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CBN.com – "I just ached all over, very sick, fevers, just felt really terrible. This went on for a while," Sue Fallin recalls. "I went to my family physician, and he told me that he thought I had some sort of auto-immune disease but he wasn’t sure. He ran some tests. They were inconclusive, but it just never went away."
Sue Fallin was in and out of hospitals for years before doctors found the problem. She had Sjogren’s syndrome, a disorder that dries up the mucous membranes. But that wasn’t all. Soon Sue developed Addison’s disease, an incurable adrenal gland deficiency. Dr. Weston Welker was one of Sue’s doctors.
Says Welker, "She came with Addison’s disease and Sjogren’s, and she, during one of her hospitalizations, developed Myasthenia gravis, which was the most serious of the ones she had."
Sue’s medication caused erratic mood swings and put more than 100 pounds on her petite frame. But that wasn’t the worst of her health problems. By 1993 she had contracted two more diseases: Lupus and Myasthenia gravis, which destroys muscle tissue.
"I found myself totally paralyzed, unable to breathe, and on a ventilator in the hospital," she says.
By
1994 Sue had been hospitalized at least 70 times. She couldn’t
walk without a cane and often needed a wheelchair. And because
Durwood got laid off twice in three years, the family had no way
to pay over $10,000 in medical bills. On top of these struggles,
doctors gave Sue the worst possible news. After
12 years in and out of hospitals, after 12 long years of suffering,
it came down to this: Doctors sent Sue home to die.
"I frankly told Sue and Durwood, 'It’s time to go home because we have nothing more to do. It’s time to gather your effects, gather your family, and say your good-byes,'" Dr. Welker recalls.
"When he said to Sue that there’s nothing else we can do, I think that was hard on her and me as well," Durwood explains.
"I would just cry out to God and I would just pray, 'O God, help me through this. This is so difficult,'" Sue says. "I would call out all of our struggles and I’d cry out to Him. He always came back with this one answer: 'I am.' That’s all. He would just say, 'I am.'"
And that wasn’t the Lord’s last word for Sue.
"I started praying daily as I always do, and God came back with a different message for ’95. It was, 'I’m faithful,'" she says.
God was about to show Sue just how faithful He is. On August 11, 1995, Sue was watching television.
"I turned on the news, and there was the woman in the Roe v. Wade abortion issue being baptized by the director of Operation Rescue," she says. "I thought, 'Lord, if You could put two bitter enemies in a baptismal pool together, You could heal me!' I didn’t realize that God was setting my mind up for a miracle."
Then Sue’s friend Paul called her.
"He said, 'I want you to think about God’s faithfulness and I want you to think about what it would be like to be totally well.' I got excited. I started reading in the Word all the miracles of a healing because I started thinking that Jesus had not changed. And when I got to the miracle of the woman in Mark 5, the woman with the issue of blood, if you read that verse it says, 'and the woman had an issue of blood for 12 years.' I thought, Hey, I’ve been sick 12 years. But it’s when she touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, and I thought, Jesus, I need You to touch me."
And as Sue was about to take her medicine, she clearly heard the Lord speak to her.
"He
said, 'Sue, don’t take your medicine.' I’d never tell
someone to not take their medicine, but I do tell people to obey
the voice of God. As I said, 'Yes, Lord,' and I stepped away,
He healed me just like that. It was gone. I immediately got stronger.
I laid down that cane. I started singing."
That day Sue didn’t take her medication, and she hasn’t taken any since. Dr. Welker was skeptical but excited at the lab results.
"We drew a lot of blood tests on our end, sent it to his laboratory in North Carolina, and had him analyze all this, and, indeed, all the antibodies that had been present during the course of her illness disappeared," says Welker. "They were totally gone. Sue, from a biochemical perspective, as well as from a physical perspective, was healed."
"He never failed us through those difficult times of my severe physical problems--going to a wheelchair, not able to shop with the girls, using a cane," says Sue. "I still have my walking canes near the front door as a reminder as I walk out the door that I don’t need those canes anymore."
Says Durwood, "Our whole family has really been changed through Sue’s healing. It gives you a deeper belief in God and helps you to understand that Jesus is real and active in our lives day by day."
"So now God has given me a ministry of encouragement and hope," says Sue. Not that God’s going to heal everybody. Could He? Is He able? Absolutely, but He’s sovereign. I can’t say what God’s going to do and not do. But I do know, I absolutely know that He can give us the hope and encouragement. He’s worthy of our trust."
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