Eventually, news of 'the power of the Lord' at work at the Muqattam Mountain spread not only in Egypt, but also abroad. Because of their Christian faith, Copts face barriers to promotion and career opportunities in their homeland. Therefore they have scattered all over the world in their search for better opportunities for work or greater freedom to put their faith into practice. Some Egyptians rise to great prominence abroad. From 1992 to 1997 the Secretary-General of the United Nations was Dr Butros Ghali, a Copt. Among the Muslim community, Mohamed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods, and his late son, Dodi, are household names in Britain.
To the Copts, an equally famous name is Sir Magdy Yaqoub, who has carried out many successful heart transplants in England. His prowess as a surgeon was well known to the family we are going to meet. They appreciated too the skills of Dr John Mitchell, a consultant heart specialist. This is a story about a brother who followed their advice - and his sister who found a different route to healing.
- Hany's Trauma
Like many emigrant Coptic families, they were spread out over at least three countries: a nucleus in Cairo, a brother working in Germany (whom we will call Hany), and a sister who had lived in London since she was thirty (we will call her Sara). In 1994, doctors in Germany discovered that Hany was suffering from heart disease. The diagnosis (as for Nahid in the last chapter) was cardiomyopathy. When he came to see his sister in London, she was horrified to find him in a deep state of depression concerning his illness. Soon he was in hospital, his life hanging by a thread. He was totally reliant on various pieces of cardiac equipment to stave off the threat of heart failure.
Sara was very aware how serious the situation was and realized that her brother probably didn't have long to live. At the same time, she couldn't come to terms with what was going on, or face up to the future. The next day she set off in her car to see Hany in the hospital, and on the way her car broke down. Sara felt deep despair. It seemed like the last straw. She found herself praying from the depths of her heart, 'Lord, I am worn out. I'm exhausted, stuck out here between home and hospital. Do something, anything.' She was in floods of tears, and yet for the first time had a strange feeling that God would do something.
Sara scarcely remembers how she got the car repaired.
When she finally did get to the hospital she had no idea what condition she would find Hany in. She was horrified to see on the monitor screen that his heart had swollen up. The doctors explained to her that there was a dilatation ('ballooning') of the walls of the blood vessels. To Sara, it looked like an ocean of water. Hany desperately needed a new heart, but he was also suffering from an infection that gave him a high temperature. So it looked as though they couldn't go ahead with a transplant that day anyway. Sara stayed a while with Hany, then went home.
The hospital lost no time in giving Hany antibiotics to try to control the infection. This process could have taken up to forty-eight hours. Yet at eight o'clock that evening Sara's phone rang. It was the hospital, asking her to come in. They were going ahead with Hany's operation.
So after going through the agonies of uncertainty over what would happen to Hany, Sara suddenly found events moving very fast indeed. She was glad that God could see she could stand the suspense no longer, and was going to act decisively. This was a tremendous relief to her, but the whole build-up to the operation had been so traumatic that she couldn't imagine ever coping with such an experience again.
The operation was difficult and delicate. But when the doctors checked and rechecked the condition of Hany's new heart, they pronounced the operation a success. In due course, they discharged him, and Sara returned to her normal busy life. About a year later, just when she had reached the point of thinking that the whole episode was safely behind her, her own health took an abrupt nose-dive.
It happened on 25 November 1995. 'I felt completely shattered, unable to move. 1 couldn't even lift a piece of paper. My body began to cause me pain day and night. When I tried to get up from my bed, I couldn't.' This went on 'day after day after day'. Finally she was admitted to hospital, but the doctors didn't come up with any clear results. After a thorough examination and X-rays, their comments were guarded. 'There's something wrong,' they admitted, 'but we don't know what it is.'
Sara went to a second hospital and then a third. In the end one doctor felt ready to commit himself to a diagnosis. 'I will see you tomorrow morning,' he promised (the next day was a Sunday), 'and God willing I will give you all the details.'
During this whole period of twelve days Sara had been unable to sleep, or eat, or drink. She couldn't move at all without assistance. At last, when the doctor came the following day, he did the same checks all over again. Then he suggested a new test. 'We'll do a cardiogram.'
