For the past several months, we’ve been bringing you inspiring stories of people overcoming extraordinary circumstances. Now, we continue our “Healed by Faith” series. NBC25’s Kathy Hoekstra tells us about an Owosso woman who says her faith got her through not one, but two hardships that could have cost her her life.
The pictures in her Owosso apartment may be the same as they were two and a half years ago, and she still does things like check her email and surf the web, but life for Karen White is vastly different. It all started with what she thought was the flu. “I found out that I had leukemia. Which was a big shock for me.” And another shock, the chemotherapy to treat it, "The first treatment I had it took a month for my body to come back..”
So, backed by her prayers, her faith and her family, Karen took charge. “I chose to not have the last two treatments.. I said I am healed... I took four treatments instead of six.. They were very, very skeptical b/c of that..”
Karen says her first chemo treatment sent her cancer into remission, but she wasn’t out of the woods just yet. She wound up back at Memorial Healthcare, her condition much worse than before. "I ended up in a coma for 8 days and they had no clue what was really wrong. Other than each day I was dying a little bit more and a little bit more." Turns out, it was an infected gall bladder. "It didn't help that two weeks before that I had had a full chemo treatment so my counts were bottomed out.. When you have no immunity to fight how do you fight something as serious as gangrene?”
This time, Karen couldn’t take charge, so her daughter did. “Well my daughter had tremendous faith in all of it… Here they said you're not going to make it, and my daughter said 'yes she's going to make it' so they did surgery with very little chance of survival and here I am!"
"Every time I see doctors that have worked on me and have been with me through this procedure.. They kind of like shake their heads and say, 'you know, you're a miracle…it's amazing that you're still here." Karen isn’t as amazed as she is confident. "I say well I’m here because you have to have faith.. You have to know that we have an awesome God. And that God can do incredible things as long as you believe… God has a purpose and calling for your life. You need to know that."
Karen says her purpose it to educate other about God and the unthinkable things he can do. She is now educating others about cancer care offered by Memorial Healthcare and acts as a spokesperson for the hospital. Right now, a new $12million cancer care center is being build and is expected to be completed by next spring.
