A Tailbone Tale

The Reverend Sarah Bronos

At the age of twenty I had a horse-riding accident.  It was the day after Christmas, Boxing Day in my native United Kingdom.  My brother and I went to a local stable where a new mare, Emma, had recently been delivered.  It was decided, against my protestations, that I should ride her.  At best I was only an adequate rider, if that.  I preferred the more sedate horses.  Emma was anything but sedate.  Since there had been a few days of heavy frost, the ground was like iron and certainly not a good day for me to be riding this horse. 

As we were galloping down one field, Emma shied at something in the hedgerow and threw me.  Although shaken, I got back on, and we started up to a gallop again.   A bit later, Emma shied again.  This time I not only had the wind knocked out of me, but I also had a searing pain in my back and couldn’t feel my legs.  The others finally realized I wasn’t in the group and came back to me.  Somehow they managed to get me back into the saddle.

When Emma began to trot again, I started to faint from the pain, so my brother went to get his little sports car.  He drove it over the field to where I was.  They managed to get me into the passenger seat.  As he set off bumping over the uneven ground, more shock waves were sent through my back.  He took me to the hospital and then went to get our parents, who were at a Boxing Day party. 

The doctor said I had fractured my pelvis and damaged my coccyx (the tailbone). (Several years later I found out that a couple of my vertebrae had also been compressed.)  What I remember the most clearly was the doctor saying that when I got older, my coccyx would probably give me trouble.  As a result of my injury I was in a body cast in the hospital for six months – released in time for my 21^st birthday party.

After being discharged from the hospital, I had no pain from the injuries until many years later.  In my early 50s I began to experience pain in the area of my coccyx, and it continued to worsen over the months.  The pain was the most severe on arising in the morning; sitting for any period of time was impossible.  I finally went to the doctor who found nothing wrong on the scans.  I figured I had reached the time in my life the doctor in the UK had talked about and that I would just have to deal with the pain.

During this time I was attending All Saints in Winter Park.  I was scheduled to be a Lay Eucharistic Minister for a healing mission, with Maria Rocha as the guest speaker.  After her teaching, a woman in the audience got up to say that at Maria’s last healing mission, she had thought that the Lord was prompting her to go up for a healing.  However, she hadn’t responded to his prompting.  She exhorted us not to do what she had done – if we felt the Lord’s prompting, we should respond. 

After she had finished speaking, Maria Rocha said, “The Lord is healing someone with a cyst at the base of their spine.  Please come forward for prayer.”  Before I could think, I was up and out of my chair.  As I walked toward her, I was thinking, “I don’t know that I have a cyst at the base of my spine.  Why am I going up here?”  Having started to walk, though, I continued. 

When I was in front of Maria, she asked, “Do you have a cyst at the base of your spine?”  I replied,  “I’m not too sure.”  She laid her hand on my lower back and said a quick prayer, and I went to sit down.  I was so embarrassed that I sat down quickly and heavily, something I realized I shouldn’t be doing as that would cause me to have pain shooting up my spine – but there was no pain! 

I started lifting up slightly from my seat and then sitting back down several times.  I turned to my neighbor and said, “I think the Lord has healed me!”  She called over someone with a microphone and told me I needed to tell the congregation.  Beet red with embarrassment and without complete conviction, I said, “The Lord has healed me.”           

The following morning as I got up, there was only the faintest memory of the pain. In my quiet time I understood the Lord to say, “You have to claim this healing as mine if you are to be completely pain free.”  That day and those following as well as to this day, I do not cease to proclaim that it was the Lord who healed me.  And I have never again experienced any pain in my tailbone since the day He healed me.