Sara protested, 'No, there's nothing wrong with my heart. Up to ten days ago, I was active twenty-four hours a day. I have the housework, I have children, and I have private work ...’
'Nevertheless,' he insisted, 'we will do a cardiogram and an X-ray.'
After the cardiogram, the doctor did not return to Sara.
Instead he phoned the cardiac unit where her brother had been. He wanted to talk to a doctor urgently - and even though it was Sunday, he insisted that he must admit Sara. Sara's sister-in-law went with her in the ambulance. She is a doctor, and they gave her a hypodermic needle. Sara recalls the ambulance men saying, 'If anything happens, if she can't stand the journey, then you can give her this injection. If she can make it there without, all well and good.'
Sara went into the cardiac unit on 20 December. By this time, her condition had deteriorated. The doctor who examined her tried to ask her questions about it, but to her frustration she found she couldn't reply. 'I couldn't complete a single sentence. 1 couldn't tell him what had happened. The doctor brought a piece of equipment which monitors the heart. He looked and said, "Unfortunately the heart is really not functioning well ... '"
For four days Sara stayed in the observation room, wired up to every conceivable gadget, 'monitoring blood, monitoring everything'.1
'Everything I did I had to do in bed, with all the equipment around me, left and right. Of course what had happened to my brother had given me experience of these things and I knew I was following the same path. I saw the heart on the monitor screen, how it had swollen up, and there was nothing to be said.' Yet still there was no definite diagnosis. After four days' observation, Sara was discharged and told how many times a week she should return to the hospital.
For the first week Sara went along for routine checks and that was all, but in the second week the pronouncement was made. 'Unfortunately', she was told, 'you have the same condition as your brother.'
Despite everything that had happened, Sara could hardly believe the news. Somehow she had thought that things would be different for her. So when she heard the diagnosis she went into complete shock - she just couldn't accept that she had the same condition. Dimly, as if he were talking about someone else, she heard the doctor say, 'Unfortunately, the left side of the heart is no longer functioning and you are depending on the right.' When the truth began to dawn, she wondered where these words left her - in all the pressures and busyness of life with her body tiring her out every day?
All this time, Sara's weight was dropping. She had been about ten and a half stone when she went into hospital on 20 December, and within a couple of weeks she had lost about half a stone. She lay motionless in bed while the doctor tried to explain her condition to her, but she was so worn out, she couldn't take it in. She started to say to him, 'Suppose, in the worst possible outcome -' but couldn't make herself finish the sentence. The doctor said that all they could do was use medication to try to preserve the other side of the heart.
'All right,' Sarah managed to say, ' I'm not a doctor, I don't have experience, I don't have any idea of what is happening. If there was someone else in this room who was in 100 per cent good health, what would be the difference between him and me?'
The doctor looked at her and said, 'If we had a scale from one to ten, I would give you five.'
With that, he left. Sara stayed in bed, unable to move, until he came back three days later. She was given medicine that was supposed to help her get up and walk, but still she couldn't get up. Every day she would ask herself, 'When will I be able to move?' and her son would say to her, 'Not now, not yet.
Sara feared asking questions, but in the end she did. When the doctor came to see her again, she demanded to know: 'If the medicine doesn't work, what will happen?'
- Sara’s Decision
She knew already what the answer would be, but she needed to hear him say it. He replied, 'You would need an operation.' Yet to hear her fear put into actual words made her even more afraid. She could see herself enduring the traumas of the same treatment as her brother, but perhaps without such a good outcome. Yet she felt within herself a certain reserve of faith. She had always gone to the Cop tic church in London, and to many other churches, but now she couldn't go anywhere. So she made a direct, personal appeal to God. 'I found myself saying, "Lord, you allowed my brother to go through these things, but I don't need an operation. I need a miracle.'" At this point Sara was sent home to await the operation.
The doctor told her, 'The most you should do is go as far as the kitchen, make a sandwich, and go back and rest. You should not do more than that. You shouldn't be on your own; there must be somebody staying with you.'
'You mean I shouldn't get up, even to take medicine?'
'No.'
Sara said nothing more and followed these instructions. In January she went into hospital and saw Dr Mitchell. She began to go to the hospital every week and every month they did the same X-ray. Yet there was no improvement at all. Finally Dr Mitchell, as her cardiologist, in consultation with the hospital surgeon Sir Magdy Yaqoub, advised Sara to have a heart transplant.
