TESTIMONY
Chad and Chelsea Ganaway: Total Restoration
By Robert Hull
The 700 Club
Original Air Date: September 9, 2010
CBN.com
– On a late night drive through Texas, Chad Ganaway and his fiancée Chelsea’s car hit a 1,500-pound cow at 65 miles per hour. The impact sent them spinning off the road into a field. Chad and Chelsea were knocked unconscious.
"I woke up and the first thing I remember is I felt something running on my head. I didn’t know what it was," Chad told The 700 Club. "I took the air bag, I wiped my head and obviously it was blood. The cow had taken the top of our vehicle completely off and it shredded the top of the car. I looked up into the sky and screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘Help us, Jesus’ – just as loud as I could scream. I had a whole lot of pain with my arm, so I said, ‘Chelsea, my arm. It’s broken really bad.’ So I looked over at her and she was covered with blood. She wasn’t responding, wasn’t conscious. The whole time I was praying and her eye that was not injured would barely open then would roll back in her head and her head would hit the seat."
Chad called 911 on his cell phone. Within an hour emergency personnel located them in the dark Texas night and pulled them from the wreckage. They were medivaced to a hospital in Odessa where Chelsea was placed in the ICU in a coma.
Dr. Le recalls, "The MRI suggests massive damage towards the right frontal and temporal area of her brain. We really didn’t expect her to recover much of her functions at all."
"When I walked into that ICU room, that’s as low as I’ve ever been in my life," Chad says. "All we could get from the ICU nurses was, ‘We don’t know. Your guess is pretty much as good as ours,' because in cases like this where they’re in a coma, where there’s brain swelling, sometimes they don’t wake up. Sometimes they wake up three months later. It’s really uncertain how it’s going to turn out."
Chad had grown up a Christian, but had lived a double life in recent years. As he faced Chelsea’s critical situation, he realized there was only one place to turn.
"It didn’t take too long to realize that God was on my side and to lock into God’s promises. During the whole week in ICU, I would go in and read healing Scriptures over Chelsea. Pretty early on I realized this is how Chelsea was going to be healed. I made my mind up that I didn’t want to hear what the doctors said. I didn’t want to know what the MRI said. I didn’t want to know what the CAT Scan said, because I made my mind up that I was going to believe what God said. My eyes didn’t see a way out. The doctors didn’t give us a fair chance of having our lives back the way they were, but I knew because of Christ in me that there was hope."
Chelsea spent a week in ICU before waking from her coma. A week later she was transferred to the Warm Springs Rehabilitation Center in Victoria, Texas. Physical therapist Mark Adrean recalls, "She came in with all odds against her. Therapy-wise I was very concerned about what her future was going to be."
"From the clinical exams here I would say she had a very poor prognosis," Dr. Le says. "She would pretty much need 24-hour supervision."
Chad says, "The entire right side of her body was still paralyzed. When she did start coming back, it was almost like she was starting over again. She couldn’t write. She couldn’t read. When she talked, nothing made sense."
Chad and Chelsea were surrounded by their church friends and family. As word got out about the accident, people around the world prayed for Chelsea’s recovery.
"We had so much support. We’ll never know until we go to Heaven how many people were praying for us."
The doctors in Victoria were amazed by Chelsea’s recovery. They performed a second MRI to confirm the extent of her brain injury.
Dr. Le explains, "The second one, there was some injury, but not nearly to the extent we had seen in the first one. We really couldn’t explain any of the event, between the discrepancy between the two. It’s not like this was really bad and then it healed up a little bit. It’s really just two different MRI."
To the amazement of her doctors, a month and a half after the accident Chelsea walked out of the rehab center ready to resume her life. Her ability to communicate, read, write and walk completely restored. Her only remaining scar was an enlarged pupil in her right eye, a reminder of the accident and the healing.
"God does amazing work, " Chelsea says. "He's so awesome that He healed me so much that I'm back to normal. I thank God so much for healing us."
"Chelsea’s recovery is really nothing short of a miracle," Dr. Le says. "We really didn’t know how to explain it. She’s not only gone beyond our expectations, but she’s almost gone back to normal I could say, as if it never happened."
Chad says, "The only way I can describe what has happened is Ephesians 3:30. It says He’ll do exceeding, abundantly, above all that we can think or even imagine according to the power that works in us. That Scripture has become my favorite Scripture through this whole thing. I prayed some very specific things and every single one of them has happened."
Chelsea agrees, "This made me a better person. It made me love God so much more. I’ve always loved God, but now I just feel like I know exactly what He can do. I experienced Him and He actually healed me. That’s awesome. I got to see that He can heal people for real."
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