Robert and Pam

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Well, super pumped about this series. Wasn't it last week, wasn't that so powerful? Wasn't it incredible? As Doug and Karen were up here and just sharing their story. And we're in this series from death to life. You know scripture says faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. And we overcome the enemy by what? By the blood of the lamb and by the word of our testimony. So today, Steph and I have some dear friends who are joining us on stage today. And this is Robert and Pam Kimball. And they're incredible friends who are truly near and dear to our heart. And they got a story to tell today. So come on, put your hands together and let's welcome our dear friends Robert and Pam. Y'all been here from the beginning. You were here before the beginning of Momentum. And God has done an incredible thing. I just want to get out of the way. I want to invite you guys to just share your story. Okay. Sorry.

You know our story is about our son Robbie back in August of 2012. Robbie was in a horrific auto accident. And we got a call at the office by our daughter to rush up there. So we actually got there before the ambulance got there. Robbie was a trauma, which meant his accident was literally escalated to possible life or death. At any rate, we got there. I dropped Pam by the door and I went to park the car. And Pam? I actually went to the side of the ambulance door. I'm not sure you're supposed to go through that space, but I did. And a nurse grabbed me and she said, we are getting him settled. Do you want to see him? And I said, of course I do. So she took me into the room where they were prepping Robbie for being admitted and also tests. And I just laid my hand on his head and I laid my other hand on his chest and I just cried out to God to heal my son on this side of heaven. I asked him to send legions and legions of angels to surround and protect Robbie while he was there. So after Jesus and I finished talking, I gave my son specific instructions, and that was to fight this with everything that he had in him to not leave us.

And then she escorted me out of the room and I met back up with Robert at that point. Yeah, they put us in the family room and they went and took Robbie back and did CT scans. So after the CT scans, the brain surgeon and some other medical staff brought us into the little room. I don't know if any of y'all have ever been in the little room. It's not a great place to be. Anyway, the doctor proceeded to tell me what he was going to do to my son. He said, we're going to remove his skeletal cap. put that on ice, your son has a subdermal brain bleed, and what else? Which meant that it was on the inside of his brain and it was bleeding profusely. Robbie also had three skull fractures in the back of his head, multiple bruising on both sides and in the frontal lobe and additional bleeding, but the one that they were the most concerned with was the deep tissue. And since then, I've gone back and look at the CT scans and basically Robbie's entire skull was filled with blood and was dwelling. So he was absolutely critical. And looking back now, it even said, there's a 50-50 chance he's gonna make it. Anyway, for those of you that don't know, Robbie was, it was a skateboard accident actually. He was hanging onto the back of a pickup truck

going 30 miles an hour on a skateboard where the skateboard went into a speed wobble. He was projected off the board and landed on his head. One of the interesting takeaways for me was bleeding on the ground, he wakes up, epixelated, runs to the first house, beats on the door. Yeah. Lady opened up the door. He started up. Screamed for his mother. He says, I need my mom, I need my mom. And so if you don't know how important you are to your children, mothers are important just like dads are important. They take care of us, they care for us. And he knew he was hurt and he knew he needed his mom. Anyway, after he tells us what he's gonna do, I got to thinking about it and I'm like, Jesus, you saved us, pray specifically. So I looked that doctor in his eyes and his eyes were bouncing and jumping. And I said, Doc, tell me how to pray for my son. And he looked back at me and he says, well, just to caution you, there is a possibility that he will not survive this operation, so just pray that we do a good job. Sorry. Anyway, so we went outside of the,

we finished that conversation, went outside of the little room. They walked us back to the family room and to our surprise, when we opened up the door, there was already 57 people, friends, family, church members that had a trip that's less than one hour from the accident. Pastor Jimmy Winton was there from Momentum. He pulled us all together, we all held hands and each one of those 57 people prayed for my son. And you just can't say enough about intercessory prayer. You know, if somebody asks you to pray for them, don't tell them that you're just gonna pray for them, just stop right now and do it, right now. Amen. I believe that every one of those 57 prayers that was spoken was carried by an angel to the throne of Jesus. They were like, what about Robby? What about Robby? What about Robby? At any rate, after that, there was like a calmness came over me. You know, the Bible talks about this peace that defies all understanding. It just came over me and I felt it was gonna be okay. I told Payne, it's gonna be okay. My son's in brain surgery, you know.

Payne was anything but okay. But it was so peaceful that I'm walking around the room chatting up people, telling jokes. I'm like, this is crazy. Anyway, two and a half hours later, the brain surgeon brought us back into the little room. He says, you know, I don't know what was up with that CT scan. But as soon as we started to cut his skull off, we immediately discovered the brain bleed. And it was in between the dermal, which is a... Turned it off. Sorry, I'm new at this. Hello. These things are tricky. The antenna's at the bottom, so as soon as you grab the bottom, it goes out. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. The brain bleed was in between the dermal, which is the lining that covers your brain and the skull.

