‘God is Awesome’: The Tina White Story

Tina White had the world by a string: her faith, her fantastic and very handsome husband Patrick, a great job as admissions director for West Kentucky Community & Technical College, a beautiful home and their precious newborn baby girl.

On December 7, 2007, Tina and Patrick rushed to Western Baptist Hospital and the next morning they welcomed little Naarah into the world. The baby weighed in at seven pounds, 14 ounces and stretched out to 19 inches.

Tina and Patrick were giddy with excitement. They’d lost their first baby five years earlier — he was born four months prematurely and lived just 10 heartbreaking minutes. The Whites felt blessed with a second chance of having a child. And Tina adhered to several months of bed rest — not easy when you’re as energetic as she is — in careful preparation for Naarah.

It worked. Naarah’s birth came without complications, and Tina and Patrick were grateful to bring home a happy, healthy addition to their family.

Two days later, the White’s world changed dramatically. Tina began experiencing headaches so severe that Patrick called an ambulance to take her back to Western Baptist. Several days of tests and more tests passed. And on December 12, the doctors performed a spinal tap on Tina.

While in the recovery room, Tina experienced a seizure. It was a strange coincidence because it was five years to the day that the Whites had lost their baby boy.

“We were talking and all of the sudden, she just stopped,” Patrick says. “I kept calling her name and her eyes would not blink. I called the nurse and then all the sudden Tina said, ‘I heard you.’ A couple of minutes later, it happened again. By then, the nurse was with us and saw what was happening. The doctors rushed to get her an MRI and found that she had bleeding on the brain.”

Neurologist James Metcalf MD was called in to evaluate Tina. He quizzed Patrick. Did she have a bruise on her head? Had she been in a car accident? Had she suffered a brain injury before? High blood pressure?

The answers were all no. Tina White had been nothing but exceptionally active and healthy her entire life. That this sort of thing was happening to her now, just two days after giving birth to her baby girl? It was impossible to believe.

“Dr. Metcalf was trying to figure out what was causing the seizures,” Patrick says. “I didn’t care what was causing them, I just wanted them stopped.”

Why Tina? No One Knows
Numerous tests and specialists quickly followed and within a few days, Dr. Metcalf had diagnosed Tina with Postpartum Angiopathy With Reversible Posterior Leukoencephalopathy, a very rare condition that affects healthy women after giving healthy birth. The gist: The brain simply starts hemorrhaging after childbirth for no apparent reason.

Why Tina? Why anyone?

No one knows.

“I try to think in order — A-B-C — and I try to think logically,” Patrick says. “But in that moment, I was losing my mind. I thought this can’t be happening to us. This is a nightmare. I can’t lose Tina.”

Dr. Metcalf arranged to transport Tina to Vanderbilt Hospital for treatment. Patrick drove ahead and waited and waited for her arrival. It had taken several hours for the staff to stabilize Tina enough for the ambulance ride.

Tina’s church members and friends took care of Naarah. It would be two weeks before Tina and Patrick would see their little girl again.

At Vanderbilt
By the time she arrived at Vanderbilt, Tina had suffered two bleeds on the left side of her brain and one on the right. She was placed in ICU on the same floor with other women fighting the same condition. Once again, the doctors quizzed Patrick with the same questions.

“And I’m answering no, no, no — she does not have this, she does not have that,” he recalls. “And I was shocked to see….”

He hesitates.

“You hear all these great things about Vanderbilt,” Patrick says. “But the doctors were all young. I said, ‘No offense, but where are the old doctors?’”

Tina, Please Move
Eventually, older doctors did join in. Working in teams, they performed various tests on Tina — tests that were difficult for Patrick to watch.

“They’d do a stroke victim’s test and I’d just keep thinking, ‘Tina, please move so they’ll stop pinching you,’” Patrick says. “But she just wouldn’t respond to the pain. That first week at Vanderbilt was a living nightmare. They hooked her up to every machine. There was stuff going in her nose, her mouth, her arm. Everything except her ears.”

Tina slept through most of her first week at Vanderbilt. During the second week, doctors determined that they had to keep pressure off her brain to keep it from swelling. And that meant temporarily removing the bone flap part of her skull.

Eventually Tina could stay awake for extended periods, but she was unable to communicate verbally. She could write, however, so Patrick handed her a pad and a pen.

Her first scribbled message: “God is awesome.”

“I knew something was up because I couldn’t do anything for myself,” Tina says. “I was just lying there. And even through all the medication, I knew something wasn’t right. I just didn’t have the capacity to ask a lot of questions.”

