results, he saw as many as eighteen fractures. He asked Lynda to step into the hallway with him.
“This is bad,” he said. “You should have told me sooner. The scan shows multiple fractures. The steroids have stolen all the calcium; this looks like the spine of a sixty- or seventy-year-old woman with advanced osteoporosis.”
Lynda drew in a breath. “What can we do about it?”
“There’s nothing we can do,” he answered. “This is permanent. This is how Megan’s going to be for the rest of her life.”
For Megan and her parents, this came as yet another terrible blow.
Later that week Jim was in Room 12, a classroom at church, with a few staff members. Sunlight shone brightly through glass windows, but the beautiful weather didn’t match his feelings. He grieved for his daughter and the lifelong hardships she faced.
He related the bad news about Megan’s back. Then he bowed his head to pray: “What do you want us to do, God? How do you want us to pray?”
During the past difficult months, every time he’d asked for guidance about what to pray for, the answer had been for resolution to whatever specific problem they faced. But this time he heard these words in his mind: I can heal her. At the same time he saw a picture of Megan’s spine. It was perfectly straight and strong.
Yet he resisted. I don’t want to pray, God. I don’t want to be disappointed. I don’t want to be wrong. Still the impression remained.
He told the staff. The word went out to the prayer chain. They would ask for healing of Megan’s back.
Megan’s doctor had ordered an MRI to show the extent of the damage. The next day, July 7, at her chemotherapy appointment, the doctor said, “I’m sorry I don’t have the MRI results for you yet. I need to ask for them again. There’s something wrong with the report from the technician.”
Soon afterward he called and spoke with Lynda.
“Mrs. Conner,” he said, “I’m sorry, I got the same MRI report again. Could you go down there and pick up the physical DVD and films and bring them to me at Megan’s next appointment so I can see them?”
She did just that. Meanwhile, Megan stopped complaining of back pain.
The Conners soon met with the doctor. He had examined the images, and he spoke to them with a bewildered look.
“Look, I’ve got these MRI results,” he said. He seemed to be searching for the right words. “I asked for them because I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I thought they’d sent me the wrong results.
“I’ve got a CT scan that shows all of these back fractures,” he continued. “And I have an MRI that shows she’s fine. There is no medical explanation for that. I don’t know what to tell you about what happened.”
Megan and her parents looked at each other and smiled. They had a pretty good idea.
Megan is not completely free of the effects of lupus—at least, not yet. She has almost no memory of the second half of 2008, and she battles short-term memory loss. Memorization in high school classes like math and languages is a challenge. She still covers herself with sunblock every day.
Yet she’s earning A’s through old-fashioned hard work and discipline. She’s played another season of soccer. She never needed special tutors or a speech therapist. In fact, her speaking ability rebounded so well that she earned a third-place trophy for dramatic interpretation in a competitive speech and debate tournament.
More important, her health has rebounded as well. Since her amazing healing, she’s had no back troubles at all. She’s off steroids and is taking only a single maintenance drug. Her doctor recently told her relieved father, “The only word I can use for your daughter is cured.”
“I don’t know what you call that,” Jim said, “but I call it a miracle.”