Bessemer cancer survivor credits God, prayer

Almost five years ago on April 17, Mary Ruth Majors underwent surgery to remove a golf ball-sized tumor from her brain.
   
While she was in the recovery room, the doctor gave her family a grim prognosis.
   
The tumor was malignant, he said, and with radiation and chemotherapy, Mrs. Majors had six months to a year to live.
   
“The boys (her two grown sons) were pitiful,” she recalled. “But I said, ‘Don’t worry. God is taking care of me.’”
   
Mrs. Majors said she and her husband, Buddy, who is the associate pastor of education and outreach at Loveless Park Baptist Church in Bessemer, had turned her health situation over to God.
   
“I personally think that when you trust in the Lord, He will handle it, but you have to turn it over and leave it,” she said. “That’s what we did.”
   
In the afternoon following her surgery, what seemed like a setback turned out to be a miracle in the making.
   
Nurses in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) at Baptist Medical Center-Princeton found Mrs. Majors comatose, and she was rushed back to surgery to remove a blood clot that had formed between the lobes of her brain.
   
Because of the emergency situation, another physician, Cem Cezayirli, performed the surgery.
   
At the time, Cezayirli was experimenting with a vaccine that would prompt the body’s immune system to fight cancerous tumors.
   
As he removed the blood clot, he also removed a little more of the tumor, thinking Mrs. Majors might be a candidate for the vaccine.
   
After the surgery, she continued with the treatment that had been prescribed, going through 32 radiation treatments and one chemotherapy treatment.
   
“When I had finished the radiation and cancer treatments, Cezayirli called Buddy and me at home one night at around 9 o’clock to see if we were interested in the research,” Mrs. Majors recalled.
   
“Since we had prayed for direction in this situation, we decided that this was the answer to our prayers, and we agreed to meet with him,” she said.
   
Mrs. Majors said Cezayirli explained to them the concept of the dendritic cell vaccine.
   
Basically, it starts with harvesting cancer-fighting cells from a patient’s body and multiplying them in a laboratory.
   
The cells are combined with material from the tumor to form a vaccine, which is then injected back into the patient.
   
The vaccine then “tricks” the immune system into fighting against the tumor. She was initially given four injections and went back two weeks later for a “booster” shot.
   
An MRI performed three months later showed that there had been no new growth of the tumor and a decrease in the cancer that could not be removed in surgery. Subsequent MRIs every six months showed the tumor shrinking until it completely disappeared.
   
“In April, it will be five years, and I am cancer free,” she noted with a smile. “I give God the glory for all of this. We all know God is the One who did it.”
   
Before she went in for her first cancer surgery, Mrs. Majors said she felt God take her hand, and she knew that He was by her side through everything she encountered.
   
“In the prep room, before the surgery, everybody was busy and running around,” she recalled. “The chaplain asked if I needed help, but I was very peaceful. I told him, ‘No, I’m fine. God is holding my hand.’ ”
   
Later that day, when she slipped into a coma and could hear frantic medical personnel buzzing all around her, she remained calm.
   
“I could feel and sense the hand of God upon me,” she said.
   
While battling a brain tumor is not something she would have wished to go through, Mrs. Majors ironically called her ordeal a “wonderful experience.”
   
“You can’t realize what a blessing it is to come through something like that,” she said, noting how she has seen God work in her life. She believes God put her in the right place at the right time to get the medical treatment she needed. “He just wasn’t through with me yet — praise the Lord!”
   
She also knows she has seen, firsthand, the power of prayer. Everyone she knew was praying for her, and she was on many prayer lists in more churches than she may even know.
   
“I didn’t know the people, but God did, and that’s all that matters,” she said.
   
In 1999, Mrs. Majors attended the wedding of her younger son, and last year welcomed her third grandchild into the world.
   
She doesn’t believe she would have been there to see those milestones without God’s help.
   
“While I don’t understand why this happened to me, I have never questioned it,” she said.
   
As she has given her testimony, she believes she has been an instrument of hope to others in similar situations.
   
“I am now cancer free but still holding on to God’s unchanging hand.”