Meet a medical miracle
Published: April 5, 2007
To see her with her husband and child, no one would know Heather Bland is struggling to stay alive.
“I’ve had more miracles than anyone person deserves or can count,” she says.
In her home these days there are angels everywhere. Heather’s needed them and more than a few miracles in her long medical journey.
When she was 4, her mother backed over her with a car. The tires rested on Heather’s little stomach, destroying most of her internal organs.
“Everything was just broken and in pieces. They told her I looked like ground meat. There was no part in me recognizable. He didn’t know where to put… how to piece it back together.”
Somehow, they managed, and Heather’s life has become a series of hospital stays and operations. As of last year, Heather Bland has had 187 surgical procedures. Her body is riddled with the scars.
“I have a stomach, lungs, liver pancreas, everything from that point below is either man made or doesn’t exist.”
What has existed are those miracles — heather surviving the surgeries, even giving birth, enjoying a life she wouldn’t trade. And now it’s a life put into words.
This fall, Heather’s book, God Said Yes, will be published.
“They’re opening the book worldwide,” she says. “It’s not just in the U.S. It’s going to Jamaica, Iraq, Japan. They’re opening it with other languages.”
And now that difficult medical journey will take her around the country again, talking to groups, trying to help others.
“I just think there has to be a reason for what I’ve been through and if my book and my life can give hope to one person that doesn’t have it, then it’s worth it to me.”
But Heather needs yet another miracle. Her life depends on an experimental drug for pain and infection that, quite simply, she can’t afford.
“I have over a million dollars in back medical that I owe.”
But she’s grown accustomed to uphill battles. She prefers to think about what her book might mean to others.
“The joy that has come out of my pain. The hope my life has given to people I don’t even know. There’s a reason it’s happening.”
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