So they were immediately able to encapsulate the bleed and sew him back up. He says, you know, you got a long road to hoe yet, but this is good news. And I said, Doc, this is a miracle. Real quick, Robert, what did the doc say about the brain? Yeah, he said the brain was the most important organ that we have and the one we absolutely know the least about. And I remember asking him, Doc, how do you go inside somebody's brain? He said, that's a really good question. We just kind of fish down in the brain till we see blood squirting and we try to stop it. So as we walked outside the little room, I remember thinking to myself, seeing his eyes bounce and jump all over the place. I was like, okay, Jesus, you know, you're going to have to do the surgery. You saw that guy's eyes. Anyway. You prayed it just like that, too. I did. Just like that. Just like that. Anyway, Pam, why don't you? We get to the room. They moved Robbie up. They told us that he was still critical. We get to the room and I see there's another doctor who comes in who's waiting on Robbie. And he says, you know, Robert and those guys are still celebrating. Mama wasn't quite there yet. And I was very thankful and overwhelmed for the miracle that Robbie was still alive. And so we get to the room and they're celebrating and the doctor says, I don't know what you're celebrating for because he may not make it through the night and he might not ever walk out those doors.

So we were like, we knew, we knew our God already had this. We had already seen several miracles. I knew he wouldn't take us that far without all the way. And so that night I had asked the doctor as well, I said, you know, how do we pray for Robbie? And he said, for a complete brain healing that my family and I pray and we'll pray for Robbie every day as long as he's here for a complete brain healing. So that's what we did. That same doctor told us that for me to go outside and look at the stars in the sky and for every star that I saw that I could count, that is what medicine does not know about the brain. And at some point, medicine ends and God takes over. And that's where we were right then. So we had a rollercoaster few days, telling you, I think that for a solid week, they said the next 24 hours, the next 24 hours, but, um, on, uh, at the 72, almost a four day mark, uh, that same doctor had finally said, I think he might make it. And, uh, that happened to be Robbie's birthday. Yeah. It was his birthday. Now, Robbie, keep in mind, he was still in a coma. Uh, we brought a cake in, lit candles. Uh, he was on the third floor, but we were on the second and we sang loud and proud. And I'm pretty sure he heard us. So you were there. Gavin was there and staff was like, yeah, he's bouncing on the chairs and diapers. It's a big birthday too. Yeah. It wasn't just any birthday. Yeah. It was the 16th birthday.

Yeah. So, uh, we were celebrating that he was still alive. Yeah. And that he was recovering and that from 15 to 16 is a milestone birthday, but this one was stacked. During that, uh, first 72 hours, I remember there was a point. Yeah, they had left a hole in his head so his brain could swell. Anyway, he'd gotten a fever. His ICP's, internal brain cranial pressure, was like way off the charts. And Pam starts hitting social media telling that we need prayer and we need it now. And it was a Sunday. And I remember Pastor Tim's doctor, Sunday service at church, everybody prayed for Robbie again, dispatched all those angels up to heaven. What about Robbie? What about Robbie? But literally, literally in 15 minutes, we saw those things that were spiked, his fever, these internal brain pressure things, just come down to subnormal. We saw it right in front of our eyes. Right. So Robbie wakes up. That was on September 3rd. And Robbie was starting to wake up. And eventually, this was like on day 9, 10, and 11, Robbie was waking up. And there's a scale that's called a Rancho scale,

and it goes from one to five. One being waking up in kind of a vegetation state, not much activity. And Robbie woke up in a war, which is very, he was in fight or flight, and he was ready to leave. He was ready to get out of there. He wanted to walk. He was filled with anxiety. His body was coming back online. One of the physicians that actually explained it, like when you have a severe traumatic brain injury like Robbie had, that it's like turning off your computer. So when they wake up, they have to reboot that computer, and it rewires itself. And as it's rewiring, it will find ways around the damage and things like that. They just didn't know how Robbie was going to wake up. And they were a little bit surprised. At Sacred Heart, Robbie was 6'2 and 200 pounds. So he was a lot bigger than their normal pediatric ICU patients. And so he was up. He wanted to leave. He made that apparent. And the doctor had said, we're trying to get him into Atlanta, into Children's in Atlanta, but there are 12 people ahead of him. And with his condition and the way he is, we just want to make sure that he's safe. We don't want him to re-injure himself.

