"My skin was burning as if someone had doused it with gasoline and then threw a match on it," says Dr. Nasir Saddiki, the founder of Wisdom Ministries. "I felt like I was on fire from my inside."
In a sterile room on the eighth floor of the hospital, his doctor informed him "the blisters are multiplying so fast I can literally watch them grow. Your body has stopped fighting back."
The next day he contracted chicken pox and doctors placed him in strict isolation. His temperature soared to 107.6 degrees, a life-threatening level high enough to leave his brain permanently damaged.
For days he continued to deteriorate. "My nerve endings became so inflamed that even a single hair drifting across my skin sent shock waves of fire rippling through my body," he says.
At 34, Dr. Saddiki had already earned his first million dollars, but he wasn't prepared to handle his own mortality. "In facing death I felt nothing but weakness and outright terror. I didn't have the slightest idea what might await me on the other side. I had been raised as a devout Moslem and I had been taught that Allah was a god who did not heal sickness. I thought that my only hope was in medicine."
As Dr. Saddiki slipped close to death, he became listless and unresponsive, yet he could hear his doctors' conversations. "His immune system has simply shut down" one of them said."
"He's dying," another doctor stated. "His immune system must be compromised by AIDS."
I don't have AIDS, Dr. Saddiki wanted to say, but was unable to speak. The full weight of their remarks hit him like a sledgehammer. If they had given up hope, where did that leave him?
Doctors delivered the bad news to his business partner. "In a few hours he'll be dead," they informed him. "If by some miracle he lives he'll be blind in his right eye, deaf in his right ear, paralyzed on his right side and severely brain damaged." Then they walked out of the room, leaving him alone.
"I suddenly felt like a drowning man going down for the third time," Dr. Saddiki says. "Gathering what little strength I still had I was barely able to whisper, 'God if you are real do not let me die.'"
Then in the middle of the night, something remarkable happened. He awoke suddenly to find a m an standing at the foot of his bed. "I was shocked because rays of light emanated from him, which allowed me to see his body in my pitch-black room.
Mark Ellis is a senior correspondent for ASSIST News Service and the founder of www.Godreports.com. He is available to speak to groups about the plight of the church in restricted countries, to share stories and testimonies from the mission field, and to preach the gospel. mark@Godreports.com
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