The miraculous healing of a 12 year-old girl from a catastrophic auto-immune disorder is being investigated by the Vatican as a possible miracle attributable to a humble Kansas priest who died during the Korean war.
The Wichita Eagle is reporting on the story of Avery Gerleman, now 22, who began coughing up blood during a soccer game in 2006. She was rushed to Wesley Medical Center in Wichita where doctors discovered her to be suffering from a catastrophic auto-immune disorder that was destroying her internal organs.
“She was so critical all the time that we thought on many nights that we were going to lose her,” said Erin Hageman, a registered nurse at Wesley Children’s Hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit who cared for Avery at the time.
“She got put on a ventilator and on dialysis, and there were nights when it took two of us full time to take care of her.”
While in a drug induced coma, Avery’s lungs filled with blood, her kidneys shut down and her heart nearly stopped beating. Doctors told her parents, Melissa and Shawn Gerhleman, to expect her to die at the tender age of just 12 years.
But she didn’t die. Instead, she lay near death for 86 days while her parents, maintained a constant vigil at her side. Devout Catholics, they prayed to Jesus and to a Kansas native, Father Emil Kapaun, a priest and U.S. Army chaplain who died 55 years ago after being captured and placed in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Korean War. Father Kapaun distinguished himself as a brave soldier who earned the Medal of Honor for repeated acts of bravery on the battlefield. He was captured by enemy troops along with his soldiers in 1950 and died of starvation and disease in May of 1951.
The Vatican is currently investigating his cause for sainthood.
While Avery lay near death, her parents pleaded with Father Kapaun to intercede for their daughter’s life, a prayer that seemed to go unanswered for weeks.
Wesley Medical Center, Wichita, KS
But then, suddenly, it all started to turn around. In spite of seemingly insurmountable odds, Avery actually began to get better.
Two of the doctors who treated her, Lindall Smith and Michelle Stuart Hilgenfeld, both Protestant, say her unexpected turn-around is one of the most mysterious medical recoveries they have ever seen.
Both Smith and Hilgenfeld told a Vatican investigator that they believed her recovery was inexplicable. One of the reasons is because Avery’s lungs and kidneys should have suffered severe scarring but scans on her body shortly after she was discharged showed no damage at all. They likened this to peering into a building after it burned and seeing no burn marks on the walls.
It just didn’t make sense.
Doctors also told her that if she survived, she would need to be on an oxygen tank for the rest of her life.
But that’s not what happened either. As the Eagle reports, six months after she left the hospital, she was playing competitive soccer again.
Ten years later, she’s still fine, and is just about to receive her Licensed Practical Nurse license, a dream that grew out of her long stay in the hospital. She is planning to attend a local community college to earn her registered nurse license.
Bishop Carl Kemme, the head of the Wichita Diocese, went to the Vatican last year and spoke about Gerleman’s survival and other “alleged miracle” evidence involving Kapaun with Cardinal Angelo Amato, the Vatican official heading Kapaun’s sainthood investigation.
Thus far, Father Kapaun has been granted the title, Servant of God, but, depending on the outcome of the investigation into Avery’s recovery, he may be on his way to beatification. Once that step is accomplished, he will need one more miracle for canonization.
