Written by: Karen Davis. Arizona, USA.

My story started when I was 23 years old. I was working at the time and had two young children. At work one day, I suddenly had difficulty moving my legs. I wanted them to walk, but they wouldn’t respond. I was only able to move a little bit with a lot of concentration and very slow movements. I called my husband to come and bring me to the doctor. I was terrified—my legs felt very heavy and took a lot of effort to move. I was able to see a doctor that day, but he really didn’t know what was wrong.  

That was my first Multiple Sclerosis episode. My second was when I was 32 years old. This one was different from the first in that I had numbness in my arms, pain in my hand, and blurred vision. This time, I went to a neurologist who—from my symptoms—diagnosed me with MS. I had an MRI to confirm the diagnosis.

After receiving my diagnosis, I felt like I was “different”—maybe a little “odd” from other people. It was a feeling of isolation. At the time, even the treatment option was isolating—hospitalization and an IV steroid called ACTH, which was from the pituitary gland of a pig and took around 7 days to administer.

My husband and I had been going to a monthly dinner meeting of the Full Gospel Businessmen. At the next meeting, I went up for prayer, expecting—hoping—for an immediate healing. But it didn’t happen then. I didn’t lose faith that it would happen, though.

Soon, I heard of a pastor who was having a healing service in Washington, D.C. It was one of those services where the speaker would point to a person in the audience, saying, “You have been healed!” I was so hoping that he would point to me, telling me my healing was coming. So much so, that though we had three small children at the time and my husband was working, I packed up the kids and drove to Washington that night—even though it was dark and a little scary to be there alone with three children. Despite all of this, I went away disappointed and sad as the speaker did not single me out to receive a healing.

My third episode was probably around 7 years later. Again, I had IV treatment of ACTH intravenously, though this time I did it at home. The IV ran for a couple hours once a day, which I’m sure was a little traumatic for my young children at the time to watch. Also, the ACTH made it extremely difficult for me to get to sleep at night. I remember sleeping on the couch with a video running to lull me to sleep. It was a very long video, Fiddler on the Roof, so by the end, I was asleep. Even after the ACTH treatment, I played that same video over and over again to get to sleep at night. And I continued to pray and believe that I would be healed.

I never told anyone outside of my family that I had Multiple Sclerosis because I felt that I would be discriminated against at work (or assumed that I would not be able to do my job). At that time, it was even thought that people with MS would die of the disease. I didn’t want to have that stigma on me.

Since my diagnosis, I’ve had three MRIs—all showed progressively larger numbers of scars in my brain from where the nerves had been damaged and then repaired. Even faced with this evidence, I remained confident of God's desire to heal me, and I thanked him regularly even though I didn't see it yet.

The last MRI was done around 2008. By that time, I had MS for 36 years. When the MRI came back and the doctor discussed it with me, I looked at it thinking, “This doesn’t look like the other MRIs that I’ve had. Maybe MRI results look different now than they did years ago.” I was a little confused and just stared at it—what I saw was just a small cluster of brightness in the center of my brain. Previously, the MRIs looked like millions of stars in the sky, very bright spots of light. For anyone who understands Multiple Sclerosis, you know these bright spots are places along your nerves that have been damaged by the destruction of the myelin sheath and then healed, creating scarring. That’s what I expected this MRI to look like, but there was nothing! There were no millions of bright spots on the MRI. The doctor said to me that my MRI looked like someone who had MS for maybe six months, not decades. 

I didn’t think much of what the doctor said at that time, but improvement kept happening and years later realized that my healing had come—my body feels good and my brain has been healed of all the scarring along my nerve sheaths! I am healed! 

I love sharing the story of my healing with others to give them hope of a healing, too. If you need healing of any sort, pray, pray, pray. Start thanking God for your healing now. If it doesn’t happen immediately, continue to pray and be hopeful of your healing. 

My healing took place decades after I was first diagnosed. Healings are not always immediate, but never give up hope.