37-year-old Pastor Ryan Marlow of Grace Baptist Church in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina fell ill last August from a listeria infection that developed into a brain injury. In the latter part of the month, doctors declared him brain dead.
"The doctor came out … and said, 'Your husband has clinically passed. He is clinically deceased. He has passed away. He has suffered neurological death,'" Meghan Marlow shared in a Facebook Live video on August 31.
"They put the time of his death on his chart. That was it," she recalled.
She mourned the loss of her husband for two days, and then she was told that her husband was not brain dead.
Being an organ donor, doctors had been preparing to harvest Marlow's organs for transplant, but his wife stopped them as they were about to wheel him to the surgery suite.
"God's kept him here," Meghan Marlow told the doctors on the day of his surgery. "He's supposed to be dead. He's supposed to be at the funeral home right now, according to these doctors."
While their church prayed, she was able to make arrangements for her husband to be transferred to Duke University Hospital, where doctors changed his course and treatment, and he is recovering. He is "getting stronger in therapy and increasing in his stamina," and he "may get to be home for Easter," the latest update reads.
She thanks God for working in her husband's situation.
"That is only God, and this is what Ryan prayed for -- that God would do something only He could get credit for," Meghan tells AFN. "I didn't know it was going to be like this."
Nearly 34 weeks into recovery, he is still in a wheelchair. But as the choir sang "God is Still Good" in a recent church service, Pastor Marlow waived his hand and slapped the wheelchair table, saluting the Lord for his miracle.
The Christian Post notes that in celebration of National Brain Injury Awareness month in March, Meghan Marlow called her husband her "hero."