Tell Everybody to Pray
Patrick, president of Money Concepts, rarely left Tina’s side except to run to the hospital cafeteria late at night for a quick bite and to check in via email with clients. But he always made sure someone would sit with her.

“I slept in the hospital room in a chair right next to her,” Patrick says. “One night I had a dream that told me: Tell everybody. Tell everybody to pray for Tina. I had a picture of Tina holding Naarah right after she was born. So I had someone put that on the Internet and just asked people to forward it around and to pray.”

And forward they did — not just in Paducah, but everywhere. Tina received cards from across the country — even from as far away as Spain. She collected a whole box full.

Days passed, with Patrick sitting with Tina and greeting various visitors. “I was so mentally and physically tired,” he says. “And one night I just said, ‘God give me a sign that she’s going to get better.”

The next day it happened. Tina moved her big toe.

“That was huge,” Patrick says. “And right after that, she started talking. By then, the steroids were keeping her so wound up. Once she started taking again, she talked nonstop! They gave her medication to sleep, and she’d sleep for 10 seconds, wake back up and start talking again.”

Positive Energy Only
Not only did she regain her voice, Tina regained her spunk.

“I opened my eyes one morning and saw this one particular flower arrangement,” she remembers. “It looked like something you’d see at a funeral. I said to Patrick, ‘Am I dead?’”

With that, Patrick hastily removed the arrangement from the room, which was already filled with cards and photos of Naarah and other family members, soothing music 24 hours a day and, of course, other flowers — bright, colorful flowers. Friends from their Harrison Street Baptist Church congregation even brought a miniature Christmas tree. 

Tina’s parents visited regularly — her dad, a pastor, prayed for her and her mom pampered her with manicures. “I longed for her touch,” Tina says.

A childhood friend since birth, and now a Nashville resident, visited several times a week, bringing Tina’s favorite food from Opry Mills.

“We kept a positive atmosphere in that room always,” Patrick says. “In fact, other patients would come to Tina’s room. They said they felt better there because of the energy they felt in the room.”

It was a positive atmosphere that Patrick closely guarded. He tolerated no negativity — and became somewhat selective about who could visit Tina and who couldn’t.

“Some people probably didn’t like my approach, but all I wanted was for Tina to heal,” he says. “And I wanted her exposed only to positive energy. There were some people who came in and were so negative — so gloom and doom — especially after her bone flap was removed. So I told those people that they couldn’t come back. I didn’t want any negative information getting out there that would adversely affect people praying for Tina.”

“And plus, not everyone could have handled seeing me like that,” Tina adds. “My whole face was distorted after the bone flap surgery. Some people were coming by just to see how it looked.”

“And I’d just tell them, ‘No, you can’t come in,’” Patrick says.

So was Patrick, like, her manager?

“Oh yeah,” Tina says with a chuckle.

“I didn’t handle things perfectly all the time,” Patrick notes. “But I’m Tina’s husband. I’m responsible for her care — no one else. And vice versa.”

A Special Christmas Present
The Benberry, Palmer, Ross and Tyus families had been watching over Naarah while the Whites were at Vanderbilt. On Christmas day, one of Tina’s friends brought the baby down to Vanderbilt and Patrick laid her on Tina’s chest.

“I was scared,” Tina says through teary eyes. “I was scared that she wouldn’t recognize me because someone else was taking care of her. I felt like I was seeing her for the first time all over again.”

Back to Paducah
By January 4, after three weeks at Vanderbilt, Tina was ready to come back home. Well, at least back to Lourdes Hospital for rehab, where she was supposed to stay for two to four weeks. She wound up staying seven.

“When the doctors removed her bone flap, she couldn’t do much,” Patrick says. “She couldn’t walk. So there was a lot of neglect on her left side.”

In fact, Tina was in a wheelchair and had to wear a helmet to protect her head. Even with that, she remained in good spirits.

“The helmets didn’t come in pink, so I had one of the college’s recruiters just decorate mine with WKCTC stickers,” Tina says. “I didn’t even know my hair had been shaved until one of my therapists said, ‘You’ve got a funny haircut.’”

While her movement was severely limited, her laughter was not. “She cracked jokes the whole time,” Patrick says.

Patrick laughed as well, but he was exhausted. Patrick moved into Tina’s room at Lourdes, just as he did at Vanderbilt, waking very two hours through the night to check on her. He eventually took on many of the tasks the nurses were doing — bathing her and turning her over.

The highlight of their week happened each Wednesday when Naarah would come for an overnight visit.

And Back to Her Own Home
On February 16, Tina was ready to return to her real home, and Patrick planned a welcome home celebration. Family and friends stopped by with salads, casseroles and cakes. “It was probably too much for her,” he says now. “But I was so excited to get her and Naarah home.”

