Cheryl and Richard Loosemore, from Grace Church in Nottingham, recently experienced heaven touching earth in what initially appeared as devastating news. Cheryl wrote a blog sharing her testimony.
In Feb 2016, I suddenly developed a severe headache at work; two days later I discovered I had experienced a small brain bleed secondary to a benign tumour on my pituitary gland in the brain. I was referred to both a hormone specialist and a brain surgeon who I saw a fortnight later.
At this point we had been trying to get pregnant for 9 months and were informed we should start fertility testing immediately, which we declined, as we didn’t understand the full ramifications of the bleed. We were also informed if we did become pregnant I could lose my eyesight, as the hormone surge could cause the tumour to grow and compress my optic nerves.
We left devastated, unsure of what would happen next. That Sunday we attended our church which happened to be mothering Sunday, where I sobbed with friends who prayed with us for healing. We felt broken and hopeless, we clung to God for strength but had very little faith for anything else. Four days later, much to everyone’s surprise including multiple specialist teams, we discovered that we were pregnant. We were sat in our emergency appointment a week later, scan in hand and the lead Consultant walked into our room; his first words to us were “so you’re the miracle everyone’s talking about!” He then freely admitted that he hadn’t wanted to come into the room as he didn’t know what to do. Nobody in the care of our large teaching hospital had ever become pregnant immediately after a pituitary haemorrhage, and after looking through literature he found no other examples of it there either.
Statistically speaking 2/3 of people with this bleed have complete destruction of their pituitary which means hormone replacement therapy for life. Of the remaining 1/3 who have pituitary glands which survive, nearly all have hormone disruption at least in the short term, and the first hormones to be disturbed are often those which regulate fertility. To maintain fertility at all is incredible, but to actually become pregnant? Impossible. Our pregnancy has been described as miraculous by multiple teams, multiple times! We then waited to see how my body would respond, if I would need complex hormone replacement, if I would begin losing my eyesight because the tumour was growing, but against all of the odds (at the care of the God who had built me by hand) I sailed through pregnancy with nothing more concerning than morning sickness and 3 months of headaches.
Our incredible miracle had just turned 6 months old (and I was still in perfect health) when we finally received the news that my brain tumour had gone!
The only theory the medical team had was; that I was infertile and had experienced a brain bleed which had immediately corrected my fertility and destroyed a brain tumor. Although they did not believe that was medically possible either.
We believe that the God of the Universe, who sustains my every breath decided that He wanted heaven to touch earth. He wanted to bring wholeness to the broken, hope to the hopeless and use what the enemy had planned for bad to outrageous abundance. He provided an impossible baby and removed a brain tumor, it doesn’t get much more miraculous than that!
Catalyst is a movement of churches raising world-changers across the nations
