A teen who was declared brain-dead following a serious accident made a miraculous recovery after her parents said a devout family friend came to the hospital to pray for her healing.
Taylor Hale was 14 years old when she was in an accident that left her in a coma. Her parents feared she would never wake up, cutting her life tragically short.
On Sept. 11, 2011, Taylor was with a group of friends after a football game when one of them said he had to leave. She and another friend playfully hopped onto their hood of the friend’s car to prevent him from leaving.
But the driver unwittingly began reversing, and Taylor and her friend were thrown from the hood of the car. While her friend walked away unharmed, Taylor hit her head on the ground and was knocked out.
Taylor was rushed to the hospital, where her parents, Chuck Hale and Stacey Hennigsen, were informed she suffered a traumatic brain injury. For the next seven days, Taylor was in a medically induced coma to allow her brain to heal. But things did not look promising.
Six days later, Taylor suffered a brain hemorrhage while still in the coma. The hemorrhage resulted in part of her brain sliding into her spinal canal, which doctors said was a “point of no return.”
Doctors informed the parents that it seemed their daughter was brain-dead and that they may want to consider thinking about donating her organs and making preparations for a funeral.
But everything changed after a visit from a family friend.
Jeff Stickel, a family friend and chiropractor, came to the hospital one day after the parents received the difficult news. As a devout Christian, Stickel wanted to pray for Taylor and her family. He told her parents that he felt God was calling him to help heal Taylor.
Taylor’s parents told Stickel there was nothing he could do for their daughter, but agreed to let him pray with them anyway. He placed his hands on Taylor’s neck and asked God to spare her life.
Later that day, Taylor was taken off life support, but rather than flatlining, she began struggling to take a breath. Over the following several hours, she slowly began to show signs of improvement. Her brain became more active, her eyelids started moving and she attempted to speak for the first time in a week.
Incredibly, Taylor finally awoke from her coma.
“It was the hand of God at work,” said Chuck. “That’s the only thing that can explain it.”
Taylor was finally on the road to recovery and would go on to spend months re-learning how to do every from walking and talking to eating on her own.
Though the recovery was far from easy, Taylor overcame the odds and in 2015, graduated with her class at Wake High School.
“It was just like a painful, stressful recovery,” Taylor told KCCI. “But I pushed through it because you just got to do what you got to do.”
She added: “I’m always thankful to all the doctors and nurses and therapists who helped me get better, but God did most of the saving.”
Taylor said following her graduation she planned to enroll in community college to study event planning.