Testimony of Healing December 6, 2004 Issue

My victory over childhood paralysis

Phyllis Woodhead

Just after I started school at the age of six, I became paralyzed from the waist down. I was required to be in hospital in the isolation ward for a week, and then a month in a ward for those considered incurable. During this time, I was given no medication because the doctors did not know what was wrong with me and were worried that medication could make things worse. I was grateful for this, since I was praying to God as my only help in this situation.

I prayed as best I knew how to pray—to understand that all of God's children are truly His perfect creation, as the Bible states in the first chapter of Genesis, and that this applied to me as much as to all the other children in that ward. I accepted that I was a perfect child of God's creating, and that what He makes is eternally perfect. Because being unable to move was not good—was not like God's nature—I knew I did not have to accept it as true of me. I held with all my heart to the ideas that I had been taught in Christian Science Sunday School, which came to mind as I prayed.

After five weeks, I was lying in bed by the door to the ward, with my mother visiting me, when the hospital's chief consultant came through. He came back when he saw my mother and told her how sorry he was, but that nothing could be done for me. I was incurable and would be in a wheelchair all my life, paralyzed from the waist down.

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My victory over childhood paralysis

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