A Misdiagnosis Opens the Door for God's Glory

“My head was just killing me,” Loria Hubbard said as she described the sudden headaches she began having. “What is going on? I’ve never experienced it to that magnitude, like, what is it? I just never thought it was anything that serious.”

The headaches would come and go for Loria Hubbard. At first she thought it was allergies or stress causing them and took aspirin, trying her best to carry on with her daily routine. But as the weeks passed by, the headaches came more often, and were more severe.

“When I got to work one Monday I still was just having these horrible, horrible headaches,” Loria said. “I was like, ‘I can’t even do my job. I’m going to have to go to the ER because I just can’t take it anymore.’”

At the ER, doctors told Loria the headaches were benign and sent her on her way. Loria then went to her parent’s house and laid in bed. When she didn’t get up, her mother, Terri Hubbard, came to check on her.  

“When I came in I knew she had the headache,” Terri said. “But it still did not register in my mind that this was serious. She kept telling me it was okay, but she never opened her eyes.”

A few hours later Loria was still in bed unable to get up on her own after trying several times. Terri then called 911. Paramedics arrived and took Loria back to the hospital where, this time, doctors performed a CT scan. That’s when Terri was brought in. 

“The doctor who was on call came in and he pulled up a chair and sat right in front of me,” Terri said while recalling those frantic moments. “He said, ‘Mom, it looks like a brain bleed.’ And when he said that, literally the wind just went out of me, because in all of my understanding, I know that’s not good. He said, ‘Okay, let me do what I’ve got to do. We’re right on top of this.’”

Loria needed immediate surgery to drain the blood, relieve the pressure, and stop the bleeding – otherwise, she would die. The nearest facility equipped for such a surgery was The Ohio State University Medical Center, an hour away.

“So, I sat there on the gurney for probably about a minute and I was just crying,” Terri said. “Then I heard the Lord say to me, ‘I have trained you for this. Get up and go do what you know to do.’”

As the medical staff prepared Loria to be transported, Terri started calling friends and family asking for prayer.

“I began right then and there rebuking death,” Terri said. “We began to plead the blood of Jesus over her life. To see her in that situation, I truly had to trust God with my baby.”

Praying as she drove to the medical center, Terri says she received another word from God.

“The Lord told me, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and He said, ‘The bleeding has stopped,’” Terri said. “Once I heard Him say, ‘The bleeding has stopped,’ the enemy couldn’t torment. Cause that’s what he wanted to do, he wanted to torment me, make me think, ‘By the time you get there, she’ll be gone.’ When He said, ‘The bleeding has stopped,’ then I kinda breathed again. I felt the peace of God.”

At the OSU medical center, neurosurgeon Dr. Shahid Nimjee began to prep Loria for emergency brain surgery.

“It mandated open surgery,” Dr. Nimjee explained. “Which means that we make a fairly large incision, so we can take off the entire skull on that side of the brain and we remove all the blood that’s there, and in her case we put the bone back on and sewed her up again.”

After draining the blood putting pressure on Loria’s brain, Dr. Nimjee found that the bleeding had indeed stopped. In fact, after an extensive search to find the source of the bleeding, he couldn’t find one.

“Dr. Nimjee said the blood had stopped,” Terri said about the moments after the surgery. “When he said that, immediately my mind went back to when the Lord told me the bleeding had stopped. I was literally amazed. We were just all rejoicing when we heard the bleeding had stopped, she’s going to be fine.”

Loria was released from the hospital after only a few days and was soon back to feeling like her old self.

“Just something so tiny like a headache – I could have been gone,” Loria said about her brush with death. “I was grateful just to be alive. Most people they have so many different things wrong with them when they go through a craniotomy and I really feel like I’m a version of me before the surgery. God is just amazing.”

Both Loria and Terri credit the work of Dr. Nimjee’s team and the power of prayer for her miraculous survival and recovery.

“Just thinking about the awesomeness of God and how much He just loves us,” Terri said with tears in her eyes. “It just overwhelms me to be able to see my daughter’s still here. Just to see her again normal, just like she said. She has no visible scars of that incident. No deficiency. I know the power of prayer. I have seen it firsthand.”

“When I look at those pictures of me, my poor little brain, it makes me just think, ‘God is just crazy, He can take you through that,’” Loria said. “You look at me and you would never know. I’m grateful every single day. I’m grateful for the medical team, what they were able to do was wonderful. I now know I have nothing to fear. I have nothing to worry about, because if God brought me through that, God can bring you through anything. I believe in prayer, the power of prayer. That’s probably the biggest thing that I’d say from my story to take away.”