In 2016, after suffering a seizure, Katie Steele got the worst news – she had a brain tumor & had to undergo extensive surgery. Just months later, Katie & her husband Brian were shot at during a neighborhood dispute, injuring the same spot where they had removed Katie's tumor..
Yet, they truly could have never expected what would come next. In this incredible, candid interview, the Steele's share first-hand how God provided for them and worked a miracle in the midst of their story.
Katie Steele
My name is Katie Steele.
Brian Steele
And I'm Brian Steele. We've been married for six years
Katie Steele
It was the summer of 2016. We were in Lake Tahoe hiking – we love to hike. And we were about three-quarters of a mile into the hike when I started to feel really dizzy. I just remember leaning forward, putting my hand on a tree, and saying out loud to my brother-in-law. "I'm feeling dizzy.", and then I was down.
I woke up, and I see people looking down at me, Brian's there now and he's helping me get to my feet – I'm disoriented and then I see firemen coming up the trail, and I'm thinking to myself, like what, what just happened, and – oh, I must be pregnant!
Brian Steele
Well, she had a seizure. And, and she was out for two minutes. But when we got to the emergency room, we got the worst news possible.
Katie Steele
They said, "Katie, there's a 1% chance that you would have anything going on in your brain, but since you aren't pregnant, let's just take a scan of your brain", and the doctor came back with a very different countenance – and he said, "You're that 1%" and we just found out that I had a brain tumor.
Brian Steele
A walnut sized tumor was wrapped around her pituitary gland, and her optical nerve. It was like the whole world just turned upside down, the carpet is pulled out from underneath us.
Katie Steele
By God's grace, we got into the top neurosurgeon, arguably in the world for the kind of tumor that I had.
Brian Steele
It was going to be a nine and a half-hour long surgery, and the last thing I remembered before she got wheeled into the surgery center was taking her wedding ring and holding it. So I had her wedding ring next to mine and just didn't know what was gonna happen.
Katie Steele
Well, praise the Lord, I woke up. The surgery was a total success, and they got the whole tumor, and we were now facing recovery time.
I went from not being able to really move to walking – and then we thought, wow, why don't we start training for this run that we really enjoy doing called the Ragnar, which is a 200-mile race from the peace portal arch to South Langley.
We started to train, I went from being able to walk around that floor at the hospital, to gaining strength to walk from my bed downstairs, to around the neighborhood, and then eventually to running and running miles.
So it's it's race day, and we've got a great team and we start running – it was difficult, and it was fun. We were done with our portion and one of our dear friends, he knows that I love eagles. Eagles remind me of Jesus's love for me personally, so the opportunity to see Eagles after meeting this milestone was such a gift. And so we had that opportunity. So we went down, not knowing that we were walking into a neighbor dispute.
Brian Steele
We were just randomly there and this guy who'd had a long-running dispute with his neighbor just flipped his lid and started shooting the pellet gun to the crowd of us on the team. All of a sudden, I hear Katie screaming, "Ow, ow ow!" and I just like I lost it – I was like, "You shot my wife! She had brain surgery and you shot her!", and it was terrible. We went to the emergency room – the doctor checked her out and it seemed like everything was okay. He said "Yeah, you're going to be sore for a little while, and we thought that was it.
Months later, Katie's head still hurts and it's not getting better, so we just happen to have a schedule for a normal checkup following the brain surgery. Like 30 seconds into to the MRI, they stopped and said "Something is wrong."
Katie Steele
They pulled me out so fast. It felt like a balloon was rubbing against my head like static electricity. They pulled me out and said "Oh, you've got an artifact. You've got metal in your head. What happened?" and we had to go through another series of imaging to find that while the pellet is still in my head, the only way to get it out was to surgically remove it. At that time when they were in my head, they would decide if they should take the plate out because the pellet was burrowed in one of four plates that was fusing my skull back together.
Brian Steele
We believe that plate saved Katie's life – it's about the size of a nickel and, and the pellet hit right in the middle of it. It dented the plate and it saved her life. If it was over by a quarter of an inch more, it very easily could have hit this soft spot and gone into her brain. It could have been a very different situation.
Katie Steele
You know, something that really impacted me was our community – we had meals, we had words of encouragement, so many people were praying for us, and we did not feel alone. That is, I think, a miracle, how the Lord desires us to be one. Right?
As the Father and Son are one, so the world will know that Jesus was sent. We got to experience that miracle of oneness in a way that is very rare, and I ache for that.
Brian Steele
When we think about what was miraculous about the story, part of it was miraculous that she survived the brain tumor and part of it was miraculous that she survived and this teeny little plate ended up saving her life. It's not like "She got a brain tumor, and she got shot, now everything's better, because everything isn't better."
Katie Steele
But he [God] is good.
Brian Steele
But the Lord is good – I think that's that's some of the miracle of the story. We find that he [God] is good, even though everything isn't better.