This was a road Sara simply could not face. She had gone down it once, vicariously, for her brother, and knew that the operation had succeeded. Yet she couldn't face all that stress and uncertainty again. What was the alternative?
She kept praying for an answer, but it did not come at once. Yet the day came when, as she prayed, it came to her that she should go to Egypt. 'I was always praying, but there came the moment when I felt that this is what I should do. Many times when I prayed nothing happened, but this time I said to myself, "I must go. There is something in Egypt I need." What that was I couldn't have told you.'
Sara began to feel this way in June. She had followed the medical regime in London for about eight months and took the medicine until the last possible moment. Yet she 'just knew' there was something in Egypt she needed. So she booked a flight, went to the hospital for the regular X-ray and told the doctor, 'I want to go to Egypt.'
'Why?' he asked.
'There's something I must see to there.' 'How long will it take?'
'Ten days.'
'Who is going with you?' 'My daughter.'
'You'll be away ten days, not one month?'
'No,' she reassured him.
- On a Wing and a Prayer
So Sara went ahead and booked the flight. She didn't take any medicine with her, or any documents to show what she was suffering from. She was even afraid to tell anyone on the plane, since she wanted to keep her quest to herself. 'All the time on the plane, I was saying, "Lord, don't let anything happen. If anything happens at all, people might find out what I've got.
Sara arrived in Cairo on 22 June 1996. Following doctor's orders, she had booked her return flight for 30 June. But when her family in Cairo saw her condition for themselves, they said, 'No, you can't possibly travel in this state - you must stay.' So Sara went to the airline office to try to delay her return flight, but there was nothing available. Every day she went to the airline office and every day they said 'There are no return flights available, none at all- apart -from the day you've already booked, everything is booked up.' That, it seemed, was all there was to it. She gave up trying to change the ticket and told herself, ‘if I must go back on 30 June, and then I must.'
But she knew that there was something special she needed that she was searching for. She turned to her family and said, 'Look, everyone, I need someone to pray for me. Yet I cannot explain to you what it is that I need. I feel the need to go to a monastery - but I can't go unless someone helps me.'
All Sara's friends and loved ones came and said, 'Ah, we could find so-and-so for you, this father or that father could pray.' But they didn't come. So what could she do?
One day they decided to go together to a monastery. Sara really wanted to go to the monastery of St Mina, but they took her to a monastery that was nearer. Then one of her relations spoke to one of the monks, saying, 'There is a lady with us who is ill. She has come from London, and we need someone to pray for her as she is worn out.' The reply was dismissive: 'But she has Magdy Yaqoub over there!'
These words really annoyed her. She was seething as she left the monastery, and felt badly let down. 'Did I come here for that?' she asked herself. 'If I had wanted Magdy Yagoub, would I have come all the way to Egypt? I came for something else.' Sara was full of sadness and pain, and a sense of loss. She arrived home from the monastery in a state of collapse, unable to do anything.
She had a sleep, and after that went into the kitchen. Sara thought, 'That's it. I'm not going to any other monasteries.' She was going to confirm her flight for the 30th, and that was that. But by the time she came out of the kitchen the phone was ringing. It was the airline office to say that they had transferred her booking from 30 June to 22 August.
Sara was silent. She didn't say a thing, but she thought to herself, 'All right. I won't tell everyone what I was going to say about going back and not wanting to go to a 'monastery.'
- The Miracle
Soon after that, a member of her family said to her, 'One of t he fathers is available and he can pray for you.' Sara snapped hack, 'OK, everyone, find me someone, anyone!' She tried to sleep that night, but she couldn't. How she prayed! She stayed in the presence of the Lord waiting, listening, asking.
'Someone listening in would have been sure that there was someone with me.'
Sara cried out from the depths of her heart. Her tears were flowing, not just from her eyes but from her heart. She reached the point when she said to God, 'All right, don't do this miracle for my sake. I am coming to you for this miracle, and I am clinging on to you. If I have sinned, and don't deserve it, do it for the sake of the person who prays for me - whoever that may be. Do your miracle with me. Don't let me go back on the 22nd without finding someone. I sense that this is something I must receive before I go. I can't come back here again.
