AMAZING STORY
Delivered From Digestive Disorder
By Rob Hull
The 700 Club
CBN.com -LeAnne remembers, “He wasn’t gaining weight and then he was losing weight.”
Mike says, “He would eat and swallow but then it would spit right back up, he would not be able to hold anything down so he just was not growing.”
Mike and LeAnne Gunderson were desperate for solutions. Their newborn baby Christopher was born with chronic pseudo obstruction syndrome. It’s a rare condition that paralyzed his stomach and parts of his intestines. He was unable to digest any nutrients or even take water.
“I’d pray every night and not know what the end game was. Not knowing if he was going to die or if he was going to make it or what that looked like,” says Mike. We just had to enjoy the time that we had with him because we didn’t know how long that was going to be.”
LeAnne says, “There was no way to fix it. The only thing they could do was make him grow. The issue was not, ‘How are we going to cure it.’ The issue was, ‘how are we going to keep him alive? How are we going to get nutrition into his body to keep him alive and help him grow?’”
Baby Christopher went through several major surgeries before doctors came up with a permanent solution. They connected a feeding tube directly into his intestines, bypassing his stomach. Then they put a second port into his stomach to pump out bile and saliva.
“It was a really tough time” says LeAnne, “but I always heard this little voice when I’d get upset just whisper in my ear, ‘Don’t worry, it will all work out in the end.’”
The surgery allowed him to lead a normal, active life. But he grew up unable to eat or drink without painful stomach aches and vomiting,
Christopher, now 18 years old remembers his childhood. “I could do everything that everybody else could do but just differently. It was like a normal life for me. I tried food but I just couldn’t swallow it. I had to chew it and spit or I had to drain it out of my top tube at the end of the day.”
LeAnne says, “We just figured it out because we wanted him to live a normal life. We didn’t want him to be, ‘Oh I have these feeding tubes, I can’t do this and that.’ We wanted him to be able to figure out, ‘Yep I have these feeding tubes and it’s good because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be alive and I’m just going to praise God for that and I’m going to figure out ways around to do other things.’”
He wore a backpack that pumped formula into his feeding tube during the day - an IV pole fed him at night. Christopher lived with his condition for 16 years, until one day his family brought him to a healing service led by evangelist Bruce Van Natta.
Christopher says, “During the whole sermon that he was talking, I felt like a pulse in my stomach the whole entire time.”
After the service Bruce gathered Christopher and his family together and prayed for a miracle healing.
Mike says, “I actually think I had my hand on Christopher’s shoulder and it just felt like his whole body was just shaking.”
LeAnne says, “That G tube is vibrating just really super, super fast underneath his T-shirt and I noticed this so I’m looking at it, and I’m watching it and I’m thinking, ‘I’ve never seen it do that before.’ And then that vibration starts to follow the pattern of his intestines. I can see it moving down his stomach down into the second tube which is the J tube and then the J tube started doing it too, and the whole thing is just doing this.”
Christopher says, “I felt just a big shock go through my shoulder and through my stomach and the pulsing. It felt like, like a pounding feeling in my stomach.”
Leanne says, “You just knew what was happening and that he was being healed. I knew when we got out to the parking lot we were standing there like, ‘What just happened?’ It was one of those moments. It was one moment in time that changes everything.”
“What I really feel like is that was God jumpstarting my stomach back up with a shock,” says Christopher.
That night his family went out to dinner and Christopher ate the first full meal of his life - with no complications.
Christopher says, “I just started swallowing more and more and I got a bigger and bigger smile on my face and I had a really good time. It was one of the best days of my life. I just swallowed as much as I could and had the whole plate can and had a nice drink too.”
Christopher has been healed completely and his feeding tube has been removed. Mike and LeAnne say they are thankful for the long journey that brought a miracle healing to their son.
“The harder the journey the better the reward. That’s kind of the way I look at it now is it was a long journey and wow! What a reward.” says Mike.
“God is so good and He is so big and so compassionate and He can heal anything,” says LeAnne. “Nothing is impossible for God. What is impossible for man is not impossible for God. Everything is possible for Him.”
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