Cure For Life

May’s baptism almost killed her. Bob Donaldson was there.

Would someone get oxygen for May? Quickly!” May Atkinson wasn’t on an operating table, nor even in a hospital bed. She’d just stepped into the baptismal font of her Port Macquarie, NSW, church. And the request hadn’t come from a doctor, but the minister waiting to baptise her.

Despite the water in the font being heated, it was still “a shock to the system,” May recalls. “With my chronic emphysema, it took all my breath away!”

But May was determined. “The Lord had performed a miracle so that I could be baptised. In fact, it’s a miracle I’m alive to tell the tale,” she says.

May was born at Burnt Bridge, near Kempsey, NSW, on an 800-acre property granted to her great-grandfather for his services as an Aboriginal tracker. With her family, she attended a church on the property. She left school at 15, and married the next year. The couple moved to Sydney, where things soon started to go wrong. She began to drink too much and smoked heavily, which was to take her close to dying later.
“We left God and church behind in Kempsey,” she says.

Her family life was unhappy, and eventually she divorced. She remarried, but it was no better, so she left her younger children with a sister and “roamed around Victoria and NSW for many years.”
“I lived like a gipsy,” she admits. “Although I knew what was right, I wouldn’t give in. The devil had me, and I had to nearly die before I came to my senses.

“In September 2001, I was admitted to the Port Macquarie Hospital with chronic emphysema, gasping for every breath. One night in a dream I saw a man leading me up some steps. There was also a lady trying to pull me back. They were arguing over me.
“I took it as a sign that God was calling me, so I asked for an Aboriginal minister to visit me. He came, then introduced me to a retired minister in Port Macquarie.

“Because of an oxygen mask, I could only communicate by writing short messages. He read the Bible and prayed. He assured me God never gives up on us. After I got out of hospital, he came to my home every week to study the Bible. Many of the things I’d learned as a child came back to me.”

n But May’s health was still failing and she had more stays in hospital until another severe attack of emphysema in June 2002.
“It was much worse than the first time. I was in and out of the ICU. The doctors had actually given up hope. Before sending me to the ICU, they told me to call in my family to say goodbye! But I’d told God that I wanted to be baptised.”
May was anointed, according to the biblical instruction, in a brief ceremony. She eventually recovered enough to be discharged. “They call me ‘the miracle lady,’” she beams, “the doctors included.”

As her baptism day approached, she was nervous and excited. “It was the day I’d prayed for,” she says, “but the water in the font wasn’t as warm as I’d anticipated, so I started gasping for air.”

Which was when the officiating minister called for the portable oxygen supply, administered by a nurse, while the 200-strong congregation sang May’s favourite hymn, oblivious to the drama behind the drawn font curtains.

“All I needed was five or six puffs!” says May, who since that day hasn’t been back to hospital. (However, she does keep an oxygen concentrator handy.)
“Now, I’m praying for my family,” she says. “They’ve seen ‘the wages’ of my sin. It isn’t worth it. I was looking for happiness and only found misery.
“I thank the Lord that He protected me and was so patient with me all that time I was wandering aimlessly away from Him.”

Articles of interest: