In March 2013 I fell at work. I was a chef at the time and slipped and fell onto a ridged metal plate screwed into a cement floor.
I dislocated my kneecap. I hit it so hard that it took three months for them to put it back in place. They would put it back in place, but it would not stay. Because the knee cap was out of place for so long, it wore the cartilage down, causing cartilage and nerve damage. Doctors said it would have been better to have crushed it than to have done what I did. I was at level 9 to 10 pain daily all day and could barely walk. When I was in the first-year class at BSSM, the walk from the parking lot at the Civic into the Civic would wear me out. I could not stand or kneel at all. My knee could not touch the ground at all. I could not be a chef anymore because I could not stand to cook. My stand tolerance was maybe ten minutes on a good day. (I had been a chef for almost ten years. The restaurant I was at when I got injured was pretty much my dream job.)
I came to my first year with a cane in 2018. I had probably in that first couple of months of school had 100 people pray for it with no change. But on Dec. 6, 2018, I was standing with a fellow first-year student talking before class. A third-year student came by, and we started talking. December 6 was the anniversary of my healing from fibromyalgia a few years earlier, and I mentioned it to the third-year student. She saw my cane and said, “But you have a cane.”
I said, “Yeah, but it’s a separate issue.” She prayed, and the pain started going down. She said, “Can you test it out?”
I said, “I can try kneeling on it.”
She said, “Have you done that before?”
“Yes, but the last time I tried to kneel, I passed out in pain.”
Because of the cartilage damage, I knew kneeling was the only way to truly tell if the healing was more than just the pain leaving.
So I tried to kneel on the Civic floor and was able to put about 30% of my weight on it. I was able to kneel and was so excited. For me, it was really special. The healing was amazing, but the fact that God would do it on the anniversary of my being healed of another substantial healing was even more special. God had given me a word a year into the injury that He was going to heal me. As much as I did not see any healing, I was holding onto the word that He had given me.
Before my healing, I could only do part of the ropes course. I could not do the labor of the city project. In my second year, for City Project, I was hauling trees and lugging branches night and day.
I had to sit on the main level of the Civic because I could hardly do the stairs. Now I can do stairs. I can walk anywhere I want to walk.
I am about 80% healed. I am in no pain, but there is a little bit of physical stuff going on, but it doesn’t limit me in my life.
I baked cookies for the police department just to bless them at Christmas. There is no way I would have been able to stand that long.
The thing that meant so much to me was that the student who prayed for me was a third-year on her way to do something, yet she stopped for the one. That is, knowing she was busy, knowing she had things to do, she stopped to listen to the Lord and pray. The Lord can use anyone He wants. But would I not have gotten healed that day if she had not stopped? Every year I message her and thank her for stopping to pray.