For six years I was a sufferer, spending the greater part of my time in bed, never free from pain day or night, brought on through childbirth. I fought desperately for life, as I had small children and felt I could not leave them without a mother. I tried skilled physicians, spiritualism, electricity, all kinds of patent medicines, and everything that any one told me about, but they were of no avail.
I was then living in Grand Forks, N. D., and one of the physicians advised me to go to St. Paul and undergo an operation, which I did, and in two years' time I went through five, but was worse than when I began. So the doctors sent me home, allowing me ten years to live, at the very longest. I did not despair. I prayed in my blind way that God would not take me from my children. A specialist from Chicago came to our city. I consulted him, and found he was about to locate in Minneapolis. I went to him the next spring, and was under his treatment four months, growing worse all the time, until I was confined to my bed. While lying in this condition my baby, fourteen months old, had the measles and died, three hundred and fifty miles from me, and was buried without my seeing her. This to me was the last straw, and for the first time in my life I did not care to live, and there, at the brink of the grave. I found life eternal— Christian Science.
The lady of the house where I was stopping asked my husband if he had ever heard of Christian Science, and asked us to try it, as everything else had failed. She said her sister was healed of paralysis of fourteen years' standing, and was then in the Science work. My husband at once sought and brought in a Scientist. I remember asking her if she could heal people who had no faith. She said, "I don't expect you to have faith in something you do not understand." I began taking treatment. In four days I was out of bed, in ten days I walked nine blocks,—something I had not been able to do for years,—in thirty days I went home, not entirely healed, but growing stronger every day; until I found myself reaching out once more for the world's sense of happiness. I had found health, but was too blind to see how it came, and, like the nine lepers, did not return to give thanks.
