Patti Barnes, who calls herself a “medical anomaly,’ says she´s grateful to be here telling how prayer saved her life. At the age of 28, and eight months´ pregnant with Nicole, now 23, Ms. Barnes, who has been a Baha'i for 26 years, was attending a party at a friend´s house when her vision turned fuzzy.

To determine whether her problem stemmed from aneurysms or tumors, she underwent an angiogram without anesthesia, because of the baby. Afterward, she had to lie flat on her back for eight hours. The diagnosis: Three meningiomas – usually benign tumors located in the membranes that protect the brain. After shedding “many, many’ tears, she received a rock blessed by Abdul-Baha (son of the founder of the Baha´i Faith, Baha´u´llah) from a fellow Baha'i. Another Baha'i gave her an audiotape of Abdul-Baha saying prayers.

Ms. Barnes says these gifts, along with repeating a Baha'i healing prayer over and over, became her lifeline for the three weeks she was in hospital recovering from childbirth, and eight days later, brain surgery. “The healing prayer gave me the courage to leave myself in God´s hands,’ she says. “I told him, ‘It´s all up to you.´ It put me on a different spiritual plane."

A little more than six years later, Ms. Barnes again was challenged: At age 34, she went into premature menopause, and then was diagnosed with a tumor on her spinal cord. Because she was in between jobs and had no insurance, she had to postpone surgery for three months. Bolstered by the power of prayer the first time around, Ms. Barnes says she sailed into the second surgery, sans prayer. “But I learned my lesson the hard way,’ she says: Due to complications, I came this close to exiting this earth.

I had migraines around the clock and could barely eat for four months." Unfortunately, Ms. Barnes got another opportunity to test the power of prayer six months later when she went back for an MRI and found a tumor on the other side of her spinal cord. “I thought of committing suicide," she says. It took three years for the tumor to grow enough to safely be removed. Before the surgery, Ms. Barnes asked friends and family to pray for her.

She also prayed every day. After the surgery, she was out of the hospital in eight days and back to work in three weeks. Ms. Barnes got a reprieve until 1995, when she suffered two successive strokes at the age of 41. She lost her powers of speech, reading and memory, and had no feeling in the palms of her hands and soles of her feet.

Her husband, Jim, sent out an SOS to family and friends to pray for her. She believes that all their prayers, including her own, “are the reason I´m here.’ From the day she started her recovery, Ms. Barnes says she “lives life to the best of my ability."