Jay Wolf III hears his wife, Katherine, yell the words that will change their lives forever.
“Come in here,” she urges from across their Malibu, Calif., apartment. “I don’t feel right.”
Jay, the son of First Baptist Church, Montgomery, Senior Pastor Jay Wolf, finds her suffering from a strange illness. In a few minutes, it brings Katherine to her knees before knocking her flat on the floor.
As their 6-month-old son, James, sleeps in another room, Jay calls an ambulance. By the time it arrives, Katherine is vomiting and can’t feel her legs. The paramedics check her vital signs, which show nothing wrong. She is rushed to UCLA Medical Center, where on that day — April 21, 2008 — tests deliver a medical death sentence. “I remember the doctor came out and said, ‘It’s not good,’” Jay recalled.
Katherine had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke. A tangle of abnormally formed blood vessels in her brain had ruptured, bleeding into the inside of her skull. The pressure was pushing her brain down into her spinal cord.
Katherine’s condition was the worst her neurosurgeon had ever seen. The prognosis was abysmal: She probably would not survive surgery, and even if she did, she likely would remain in a coma or vegetative state. Given the slim chance of survival and the fear of lawsuits should she die, it was possible the doctor might not even operate.
This wasn’t what the Wolfs, both only 26, had planned. After graduating from Samford University in Birmingham, they moved to California to chase their dreams. Jay was finishing law school at Pepperdine University in Malibu, while Katherine worked as a model and had joined the Screen Actors Guild. Now the future seemed to be falling apart.
“It could be me losing my wife at 26 to a stroke,” Jay recalled thinking. “That didn’t make any sense.”
But the neurosurgeon decided to operate. During the 16-hour surgery, the deformed blood vessels were removed, along with half the cerebellum area of Katherine’s brain — the body’s coordinating center for muscular movement. Seven cranial nerves, vital to motor and sensory functions, were damaged in the process. Her entire blood volume was replaced five times.
The couple had the support of their church family. More than 100 people prayed for Katherine in the hospital waiting room on the night of her surgery. “My heart stopped every time the waiting room phone rang,” Jay said. “I felt like I really didn’t know what God had for us.”
Katherine lived. Following the surgery, she was placed in a medically induced coma to heal. Less than 24 hours after the operation, she could move her toes and fingers on command — an unheard of recovery for someone in her condition.
“That early sign that she wasn’t paralyzed or brain dead was truly a gift from God, and it provided me a supernatural peace that in time, Katherine would be well again,” Jay said.
Katherine regained consciousness after a month and a half, awakening to a bizarre reality. “I woke up in the hospital wearing a medical diaper, with a feeding tube coming out of my stomach, hooked up to IVs,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? What’s happening?’”
The life-saving surgery caused significant damage to her motor controls. She couldn’t swallow or walk. She had severe double vision and was deaf in one ear. Her right side was weakened and her right hand nearly useless. The right side of her face was paralyzed, marring her physical beauty and leaving her speech slurred.
But Katherine didn’t panic.
“I could have ripped out things and started screaming and crying,” she said. “It could have been really bad. But none of that happened.
“God gave me a supernatural contentment to deal with this.”
Forty days after her surgery, Katherine was moved out of the intensive care unit to begin almost four months of rehabilitation.
Jay credits God for giving her and him the ability to endure.
“God gave us all the strength we needed to deal with something that, on the surface, would be almost impossible to deal with,” he said.
Katherine agreed. She recalled clinging to John 16:33, in which Jesus said, “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (NIV).
“I knew God was in control,” Katherine said.
Jay was constantly by her side. He made such efforts to ensure she got the best possible care that hospital staff called him “Dr. Jay.” Katherine said her husband demonstrated his devotion to her in the most trying of circumstances. “Early on, I told him, ‘Just get away. Go on vacation,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I’m not going to leave. You’re not going on vacation so how can I?’”
After more than five months in the hospital, Katherine moved to Casa Colina Centers for Rehabilitation in Pomona, Calif., where she continued therapy for more than a year, facing the restrictions of her broken body.
Some days were more painful than others.
On her blog, Katherine recounts when she heard James wake up from a nap and say the word “mama” for the first time ever.
“He wanted his mama to get him out of his crib but his mama can’t walk,” Katherine wrote. “I fought back sobs and said as chipper as I could sound, ‘James, Mama can’t come get you right now. Mama loves you so much though.’ I dissolved into sobs.”
But through her suffering, she resolved to face her challenges head-on with a positive attitude.
“I thought to myself, ‘You can do this,’” said Katherine, who believes the Lord made her an optimist. “It’s not easy, it’s not fun and it’s hard but God will give you what you need to survive it.” As an example, the admitted food lover cites the torment of being unable to swallow. She even began to salivate over the baby food she fed James. A speech therapist at the hospital had told Jay that Katherine would never eat again. But he never informed her of the prognosis, and she doggedly performed exercises to help her swallow. On March 25, 2009, she passed a swallowing test and began to eat once more.
“I think there’s something exceptionally powerful about what you think,” Katherine said.
Once considered as good as dead, she has made remarkable progress in a recovery doctors call miraculous. She has learned to walk with a cane and recently had surgery that will, over time, reanimate the right side of her face.
She still faces enormous impairments. She can’t dress herself. Her speech is still slurred. She has very little stamina. She still suffers from double vision and deafness in one ear, and her right hand is still essentially useless. Yet Katherine betrays not a hint of bitterness or self-pity. Cracking jokes about her condition, she shows that her optimism and bubbly personality have not faltered. Neither has her trust in God.
“This is not at all what I had planned, but that’s when God says, ‘My plans are better than your plans. It may be a different path, but it can still be a beautiful path,’” Katherine said.
She sees in her stroke not a curse to be resented but an opportunity to tell others that Jesus is truly enough, no matter what happens.
“Before my stroke, people would not necessarily have listened to what Katherine Wolf had to say about that,” she said. “Now they will.”
As for Katherine’s outward beauty that was marred by the stroke, she has found something much more valuable. “Instead of relying on your outward appearance, you have to go to a deeper place for beauty, rather than saying, ‘How I look is all that matters,’” Katherine said.
Citing 1 Samuel 16:7, which says, “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (NIV), she said, “Perhaps the response to suffering is what real beauty is all about anyway.”
Jay, who said he has learned much about the fragility of life, shows no resentment or anger over the trials he and his wife have endured. Instead he speaks of them as a chance to know Jesus more.
“When we do experience suffering, that is an opportunity to know Christ in a new way, not only to trust Him but to experience Him.
“Suffering is probably one of the most valuable ways in which we know Christ so it’s not wasted,” Jay said. “Nothing is ever wasted for a Christian.” His father admires the way he and Katherine are pointing to Jesus through their trials.
“They have been given the difficult assignment of embracing suffering, and they’ve done it with beauty and grace,” he said. “God has used them to be a platform for Him.”
Jay and Katherine are trusting Christ to sustain them in an uncertain future. “I don’t know much but I know He is good even when things are bad,” Katherine wrote on her blog. “And somehow, that’s enough.”
To read the blog, visit www.katherinewolf.info.
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