“Thank you Jesus!”  the mother cried out as she bore down one more time, pushing her third child in three years, her first girl, into my lap.

It was this prayer that marked as memorable an otherwise unremarkable labor, this prayer that transcended the blood and amnion pooling at my feet, this prayer that marked this family’s destiny as unlike any other.

At that moment, during my family practice residency training in Seattle in 1981, I could not have known that within four years this family of five would become an orphan of one.  I could not have known the vague and unremitting symptoms of achy muscles,  tiredness, and headaches this woman experienced before and during her pregnancy were not just those of a weary mother of young children.  In addition, her husband, a hemophiliac, had troubling chronic fatigue and weight loss as well as frequent respiratory infections.  Two of their children seemed to always be sick with something–usually sore throats, swollen lymph nodes, poor appetites.  No diagnostic testing, despite extensive searching for an answer,  explained this family’s struggles.

As believers in the power of prayer and alternative approaches to healing, these parents had done some reading on their own and were certain it was too much yeast in their diet causing the problem.   They tried elimination diets, tried antifungal medications on their own, tried homeopathy.  Nothing made a difference.  My inability to find an explanation was frustrating to them, and only confirmed my sense of inadequacy as a diagnostician, much less a competent healer.

This new baby girl seemed healthy, a sign that everything might be restored.   Instead, the birth marked the beginning of the end.  By the time she was three years old,  not gaining adequate weight and failing to thrive,  a new blood test finally became available.  She was HIV positive.

Both parents and the other two children were tested.  All were positive except the oldest son.  Unscreened blood products transfused into the father had infected him, then sexually transmitted to the mother, and passed during pregnancy or breast feeding to the youngest two children.

There was no known treatment and no hope for cure.  All that was left to them was prayer. So we all prayed.  Their church community rallied to care for them as the disease took them, one by one.  Their son, spared by an inexplicable grace, was entrusted to friends.

Remarkably, incredibly, in its own way healing, his parents continued to pray, until the very end, “Thank you, Jesus.”