An Easter Miracle for Christopher: All Things Are Possible with God
It was the miracle our family had been praying for. In April 2022, on a glorious Easter Sunday (of all days!), our courageous Christopher took his first bite of solid food in over a year.
Christopher, who has had severe autism since he was an infant, had developed a debilitating case of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and could barely eat or drink anymore.
By the summer of 2021, when we rushed him to the ER for the third time, he had lost 80 lbs. in six months.
How could this happen? As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a lot to the story. For one, there’s Christopher’s disability: his inability to properly communicate to us where it was hurting and what the pain felt like. It made it challenging to reach a diagnosis.
At that time, Christopher was also living primarily with his biological mother.
His swallowing issues started when, for several weeks, his mother gave him unlimited access to an over-the-counter throat spray. The throat spray suppressed his appetite and contained a chemical called phenol. If overused, phenol can cause serious gastrointestinal damage and even death.
Today, we know that Christopher’s GERD and dangerously rapid weight loss resulted from his overuse of the throat spray.
Back to July 2021 when my husband (Christopher’s dad) and I took Christopher to the ER for the third time…
The doctors confirmed what we already suspected: our sweet boy was severely malnourished, dehydrated, and had developed a UTI while in his mother’s care. A sepsis infection could easily have set in and killed him in a matter of days or even hours.
After Christopher’s life was saved and he was out of imminent danger, he was discharged from the ER.
My husband and I hired an attorney and were granted emergency conservatorship over Christopher, who was 20 at the time. This meant he would live with us under our protection for at least as long as he was recovering.
The two of us quit our jobs to care for him. He was still so dehydrated that three times a week, a nurse would come to our house to give him IV fluid treatments. My husband assisted with the treatments as well. I vividly remember how emotional he would get as the nurse stuck the big needle into Christopher’s hand, and Christopher grimaced in pain.
All day, every day, our lives revolved around trying to get Christopher to gain weight. He didn’t have the strength to chew, so his diet consisted exclusively of minced or pureed foods—meals we would spend up to an hour chopping and mixing. Each bite of nutrition-packed food took Christopher about thirty minutes to swallow.
For the next several months, my husband and I took turns, spending 10-12 hours a day hand-feeding Christopher as we tried to help him train his throat to start working normally again.
We counted bites and ounces and calories. We meticulously measured and logged every bit of progress or regression.
There were many setbacks. What made it extra heartbreaking was that there’s probably nothing Christopher loves more than to eat his favorite foods…
Yet he could not.
Things were not looking good for him. He was so, so weak. His intake of foods and fluids was not sufficient to gain weight or even to maintain it.
Our research showed it was unlikely that this type of throat condition in a person with severe autism would ever reverse itself. At the same time, we hoped and prayed that God would not want Christopher to live like this indefinitely.
The less preferred alternative suggested by his doctors was to put him on a feeding tube. But this could potentially keep him from ever using his throat enough to eat normally or even speak again.
Yes, there were a lot of knees hitting the floor during those months. Everyone was praying for a miracle for Christopher.
Christopher had limited comprehension of what had happened to him. But he understood it when we explained to him how critical it was to push himself to eat and drink.
At times, swallowing was so painful and laborious that tears were streaming down his face, and he had to bend his whole body backward to force down the bites of minced food. Still, he soldiered on for hours on end until the end of each day.
Summer rolled into fall, and fall into winter. Christopher kept doing everything we asked him to do, never complained, and maintained a remarkably positive attitude through it all.
He always complied with the doctors, physical therapists, and social workers. He didn’t object to dad or me hovering over him, constantly weighing him, taking his blood pressure and temperature, insisting that he go for walks even when he didn’t feel like it, and prompting him every waking hour of the day: “Ready for another bite, sweetheart?”
Then, at last, he started making progress. Specifically, two big answers to prayer took place.
We would place a cooler with drinks next to Christopher’s bed at night. It would take him 20-30 minutes to force down just a few ounces of liquid, and trying to help him stay hydrated was a daily battle. Therefore, it was imperative that any time he felt like he might want to drink something, he had a beverage within reach.
Five months into his at-home rehabilitation, when checking the cooler in his bedroom in the morning, we noticed that some bottles were almost empty—most notably those that contained his favorite drink, chocolate milk. This happened several days in a row.
Knowing how long it would take Christopher to drink, we worried he must have stayed awake all night, slowly sipping the bottles. This meant he wouldn’t have gotten near enough sleep, which could be a massive roadblock to his recovery.
However, he didn’t seem particularly tired…
We weren’t sure what was happening, so we set up a hidden camera in his room overnight. And what we saw when we reviewed the recording made our jaws drop. The film showed Christopher waking up at the crack of dawn, grabbing a bottle in the cooler, and in about four minutes and with a herculean effort, chugging down 16 ounces of chocolate milk!
What he couldn’t get himself to do during the daytime, he was, for some mysterious reason, able to pull off when he was supposed to be sleeping!
After the chocolate milk miracle, we knew things were finally moving in the right direction. Something incredible was happening with Christopher’s throat.
Then, after four more months—nine months after we got him home from the ER—on Resurrection Sunday in April 2022, God gave us our second miracle. An Easter miracle. That day, Christopher took his first bite of solid food in over a year. He savored it. He chewed it. He swallowed it. And he smiled the entire time.
In the weeks and months that followed, he continued to alternate between solid and minced foods as he gradually got used to eating normally again.
Then, that summer, in Norway (our first vacation as a family out of the country), he completely and permanently transitioned to solid foods. I was overflowing with joy as I watched him pile fried potatoes on his plate at the dinner table, leaving little for the rest of us, including my Norwegian relatives, lol. And he ate every bite!
Yes, things sure have changed. These days, the challenge is not to get Christopher to eat but to try to keep him from eating—especially late at night when he should be in bed!
The little troublemaker likes to sneak up in the middle of the night when he knows everyone else is sleeping to steal his favorite snacks from the kitchen. (This is evidenced by the smudges of chocolate syrup on his face in the morning, the ice cream stains on his bed sheets, and the empty hot dog wrappers in the trash can.)
We keep moving the food around to new hiding spots, but sometimes, he still outsmarts us!
During his many months of being rehabilitated at home, Christopher went from being so weak that he couldn’t walk even half a block to jogging, then running two or more miles three days a week, swimming laps at the YMCA for an hour at a time, and doing light weight training with me at the gym.
He’s also back to going trampoline jumping, riding his tricycle around the park, and enjoying all his favorite big rides and slides at our local amusement and water parks. In the fall of 2023, he even sailed the Gulf of Mexico on his first cruise!
Additionally, Christopher completed adult school last year, and the principal recognized his miraculous comeback at graduation. There, Christopher received a special award, “Most Resilient Student”. This new award will now continue each year in honor of his courageous efforts to recover and continue his education.
Earlier this year, Christopher was accepted into a full-time educational/vocational program, where he gets to work on his favorite activities every day, such as various artwork and drawing.
I can’t tell you how proud we are of him! It didn’t look good for a long time, but he ended up exceeding all our hopes and expectations!
That said, Christopher is still recovering from the aftereffects of what happened to him. To this day, he’s still getting dental work done as every one of his teeth was damaged by gastric acid during his illness. He’s also noticeably slower than before he got sick. And although he finally started talking again 18 months into his rehabilitation, he only speaks at a low volume.
But we continue to cheer him on and try to take one day at a time. We know God’s got His hand on Christopher’s life and that Christopher has a lot of faith in God. We believe the Lord for even more victories ahead, and we’ll never grow tired of praising Him for what He has done.
L.B.
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