'You say, if I only had faith like a mustard seed - but I haven't got even this, my faith is very weak. So please strengthen my faith so that 1 can ask this thing from you.'
Sara cried such tears 'no human being could imagine'.
When she awoke, she was taken by surprise by a phone call telling her that a priest was going to come and pray with her the very next day. That was to be 30 June - the very day she was originally supposed to fly back to London.
The priest arrived. Sara didn't know him, but it was Father Simaan. He sat next to her and asked, 'What's the story?'
So she told him her troubles from beginning to end. He said to her, 'Do you have faith?'
Sara replied, 'I came here, so that shows I have faith to ask for anything.'
He took her at her word. 'All right,' he said. 'If you have faith, what do you want from our Lord? Do you want a new heart? If that's what you want, ask for a new heart. Do you want a new heart?'
She nodded.
So he said to her quite simply, 'that’s all there is to it Then – you will have a new heart.' He prayed for her, sprinkled Water on her and anointed her with oil.
Then Father Simaan said, 'It's finished. Get up and go out. Go down the stairs.'
'All right,' Sara replied, uncertain what to think.
At that, they fell silent. Sara said goodbye to Father Simaan and kissed his hand. On his way out, he said to her, 'There is a meeting you can come to.' She agreed to it, and they arranged that she should come on Saturday to Muqattam.
~n Egypt, appointments are not regarded as binding unless they are reconfirmed. In fact, Sara had no real intention of going. As far as she was concerned, that was the end of it. 'He had prayed for me, and I didn't know what to do next. I went into the room and found a chair next to the bed I went in and, without thinking about it, even though I had been forbidden by the doctors to do this and that, I picked up a chair that was next to the bed.'
(A untie, don't do that!' It was one of Sara's nieces, telling her off for disobeying the doctors' orders.
‘Be. Quiet!' Sara snapped back - before she could stop and think about what she was saying.
I don't know why I said that to her. I went and picked up till' chair and put it back in its place. I was rather amazed, but not believing. After that I sat on the sofa and my son came to me.'
Sara said to him, 'I have a request.'
'What is it? He asked.
'I want to find someone to do me a cardiogram.' Sara felt torn between two things: she wanted to hold on to her faith perhaps God had really done something for her - and at the same time, she wanted to see a doctor, in the hope that he would tell her something more concrete.
Can’t you go when we get back to London?' her son asked.
'No, I want to go to a doctor now.'
Sara wanted to hear information from a doctor, but at the same time there was an apprehension inside her about her lack of faith. She feared that it could ruin everything.
So she went to a doctor and waited to get a response. She said to the Lord, 'I am coming to strengthen my faith.'
She went in to see the doctor. The nephew who was with her said, 'This is my aunt, who is staying with us. Her brother has a heart condition and we would like you to check that she has not inherited a similar problem.'
The doctor asked a series of questions, to all of which the answer was, 'No.' they included this one:
'Do you feel anything when you exert yourself?' Sara replied, 'No.'
'All right, I'll do an examination.'
The X-rays showed that the heart was in perfect working order. Sara didn't know what to say. She tried to put words into his mouth - anything that would contradict that. But she couldn't. The doctor averred that each part of the heart was working perfectly.
'What is the size of the left ventricle?' Sara asked. 'You can see it on the screen.'
'I know, I'm sorry I'm asking all these questions, but from my experience with my brother I need to make sure.' 'Go ahead, ask away.'
'What about the heartbeat? Is it as it should be?'
The heart rate, it turned out, was sixty-six, as compared to a normal rate of between seventy and ninety. To the doctor it was as near normal as possible: in fact he regarded anything above sixty as a bonus. And despite all Sara's attempts to drag out of him any kind of negative diagnosis, the doctor insisted that no more tests were needed. 'There is nothing wrong with your heart whatsoever,' was his final verdict.
Sara got up and went out. The first thing her son said to her when she got home was, 'That was wrong. You should have told the doctor what you had so that he could test it properly!
'Be quiet! Not a word!' said Sara peremptorily.
