Author Interview – Leigh Bale: (part two) The Reality Behind the Fiction

By the time our daughter was diagnosed, she was at death’s doorstep. It was Easter Sunday and she was walking like a drunken sailor and her speech was slurred. She couldn’t finish a complete sentence. She didn’t want to gather her Easter eggs or eat her candy. What seven-year-old child doesn’t want their Easter basket? This child wasn’t acting. She was in grave trouble.

That night, we put our kids to bed, but both my husband and I were very restless. We sat down to watch a movie on TV, but we couldn’t sit still. We both had the intense feeling that we must call someone right now. We must not wait. We believe the spirit of the Lord influenced us into action. My husband tried calling the doctor who misdiagnosed our daughter, but he was out of town on vacation. So, we made some calls to get the home phone number of another doctor who was a member of our church. It was late at night and we felt embarrassed to be calling this doctor at home, but we were desperate. Based on the previous doctor’s misdiagnosis, we figured an emergency room would think we were crazy. We explained the problem and the new doctor ordered a CT scan for first thing in the morning. (We found out later that he never, ever would do such a thing without seeing the child first. But this time, he felt so strongly impressed that he must act immediately, that he went ahead and called the order in.) Dr. Jay Chamberlain saved our daughter’s life. Within hours of the CT scan, our daughter was rushed into emergency surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain. She had a brain tumor, which had grown large enough to block the fluid on the brain so it could not drain. The neurosurgeon gave our daughter 48 hours to live before the pressure would have split her brain stem and killed her.

Once our daughter was stable, we took her the University of California in San Francisco where they treat thousands of brain tumors every year. Our daughter has had six brain surgeries to drain cysts and drain hemorrhaging and other surgeries to install a porta-catheter near her heart for administrating the chemotherapy. Through it all, we never once allowed ourselves to consider that our daughter might die. She asked us about it once or twice, but we refused to let her go. Truly the Lord had a hand in our child’s survival.

Coupled with blessings from heaven, I firmly believe our refusal to quit is what saved our daughter’s life. Our daughter is now seventeen years old and our neurosurgeon has told us that she is the top child in the world for survivorship of her type of brain tumor. No other child has had such a dramatic shrinkage of this type of tumor and her pathology reports have been sent to Tumor Boards all around the world. These boards of specialists study why our daughter has done so well in order to help other children suffering a similar situation.

Our daughter now has other health issues we have to deal with. For instance, she has hormone problems and NASH Syndrome, which is in essence an alcoholic’s liver, without the alcohol. The doctors figure this is due to the year of chemotherapy. But we’ll take these health issues over the alternative any day.

About four years ago, my daughter asked me why I didn’t write a story about a kid with a brain tumor. Because this issue hits so close to home, I mulled it over in my mind for a year before I started writing the book. I left out a lot of the issues a family in this situation goes through in reality. Most people read a fictional novel to escape reality, not to immerse themselves in it. Although “The Healing Place” is fiction, many of the scenes are based on very real situations. It’s a heavy topic with a sweet message. Hopefully this story will offer hope to the thousands of parents out there clinging to every shred of good news they can find. God bless them all.