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Thirty seven-year-old Baptist pastor Ryan Marlow was about to be unplugged from life support for organ donation when something miraculous happened, halting doctors from taking him into organ removal surgery.
The pastor of Grace Baptist Church in North Carolina was hospitalized after contracting listeria, which is a serious infection that comes after eating contaminated food.
“I was across the hall and I heard Ryan scream, ‘someone help me,'” Ryan’s wife, Megan Marlow, says in one of her videos, which have garnered thousands of views and shares across social media. Megan says her husband was having trouble swallowing as doctors were still in the process of figuring out what was going on and how to treat Ryan’s symptoms.
On Aug. 27 doctors pronounced Ryan neurologically dead after suffering swelling in his brain. Doctors called Ryan’s time of death and notified the family that he was an organ donor, and they were going to begin the process of finding matches.
Three days later on Aug. 30, Megan and her family went to the hospital to see Ryan before he was going to be unplugged from life support to have his organs donated.
Ryan’s family went to the hospital and sat with him throughout the day, showing him videos and saying their goodbyes. Megan couldn’t bare the thought of seeing her husband wheeled away to go to organ removal, but she felt a pull to go to the hospital and see her husband one last time.
When she arrived, her niece met her in the lobby saying she had played videos of their children when something miraculous happened. Ryan started wiggling his toes.
“Literally the OR team was standing there waiting to take him…and I tell the nurse ‘stop everything right now,'” Marlowe says as she’s pacing around the hospital lobby recounting the story.
Megan told doctors she wanted tests done to verify that he was in fact brain dead. She had a feeling deep down from God that this wasn’t over. She was right. After CT scans doctors confirmed that Ryan was not actually brain dead but had a traumatic brain injury from the swelling, and was in critical condition in a deep coma.
“God’s not done,” Megan says. Ryan is getting surgery and continuing to improve with more body and eye movements.
God has moved in miraculous ways, and now Ryan’s family is asking for the body of Christ to pray for his complete healing and that he would get the care he needs to continue improving. {eoa}
Shelby Lindsay is an assistant editor for Charisma Media.
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