The Test of Trust: Healing Her Child’s Brain Tumor

“We sat down, and the doctor told us that he had cancer. It's like somebody putting a knife in your gut and twisting it. It's awful.” 

Patti and Bill Gunn had a busy life raising three boys near Orlando, Florida. Although their youngest, Isaiah, had some early health issues, by 2012, the two-year-old seemed to be doing fine. Patti recalls, “We had a trampoline, we had bikes and we were always doing something. And yeah, it was very, very, very active.” Then, in late October, Isaiah had an excruciating headache. Nothing helped so Bill and Pattie took him to the pediatrician. Bill remembers that day, “My warning bells went off that something's not right. We did pray, you know, Lord, help us find out what it is and give the doctor's insight.”

An MRI was scheduled for six weeks later. However, when Isaiah suffered another headache days later, they rushed him to the ER. Bill says, “I had everything going through my head through like, aneurysm or hydrocephalus or, you know, all these other things that I've read about.” A CAT scan revealed an anomaly near Isaiah’s brain so an MRI was scheduled for the next morning. Patti and Isaiah were assigned a room in the hematology oncology ward. She says, “And I remember in my brain thinking, well, there's a club I never want to join. That was my brain starting to realize that something might be wrong.”

The next morning’s MRI revealed the problem: a large tumor was wrapped around Isaiah’s brain stem. Patti remembers, “It was scary. It was awful. Immediately, you get on your knees, you send out your prayer requests my parents are missionaries, the prayer requests were sent out all over the world.” Bill also recalls, “I remember sitting in the chair and I just covered my face and started crying and praying like, ‘okay, Lord, this is the journey we're gonna be on. I know that you're gonna walk us through it’.” On October 24, Isaiah underwent surgery to remove the slow-growing tumor, called an ependymoma. For twelve hours his doctors painstakingly removed the ‘sticky’ tumor piece by piece as Bill and Patti relied on the only weapon they had… prayer. Patti says, “He could end up paralyzed, he could end up brain damage. There's so many things that could have happened during that surgery that people prayed against.” Bill says, “It ends up increasing your faith because there's nothing you can do. You've come to the end of yourself. You have to trust God and his plan and process of whatever it is.” And Patti adds, “We had family and friends coming in and out of the waiting room all day long. And I swear there was just a constant circle of prayer. Half the time I was numb. Half the time I was gut wrenching the rest. But the whole time we were praying hard.”

Finally, some good news -- the tumor was completely removed!  However, there were serious complications. Isaiah had nerve damage and couldn’t swallow. Patti says, “He kept aspirating for the first, like, I don't know how many weeks it was. So the entire team would come in and have to suction him and get him, bring him back. It was, it was awful.” He was dehydrated and growing weaker, so his doctors performed a tracheostomy to help Isaiah breath and gave him a feeding tube. Patti and Bill continued to lean on God. She recalls her thoughts at that time, “Do I really trust God? Do I believe everything I've learned my entire life? Do I trust him even if he takes him away? Because he had almost died in front of me so many times before that. And for my own sanity, I had to choose. I heard Him audibly, do you trust Me? And right then and there I said, ‘I trust You.’”

Within days Isaiah stabilized and joined a study devoted to his type of tumor. However, he wasn’t out-of-the-woods yet. Over the next seven weeks he underwent 33 rounds of targeted radiation. His parents posted updates and prayer requests to Facebook as the weeks went on. Bill says, “It's hard to see your child going through any kind of difficulty or struggle. Having that Facebook community where people were able to put out prayers of encouragement or ‘Hey, I went through this’, or just being available and supporting us through it. That's, it's fantastic.” Through it all, Isaiah was resilient and on December 31, he was released to go home. Isaiah’s last outpatient radiation treatment was on February 4, 2013. Six months later, the feeding tube and trach were removed so he could resume a normal life. Patti recalls, “From the very beginning, we saw God in this.” Bill adds, “You come out the other side of the storm stronger than you were before. Well, now you're in a position to help somebody else who needs the help, somebody else who is going through it, and maybe they don't have faith.”

Today Isaiah still has no signs of the tumor. He’s living a normal teenage life, learning to drive, and participating in extracurricular activities… including singing in his school’s choirs, something the doctors said he’d never be able to do. Isaiah says, “It makes me feel thankful that He was there. That God was there to be able to bring me through all this. He has given me strength to do things that I otherwise probably wouldn't have had and also the trust and faith in Him. No matter whatever happens to you in life, God will always be right there ready to pick you up and keep going.” Bill adds, “When you've seen God come through time and time again, what else do you have other than to trust him when things go wrong, when things don't go the way that you expect.” Patti says, “If you're not a believer, find God. If you're a believer, get in the word, be ready for life. God’s will is better no matter what it is, which is hard to say out loud, it’s best for the story He’s writing.”