Brittany Bakenhaster, a cheerful, positive 3-year-old, was the picture of health. She loved singing in church and even knew Bible scripture, according to her mom, Jamie. So nobody could have predicted the terrifying scene that would greet Jamie early one morning when she went to wake up her little girl.
Brittany was having a grand mal seizure. The little girl was diagnosed with a particularly severe form of epilepsy, and Jamie’s heart sank. She knew the condition all too well; she had been suffering from it herself for years.
“I blamed myself a lot,“ Jamie opened up, explaining how she had felt responsible for passing her affliction on to her daughter. ”[But] I thought she‘d be just like me,“ the loving mom continued. ”We’d get her on medicine, and everything would be alright.”
It wasn’t to be. The seizures took over and robbed Brittany of the powers of meaningful interaction. “She couldn’t sit up,” Jamie remembered. “She couldn’t look at me to focus.”
Brittany was medicated and endured her compromised condition for two long and painful years. She even had to wear a helmet to protect her head during violent seizures. The family’s emotional and financial security suffered, and Brittany’s condition continued to get even worse.
Jamie and her husband turned to the Bible for comfort. Inspired, Jamie drove her daughter out to a school playground to watch the able-bodied children laughing, running, and playing. That’s where the exhausted mother found solace, in the belief that God would heal her child.
The little girl spent almost three weeks in hospital while perplexed doctors investigated. Brain scans showed, to the horror of Brittany’s parents, that their daughter’s entire brain was seizing. Surgery was not possible.
The doctors told Jamie and her husband to take their little girl home, where she would be “more peaceful, in her own bed.” Jamie’s heart broke. “I just knew she was close,” she recalled, “to death.”
Jamie didn’t sleep that night but instead spent it praying for her daughter’s recovery. And the next morning, something changed. The proclaimed terminally ill 5-year-old began to speak. She looked at her mother, held her gaze, and described something that made Jamie’s heart race; she described Jesus.
“Eyes like fire, the bright lights, and the angels. Who could tell a five-year-old child that?” Jamie exclaimed.
Brittany’s doctors were equally amazed by the little girl’s sudden turnaround. One nurse even commented to Jamie that it was “a higher power,” confirming Jamie’s belief that her daughter’s extraordinary recovery was indeed the work of divine intervention.
But the family’s story wasn’t over just yet. A couple of months after Brittany’s reclamation of health, Jamie started experiencing strong headaches, which worsened when she took her epilepsy medication. “My doctor thought it was just the stress I went through,” Jamie shared.
However, an EEG confirmed the unbelievable truth. Jamie’s epilepsy had also cleared. The doctor even asked her, “Would you like to come off your medicine?”
Eighteen years later, both mom and daughter celebrated life without drugs and without seizures together. Brittany continued singing for the church and enrolled in college to become a psychologist. And she still remembered her “holy” encounter on the morning that her health turned a corner.
