Several doctors are dumbfounded after finding a patient’s suspected malignant brain tumor disappeared without surgical treatment, giving the patient a renewed sense of hope.
CBS Sacramento reported Friday that the neurosurgeons and specialists in charge of treating Paul Wood, a patient from Lodi, California, are scratching their heads after brain scans revealed his tumor disappeared the day before he was scheduled for surgery.
Wood, a father and volunteer in his community, noticed something was amiss several months ago when he could barely stand up straight.
“I had massive headaches, I couldn’t walk down the hallway without holding on to the walls,” he said.
The Lodi man went to his primary care doctor, who referred him to a neurosurgeon at UC San Francisco. The neurosurgeon said his brain was bleeding, but radiologists said there was evidence of a tumor.
Wood, who considers himself a man of faith, turned to his community for support. But what he did not expect was the overwhelming amount of prayer and support for him on social media.
“My phone is blowing up, my Facebook is prayer after prayer, all over California,” said Wood.
When doctors took another brain scan the day before his operation, they canceled the surgery because the tumor had disappeared.
Wood said it was nothing short of a “miracle” from God.
It’s a miracle and that is the way God planned it,” he said.
Wood’s doctor struggled to explain why the tumor disappeared, admitting that there are some things “that we can’t explain.”
“We do tests and we have medical technology and we try to come up with some conclusion… sometimes things happen that we can’t explain,” said Dr. Richard Yee.
But faith leaders at Wood’s place of worship, Gravity Church, say a higher power was at work when Wood received the outpouring of prayers from his community.
“He just kept saying, ‘no matter what happens to me, I’m going to be okay. I trust God.’ And that was an inspiration for a lot of people around him,” said Jason McEachron, a Pastor at Gravity Church.
Although the doctors are unsure of what contributed to Wood’s recovery, they were so fascinated by it that they asked him to take part in a research study.