(5 of 9)
Ann is convinced that her prayers were heard. Even years later, the memory remains as vivid as it is out of this world. One morning, three days before she was to enter the hospital for surgery, Gary answered the doorbell. Standing on the step was a large man, a good inch taller than her 6-ft. 5-in. husband. "He was the blackest black I've ever seen," Ann says, "and his eyes were a deep, deep azure blue." The stranger introduced himself simply as Thomas. And then he told her that her cancer was gone.
"How do you know my name, and how did you know I have cancer?" stammered Ann. Then she turned to her husband and asked, "What do we do, Gary? Should we ask him in?"
Thomas came inside and again told them she could stop worrying. He quoted scripture to them -- Isaiah 53: 5: ". . . and with his stripes we are healed."
Ann, still confused, looked at the man and demanded, "Who are you?"
"I am Thomas. I am sent by God."
Next, Ann recalls, "he held up his right hand, palm facing me, and leaned toward me, though he didn't touch me. I'm telling you, the heat coming from that hand was incredible. Suddenly I felt my legs go out from under me, and I fell to the floor. As I lay there, a strong white light, like one of those searchlights, traveled through my body. It started at my feet and worked its way up. I knew then, with every part of me -- my body, my mind and my heart -- that something supernatural had happened."
She passed out. When she awoke, her husband was leaning over her asking, "Ann, are you alive?" and pleading for her to speak to him. Thomas was gone. Ann, still weak from the encounter, "crawled over to the telephone and called my doctor's office and demanded to speak to him right that minute. I told him something had happened, and I was cured, and I didn't need surgery. He told me stress and fear were causing me to say things I didn't mean."
In the end they reached a compromise. Ann would show up at the hospital as scheduled, but before the operation the surgeons would do another biopsy. They would keep her on the operating table at the ready. If the preliminary test came back positive they would proceed as planned. When Ann woke up, she was in a regular hospital room, the doctor at her bedside. "I don't understand what's happened," he said, "but your test came back clean. We've sent the sample off to the lab for further testing. For now, though, you appear to be in the clear."
There has been no recurrence of the cancer. At first Ann was hesitant to talk about it for fear that people, including her children, would think she'd "lost it." They didn't. Even her doctor, she says, acknowledged at one point that he'd "witnessed a medical miracle."