In the end, she asked a male relative to ring the doctor and let him describe what had happened and confirm it. It was Dr Magid Ramses, who practices in Roxy, Heliopolis. (Heliopolis is a suburb of Cairo.) So the relative phoned him and asked if the X-rays he had done showed that the heart was functioning perfectly.
'One hundred per cent,' Dr Ramses confirmed.
So the relative said, 'All right, I want to tell you something.' And he then explained the background to the case, and that Sara had been having treatment for the past nine months.
The doctor was very surprised. He said, 'I don't know which of you to believe. All I can say to you is that the heart I saw on the screen is 100 per cent healthy. You can come and take a report if you like, and take it to any other doctor.'
At last Sara fully believed that the miracle had really happened. She was healed! So now it was time to act...
That same day she started cooking; and it was the first day since November in which she didn't need bed rest.
She began to tell her family, but there was such a storm of emotions inside her that she was afraid that if she tried to tell them what had happened, she might not be able to gel it across. How could any human being explain that kind of thing? It was so strange that the miracle had happened the very day she was supposed to go back to London, on 10 June.
She started to say to God, 'Lord, 1 should have been in London by now. What a great thing you did for me, in putting off my journey so that the miracle could take place in me.' Yet she could still hardly believe it, and all the time she was praying she wanted to go back to her doctor and say, 'Examine me, and tell me your opinion.'
The miracle happened on Tuesday, and she was supposed to go to the retreat centre on Muqattam on Saturday. She arranged to leave that day by car at eight o'clock in the morning, so as to make an early start and avoid the worst of the Cairo traffic.
- A Narrow Escape
When the day came she went into the kitchen with one of her relatives who was going to drive her to Muqattam. As she was making a cup of coffee she noticed that there was a smell of gas.
She told her relative and he said, 'Well, we'd better test
the gas bottle.' He checked the bottle and the oven and found nothing. As Sara was trying to close the window there was an ear-splitting explosion from the oven. All the glass in the kitchen shattered. The sink fell on top of the gas bottle. The gas bottle fell on the ground and started to leak. Sara screamed and shouted, 'Get out, get out!' as she knew what would happen - another explosion.
Then God was glorified. As Sara heard the sound of the gas escaping, she saw that a bottle she used for storing water in had fallen too. The water poured out and stopped the fire reaching the gas bottle.
'The two of us were shattered. We staggered out of the kitchen, I slumped into a chair, and so did my relative. I said to him, "That's it, I'm not going to the monastery. I can't face getting into a car and you can't possibly drive."
'We stayed like that for half an hour. After that, he said to me, "No, we must go through with it."
'I told him, "I can't, I've had it." I was so shocked I said, "What is it about going to the monastery that something like that should happen? The first monastery I went to they brushed me off, telling me to go to Magdy Yaqoub. If the miracle hadn't happened I would have been really angry about this. This is very strange - it doesn't make sense.'"
But they went through with it. They went up to the retreat centre at Muqattam and prayed there that same Saturday, the day they had agreed upon. Sara told Father Simaan the story about the gas bottle and how, even despite this, she had come to the monastery and completed her errand. She was astonished to see him laughing and shaking his head, and saying, 'This is something strange, this is Unique! God has definitely given you a new heart!'
- Sara's Testimony
Sara was asked to give her testimony at the meeting:
And as you see I am standing before you now, and I thank our Lord for giving me this new opportunity and that circumstances have permitted me to come. If there is one thing I have learnt from this trial, that is that if you ask something from God, you must ask for it in faith. We may well ask for miracles, but unfortunately as human beings we don't have within ourselves the power of faith. Yet even I he episode with the gas bottle encouraged me to keep holding on to the Lord to the end, because I did not want to return empty. And in fact God did work in me to do his miracle ... so that I could go back and testify to it wherever I go.'2
- NOTES:
- Sara was probably monitored with a continuous electro-cardiogram, after making her main blood vessels radio opaque. Blood vessels can also be monitored through an angiogram: or an angiocardiogram.
- This testimony was given by Sara at a meeting at the Muqattam 'monastery' on 14 August 1996. In accordance with the rules for such meetings, she mentioned neither Father Simaan nor the retreat centre by name. The reason for this rule was to give the glory to God.
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