The Miracle That Followed a Massive Stroke

"I’m following behind the ambulance in my own car," Sara said. "First prayer was, please, please, please, please spare him."

On November 22, 2023, Sara Parnell had just found her husband Sam collapsed in the shower. The EMTs quickly rushed him to a local hospital, while their sons, James and Samuel, met them there.

"The attending physician had come in and he knew that I was a physician as well," James recalled. "He says, 'do you want to see the scan?' And so, I come out there, and he has it pulled up, and he starts scrolling through it and I realize that dad has one of the worst bleeds that I've ever seen."

"When James came back in from seeing the CT scan, the look on his face was enough to tell me that things were very bad," Sara remembered.

James described the medical reality they were facing: "That certain type of stroke, an aneurysmal type bleed, with as much blood as he had around his brain. It's a 70% chance of death. The physician brain tells me that I'm never going to have my dad back."

Kristina, Sam’s daughter in-law shares, "The doctor came in to talk to us and said, 'hey, he's the sickest man in the hospital. This does not look good.'"

Samuel recalled the doctor's blunt directive, "He said, 'you need to go in there and spend the final moments with your dad and say goodbye,' and though that moment is one that I will remember forever." 

"It really hit me that, I might have just said bye to dad. It felt like a really dark place," James admitted.

Sara confessed her thoughts at the time: "This could be the end, I think, is what I was thinking. And praying that it wasn't the end."

As the family gathered around Sam’s bed and prayed, they felt a shift in the atmosphere. 

"There was a supernatural peace in the room—if this was the final breath of his life, if this was the final moments that, and because of the faith that we shared, that we would see him again," Samuel noted.

"The room got really quiet and I just felt like the Lord stir something in my spirit, like, 'do you have faith in me? Do you trust me that I can do anything?'" Kristina remembered. "And I just started praying out loud, just boldly like 'Lord, like our hearts are for him to live, like we do not want to lose him today.' And I remember praying and saying, 'God, like we trust you even if it doesn't work out like this, but we can't have this final moment with him so quickly like this without telling you exactly what is in our hearts. Like we want him to live.'"

"She began to pray for a miracle. She prayed for complete healing and the spirit, through her, I believe, began to give us a little bit of a glimpse of hope," Samuel observed.

Sam was soon transported to a larger hospital, where surgery successfully stopped the bleeding in his brain. Now all his family could do was wait and pray to see if he would recover.

"Now it was kind of watching, waiting to find out, is dad going to wake back up or has so much damage been done that, he's not going to ever wake back up again," James explained.

"We were informing people who we knew would rally around us, and intercede for us in prayer as well," Samuel said.

"So, church leaders, you know, our good friends, prayer groups, we were very thankful for the churches that my parents were part of, my brother's a part of, and the one that I get to serve. So, they really rallied around us to pray."

"Before the night was over, he had come off the ventilator," James shared. "We had been trying to get him to say our names, you know, just to have some peace, to hold on to that—you know, maybe we're getting dad back. We had left that night, and he hadn't come back. And the nurse practitioner actually called me that night, and said he had asked where is Samuel and James and so he knew us, and it was like I got my dad back. That was, that was a special moment."

Over the next few weeks, people continued to pray for Sam as he went through occupational and speech therapy. To the family’s delight, he made a full recovery, returning home just a month after his massive stroke.

"I've already cheated death," Sam said. "You know, I know where I'm going. It's just it's going to be a few more years, looks like, before I get there."

"I'm thankful for God healing him and doing that," Kristina reflected. "I think it's just the hope that we have in the Lord, and he was a testament to God's goodness, to everyone who walked through the door."

"There's not a celebration that goes by or a moment in life. It doesn't matter that that we're all together, that just doesn't feel a little sweeter. Because we've seen God's goodness," Samuel added.

"What a blessing from God that he's here with us and that he's continuing to bless us with his smile and his wit, and chance to just all be together," James said.

"I’m so thankful that others would petition God for my healing," Sam remarked. "I praise God for that. That he's spared my life. And it's important, for me to tell others about, the power that God has to heal."

"There is not a day that goes by that we do not thank the Lord for the blessing of being alive and having him," Sara said. "The pain and all the scaredness and all the anxiety is sweet now because we're on the other side and things are good again."