Geane Prado, 51 years old, is from Brazil and volunteers her time to help others. She’s the heroine of a true story of faith and overcoming adversity, a story of victory over cancer and COVID-19.
It all started in August 2020 when Geane was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. Chemotherapy sessions and a bone marrow transplant were inevitable. However, when she went for her second session of chemotherapy, the doctors discovered that Geane had COVID-19.
She went to the hospital, but her condition worsened very quickly. At that moment, she says, she gave her life to God.
Before being intubated, even though she believed she would be cured, she started to write goodbye letters to her family. She sent them all to a friend and asked her to deliver the messages to the recipients if the worst happened.
In one of the letters, she asked her children:
Under no circumstances separate from each other. Be united, live for each other.
Take care of your spiritual life, educate your children in the fear of the Lord, be strong, and continue to be beautiful, loving children of good character.
There are no words to describe how proud I am of you.
Never abandon your father, take care of him with love.
Her condition worsens
Geane’s condition worsened. Intubated, she still had to fight complications, such as pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest, renal failure, and bacterial pneumonia. Her fever would not subside. At one point the doctors told the family that she had just 48 hours to live.
But Geane’s relatives’ and friends’ faith was stronger than the medical diagnosis. Upon being told that their mother had a short time to live, the children mobilized a huge prayer chain.
They took friends to the hospital door to pray, and asked for prayers through WhatsApp and social networks. People from all over Brazil joined the movement of faith. They always added a word of encouragement during their prayers: “Get up, Geane.”
God and Geane seem to have heard the cry of those who love her so much. Just before she was taken to the palliative care sector of the hospital, her fever disappeared and her condition gradually improved. Doctores called it “a miracle.”
“I was on the other side”
Geane recounts:
The doctors said that my family could prepare for my death, because medicine had nothing more to do. No medicine was capable of curing my fever. But God was on our side. One doctor even said to my daughter, “Your mother can consider herself a victor.” And I’m here because all of this was really a great miracle.
She says that, during the coma, she had some “supernatural” experiences:
I was on the other side. I saw my cardiac arrest, I saw the doctors reviving me… I remembered afterwards… I remember a doctor saying: ‘Don’t give up, don’t give up’… And God wanted me to stay here.
Healing
After almost 40 days in the hospital, Geane was discharged. She rang the victory bell reserved for those who receive the grace of healing.
Double healing, in her case, because recently she had an examination and discovered that the cancer cells in her body are no longer detectable. In other words, everything indicates that she no longer has cancer, although the doctors still talk about the need for a transplant.
“I don’t know what God wants from me, but whatever he wants, I will do it. I don’t want to do the transplant, but if the definitive cure will come through a transplant, I will accept to do it,” says Geane, who is also a volunteer at the Cancer Institute of São José do Rio Preto, São Paulo.
Lessons in faith and overcoming obstacles
After so much suffering, Geane understands what God wants from her. “I always had a life of service. And that’s why God left me here, to lift up His name,” she explains.
Furthermore, she says that she learned great lessons from this difficult phase in her life—lessons that she will carry with her forever and that will serve as a testimony to those who are going through difficulties.
“I learned that we have to live in the now, to improve even more as human beings, not to hold grudges, not to leave anything unresolved, to live each day, and to live each day for God,” she concludes.
