lynelle.miller@heraldbulletin.com

Pastor Leigh Crockett hesitates to call it a miracle. But he was healed. Completely. From stage 4 lung cancer. What else do you call it?

“I believe it was a miracle,” admitted Crockett, pastor of 23 years for Grace Baptist Church in Anderson. “I’m just real careful how to use the word miracle because it’s misinterpreted a lot of times. It’s not like the healings people see on television. I believe it was an intervention from God.”

His amazing story began only a few short months ago when he was kayaking with his youngest son, Luke, on Aug. 4.

“He loves to kayak so we went out on the White River,” said Crockett. “We were having a great time. There was a rapid a little ways up that is difficult to get over. I sailed up over that rapid. I smoked it. I turned to my son and told him, ‘I’m 54 and believe I’m in better shape than ever. I don’t think I could have made it up that rapid at 24.’”

Despite feeling healthy and strong, that night, Crockett fell asleep and went into severe convulsions.

“It was not very long after we went to bed, around 1 a.m., when I became aware that he was jerking,” said Crockett’s wife Beth. “I knew he was having a seizure. I thought he was having a stroke. I called for my youngest son and he came in and said to call 911.”

Living close to Community Hospital, Beth said the ambulance was there in no time.

Crockett said he remembers waking up to see EMTs in his bedroom but remembers nothing during the seizure. “I remember being upset there were people in my room. They were asking me questions like who the president was and what I’d did that day and I remember it took me a long time to remember George Bush.”

Immediately rushed to Community Hospital, Crockett was given a CAT scan. That’s when he and his wife received the first bit of bad news — he had massive bleeding on his brain.

“They didn’t say I had a tumor, but they said I had a mass on my brain and said I needed more attention than I could get in Anderson,” said Crockett. “So, they took me by ambulance to Methodist in Indianapolis. They kept saying this is very serious.”

Although he was not told a diagnosis before testing, Crockett said he strongly felt it was cancer. “I heard bleeding and a mass and I just kept thinking cancer,” he said.

Arriving at Methodist, the doctors performed a CT scan and showed Crockett the X-ray. “The mass (in my brain) was the size of a large egg.”

Because of the size of the tumor and the location inside his brain, the doctors told Crockett it’s rare that this tumor would have originated in the brain. So, they looked for a primary tumor in his chest.

“It’s routine to do a chest X-ray with this type of mass,” said Dr. Terry Horner, neurosurgeon for the Indianapolis Neurosurgical Group and Crockett’s doctor. “We treated him with seizure medications and did a chest X-ray.”