Two weeks ago, Shelby Baker, from Ipswich, stood on stage at Newday 19 to tell us an astonishing story about what happened to her when I prayed for healing exactly a year previously. Having been robbed of sensation below the waist when a hospital operation went wrong 8 months before, she told the huge crowd how she’d thrown away her crutches and skipped for joy when she was immediately healed.
Shelby first described to me the painful medical blunder which left her in a helpless and hopeless state . . .
“I had an operation in December 2017, which went wrong. They severed a nerve half-way up my back. I lost feeling from my waist down, with my right side mostly affected. I had some left side numbness. My nerve pain off the scale.
“The reason for the operation was a fake brain tumour. Fluid in my head. It exhibits the same as a brain tumour. It was relieving pressure from my brain, so they deal with that by going through your back, but they made a terrible mistake.
“A student nurse did the operation. You’re awake while they do it. I said ‘I can feel that’ and you’re not supposed to feel anything. They asked: ‘Are you sure?’
“’Yes, I’m sure,’ I replied.
“They said: ‘OK well we’re going to continue, if it gets too painful let us know’ and then the nerve was cut in the next few seconds.
“It was an L5 – L4 nerve, which refers to a whole patch of a line that your nerve follows. It wraps round your leg, supplies all of your foot, and supplies all of the top of your leg, and the middle and back of your back, all of your outside sensation, all of your muscle sensation.
“Anything like walking, I couldn’t feel my muscles moving to do it. I could move them because that nerve was OK, but I couldn’t feel it moving. It’s like sitting on your leg, and then trying to get up and run. In other words, you can’t do it, you can’t get your foot to co-ordinate quick enough because you can’t feel it, but then coupled with that, I also had the nerve pain.
“So I came to Newday, having spent spent 8 months on crutches.
“Bear in mind that I was a P.E. teacher, so I had to give up my job.”
I asked Shelby: “This must have all been so hard to take?”
“Yes, and by the way, when it happened in Dec 17, I was a new Christian. I’d been a Christian for 4 months. My faith was rocked.
“So I was on crutches. I had to learn to walk again with crutches. Trying to get the signal to move your foot when you can’t feel it, is very difficult. So I was walking with my crutches. I’d given up my job because I couldn’t do it anymore. I found myself at Newday. I came here homeless, jobless, dejected, down, and when I was listening to you and to the people up on the stage giving their testimonies of how they’d been healed the year before, I was fed up and angry. So I stayed outside the tent. Actually I sat on the grass over there.
“Then you started praying for healing, and my friends came round, and they said: ‘come on, let us pray for you’
“And I said: ‘What? It’s not going to work is it! Look at the last 9 months of my life!’
“But they all prayed for me. And it was incredible.
“Just to help you understand . . . Every sensation when you have nerve damage is boiling hot, pins and needles. So a lot of pain is normal.
“They started praying for me and they asked: ‘What can you feel? I said: ‘It’s warm. It’s NOT hot. In other words, it was a nice sensation. It was really weird. I felt that the ground was like a hoover. It was literally dragging this bad sensation out of my body. The feeling started coming down through my waist, down through my leg into the ground. I didn’t have shoes on. I stood with my crutches and then I felt the grass underneath my foot. I felt the grass! That was the moment!
“I said: ‘I can feel my foot. I can feel the grass.’
“So I compared it by touching the grass with my hand. (Because my brain couldn’t remember what grass felt like.)
“So they said ‘Great! Now let’s see if you can stand without your crutches?’
“And I did! I felt amazing joy.
“They said: ‘Can you walk?’
“I said ‘not really.’
So they prayed again. They prayed: ‘Full strength come back! Let her walk!’
“And I did. Again I got the ‘warm’ thing.
“And then I felt the softness of the grass.
“They said ‘you can walk. Let’s see if you can skip?’
“Because I’d previously joked: ‘I’ll never be able to skip again.’
“And I did skip. And then I carried my crutches back home to my campsite. (I came last year with a church in Bury St. Edmunds. I’m now at Hope Church, Ipswich.)”
Trying to take in this extraordinary story, as you can imagine I was desperate to ask Shelby, what difference this healing had made to her?
She replied: “I’m not in agony every single day. I don’t have any nerve pain. I can fully feel my foot. My muscle strength is coming back. I’m back at the gym. I’m living life again. I’m not depressed. I’m going back into being a teaching assistant.
Then, as I do with everyone who reports a healing, I asked: “Have you been back to a GP or seen any medical person who has tested your healing?”
Shelby said: “Yes. So the background to this is that I was having extensive physio beforehand. So for 8 months every time I went to the doctors, I’d arrive in crutches. So when I walked in there without crutches, that made an immediate impact. So since I’ve been healed, I’ve told the GP, I’ve told other doctors, and I’ve told the actual people that scanned me originally. They were all astounded at it. They said there’s no explanation why a nerve that’s been severed would a) re-attach and then b) then start feeling to the full extent again after 9 months. They’re stunned, they have no explanation, they can’t justify it. When I explained that I was prayed for . . . well, they didn’t really like that explanation. But they were surprised because after 9 months, nerve damage doesn’t heal itself. They explained to me that you have about a 3 month window for severe nerve damage to heal, for your nerves to reconnect, if they ever do, but after that it’s too late. So beforehand they were saying: ‘you are going to have a nerve issue forever, because I’d gone way beyond the 3 month window, I was 9 months in, but . . . well, here I am, I’ve been healed!”