Later in February, Patrick and Tina returned to Vanderbilt so that the doctors could replace Tina’s bone flap. The next day, she was able to pull herself up in the hospital bed.

“I saw her do it, but I didn’t want to say anything yet,” Patrick recalls. “Then the day after that, I helped her to the bathroom and I could feel how much easier it was. I knew she was ready to walk. When I was helping her back to the bed, I just let go of her arm and she did the rest. That’s when I said, ‘Do you realize what you just did? You walked.’”

Today, Tina’s long-term memory is perfect, and she’s steadily regaining her short-term memory. She’s also working hard to regain full movement again in her left arm.

While she desperately wanted to return to her job — she’s missed the intellectual challenge as well as the social interaction — that will likely have to wait another year or so. The brain, it seems, is the slowest healing organ in the body. In the meantime, Tina keeps busy by selling Mary Kay products. And she recently had her car modified so she can drive again.

And Patrick? Tina calls him “Husband of the Year” on her Facebook page.

“I remember hearing about another patient who was struggling like I was, and her husband came in one day and served her with divorce papers right in the hospital,” Tina says. “He told her he was too young to be held down. And then he walked off.”

That’s something, Patrick says, that never would have occurred to him.

“My only objective was to get Tina and Naarah home,” Patrick explains. “I didn’t care what it took. And it never crossed my mind to give up. You just do what you’re supposed to do,” he says.

“That bothers me,” Tina responds. “Everyone would not do what you did.”

“Everyone does not live in this house,” he answers.

Renewing Their Vows: In Sickness and in Health
Tina says she’s not at all surprised that Patrick stood by her every painstaking step of the way. The two met at Murray State University in 1993. Patrick, then 23, was a part-time senior. Tina was 26. They dated for five years before marrying September 5, 1998.

“He didn’t want to rush things,” Tina says. “He wanted to make sure he could be committed to me before we got married. So I knew when I married him that he was absolutely serious and sincere, and that he would always stand by me.”

Patrick was so committed to Tina that, while she was lying in her hospital bed, he asked if she’d be willing to renew their vows on their 10th anniversary. “I was on morphine when he asked,” Tina says. “He asked me twice.”

“I wanted to make sure the medicine wasn’t doing the talking,” Patrick jokes.

The two renewed their vows September 15, 2008. The small ceremony had very special meaning to them both.

“The vows say in sickness and in health,” Tina says. “You never know. I’m not saying our life was perfect, but it was perfect to me. I had a wonderful husband, a great job, we were getting ready to have a baby, we’d just bought a house that we were renovating, we belonged to a great church — it just felt like everything was in order. And then this happened.

“It was almost like a test — do you really mean that? Do you really mean to death do you part? I often wonder now when I see people getting married, do they really know what they’re saying or are they repeating the words?”

Incidentally, after the ceremony the two celebrated at Patti’s and spent the night at Green Turtle Bay Resort. “It was the best sleep I’d had all year,” Patrick says.

Prayer and Faith
Both Tina and Patrick continue to celebrate every improvement. While Tina could walk short distances after that final brain flap surgery, she used a wheelchair for extended distances. But by June 10, she was confident enough to pass along her outside wheelchair ramp to another family in need — she had fully regained her ability to walk unassisted.

“I cried when they came to get that ramp,” Tina says. “It’s just amazing how far I’ve come.”

If it’s amazing to Tina, it’s almost unbelievable to her doctors — though she didn’t know it at the time.

“They now tell us that they didn’t hold out much hope that Tina would improve so much,” Patrick says. “We were at Vanderbilt a little earlier this year — a full year after we were there for so long. We went up to the 8th floor to say hello to the nurses. They couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘You just don’t know what you were up against.’”

Perhaps the nurses didn’t know what Tina and Patrick had going for them: “Prayer and faith,” says Patrick.

“You know, I’m human,” he says. “I’d get angry and I’d say to God: ‘Why us?’ But then I’d think, no, there’s always someone worse off than we are. And I was telling my pastor that if we’re Christians, we should be Christians in all circumstances — the good, the bad and the ugly. I felt that God put us in this position to be an example to someone else. And I believe that God has healing powers.”

And what of little Naarah? Now one and a half, she’s a beautiful bundle of energy. Patrick encouraged Tina to take photos and start a scrapbook throughout the healing process to show Naarah when she gets older.

Chances are good that Naarah will understand the power of prayer.

The name Naarah, after all, means child of God. (1 Chronicles 4: 5-6).

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