“But I Overcame”

In 1997, Managua Latter-day Saint Josefa Correa’s faith and health were tested in an excruciating accident. A worker on the roof of her house called down to Josefa telling her that he had finished something, and, curious, she began to climb the ladder to see. Unfortunately, the ground was loose from recent rain, and the ladder began to fall. Josefa scrambled to stabilize herself against the wall but fell from the ladder’s sixth step, slamming into the ground below. “My foot broke like a cracker,” she said. “When I was on the ground, I saw that my foot was completely broken[,] with an open wound.”

Because there was a transportation strike in the city, the streets were barricaded, and the hospitals empty of doctors. Somehow, rescuers transported Josefa to a hospital with medical personnel. They immediately began a four-hour operation on her foot, stitching it back together.

After 15 days in the hospital, Josefa was close to dying from infection. Because she was allergic to penicillin, the doctors could not give her the antibiotics she needed to fight the infection. They wanted to amputate. By day 20, Josefa thought her life was about to end. “I was so desperate that I was already thinking about death,” she said. That same day, her son arrived, and the doctor told him that his mother would slowly die from the leg amputation required to stop the spread of infection.

Josefa had sent for the missionaries to give her a blessing, but they had not come. “I was very mad,” she said. The missionaries finally arrived just hours before she was to undergo the operation. “I told them, why had they come if I no longer needed them because I was already going to die?” The missionaries assured Josefa that she would live, telling her the story of a soccer athlete who had broken his foot playing but later recovered and returned to the pitch. They gave her a blessing before leaving the hospital.

“I thought about the blessing they had given me, and I thought this was the answer from our Heavenly Father,” Josefa said. She called the doctors in and told them she wanted to take penicillin. After they gave her the first shot, Josefa experienced a terrible reaction for almost two hours. “I felt that something had swallowed me and that I was going into a deep hole, but I overcame,” she said.

Fourteen injections and 10 days later, Josefa returned home. It took her a year to heal. “I was in a wheelchair, walker, and cane, but nevertheless, I always attended church, enjoying it with a broken, stitched-up foot. Each day I give thanks to our Heavenly Father, the missionaries, and the doctors who attended me.” Three years after the accident, she could walk without pain, even in high heels. “I know that this is a miracle He did for me,” Josefa said.