For Sixteen Years Multiple Sclerosis Destroyed A Young Woman Until She Was Blind, Bedridden, Breathing Through A Tube And Sent Home To Die. On Pentecost Sunday 1981, As Friends Read Get-Well Letters Aloud, She Heard A Voice Say Get Up And Walk, And Her Sight, Her Breathing And Her Limbs Were Restored At Once. Her Doctors Called It Inexplicable.
For sixteen years, multiple sclerosis took a young woman apart, piece by piece. Blind, paralysed, kept alive by tubes, sent home to die. Then one afternoon she heard a voice tell her to get up and walk. And she did.
Her name was Barbara Cummiskey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at fifteen, and for sixteen years it never stopped advancing. By the spring of 1981 she was thirty one and almost gone. She was nearly blind. Her diaphragm was paralysed, so a tube fed oxygen into her throat. One lung had collapsed, the other barely worked. She could not swallow, and was fed through a tube. Her hands and legs had curled in on themselves, and she had not walked in seven years. The Mayo Clinic had done all it could, and her own doctor had sent her home on hospice, not expected to live the week.
On Pentecost Sunday, the seventh of June 1981, two friends from church sat reading aloud to her from a stack of get-well letters, hundreds of them, sent by strangers who had heard her story on Christian radio. As they read, Barbara said she heard a man's voice, from behind her, say, My child, get up and walk. She told her friends what she had heard. And then, in front of them, she got up. Her sight came back. Her lungs filled. Her twisted hands opened. She walked into the living room, where her family stared at her, speechless.
This was not a slow recovery. Within days, doctors were examining a woman who, by sixteen years of their own records, should have been dead. Her internist wrote that he had witnessed the hand of God. Another said no medical test could explain it. Her case sits in their files, and in a book of accounts written by the physicians themselves.
Skeptics note that multiple sclerosis can come and go, and that the mind can do strange things to the body. But MS does not re-inflate a collapsed lung, straighten limbs frozen for years, and restore lost sight, all in one afternoon, and then hold for a lifetime. Barbara stayed well. She married and lived on for decades after the week she was meant to die. The records are still there. So is she.
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