And so that was on the morning of September 11. And later that afternoon, he said, Robbie's been accepted to Atlanta. He got to sleep in the morning. Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Yeah, when Robbie woke up, he was agitated. He was wild. And he was a danger to himself. Honestly, we didn't sleep for 24 hours. We were around his bed. The way the doctor described it is, if you drop an egg once, it cracks. It's still a good egg. You drop it twice, it's over. So we stayed up around the clock making sure he didn't come out of his bed. And wild and agitated, but he was still alive. Wild and agitated, I promise you, it was a minute-by-minute thing. Anyway, one of the super cool things is that when the nurses came to me, well, several of the medical staff came to me. But they said, we've seen your faith around your son. And literally, when we walk in the room,

there's something different. One of the nurses told me that she recommitted her life just seeing what happened. I remember Pastor Ted came up with some other pastors. You could only bring one person back into ICU. And we got like five people. So we're going to ICU to pray over Robbie, right? And the nurse says, hey, Robert, stop. that to bring in one person. I said, no ma'am, you said I could bring my pastors. It's like, how many pastors do you have? Anyway, we got to Elena, Robbie, literally, I think you said you talked to Pastor Tim and his… Tim told me once in the hospital already, I think he knew that my mama's heart wasn't there, that I was 100% sure that everything was going to work out. And I remember Tim looked at me and he said, God told me that Robbie's recovery was going to be exponential. And I didn't really understand what he meant by that until Robbie woke up. And then on the way to leaving in Atlanta, I saw Tim was the last person I saw before we got in the car. And he had actually said that again to me. And he didn't say it just once, he repeated it. And so I was like, okay, all right, you've told me this three times. I'm going to believe it. And we get to Atlanta and Robbie's up. He's walking everywhere. Three days later, Robbie is outside playing basketball. Yeah. He's shooting hoops. Yeah. They told us when we went to Atlanta, it'd be 12 to 18 months that we need to prepare to move there. This was still not over. He was playing basketball in three days. We were looking at, okay, do we move to Atlanta? Do we stay? How long are we going to be here? They just did not know. So Robbie was playing basketball in three days. On October 2nd, they said he's doing well enough that you can get back to Pensacola for the weekend. And then you have to be back in day rehab on Tuesday. So we came home, we went to church. It was incredible just to be back in Pensacola and try to settle in at home. And then we went back to day rehab and Robbie flew through day rehab. And what they told us was going to take 12 to 18 months. Tim was absolutely correct. We were home by October 20th.

We got to Atlanta. Robbie didn't know how to talk. He didn't know how to walk. He literally went from 15, 16 years old to one and then back up, which was kind of neat in a weird way because it gave us an opportunity just to re-fall in love with our son all over again. Because he went to a baby and then back to a teen. Babies are easier to love than teens. And on some occasions, we saw one to six or 10 to 12 in a matter of an hour. Yeah. So it was very, very fast. Yeah. At some point when we're in Atlanta, I realized that first of all, God's so multidimensional. Tim was talking to Pam about Robbie's recovery being exponential. I'm talking to other people and they're saying it's going to be miraculous. Just watch. People literally were praying and calling me and telling me, listen, this is what your son's going through right now when he was in a coma. It occurred to me that Robbie didn't know his own story and all the miracles that had taken place and went on. So me, Bree, his sister and Pam were sitting there and I was like, well, I got to tell him the story. So I start telling him the same story I'm telling you. And at the end of telling him the story, I remember a big old alligator tears welled up in his eyes. And he looked at me and he said, dad, he said, how many people did you say was in that room praying for me? I said, boy, there was 57 people praying for you in that room. He says, well, dad, did you know they took exactly 57 staples out of my skull? I said, God's cool like that. And that's your confirmation. What did it leave you with, Pam? What was your? The one thing that I absolutely got out of this entire situation with going through this with Robbie was that we were helpless. There's not anything that we could have done, nothing. But we were never hopeless because we had Jesus. And Tim, hope has a name. It is Jesus. You know my last thought was this, God didn't just walk with us. He didn't just carry us. He didn't just flex. He just took over. And my resounding thought was, who is this God? Not a question mark, but an explanation mark. That's our story. That's so, so powerful. Thank you guys. Thank y'all for sharing that with us. That's so powerful. And I think we have a picture and a video of Robbie. So this is Robbie. And you know, it hits different when it's your loved one, when it's your son, your only son,

kind of like the story last week with Cole. And if you missed last week, go watch that. But when that happened to Cole, these guys had already walked through that. They'd walked through this. They were there to help Doug and K-Star. But look, it doesn't just end here. We got Robbie playing basketball in Atlanta. And this was, was this the third day? Third day in Atlanta. So watch this. So they're telling them, get ready for like almost two years to be in Atlanta. So you guys are thinking we're going to move to Atlanta. Like we got to figure this out. We got a business here. You know, I mean, when, when tragedy and emergency strikes, right? Like, like you got to stop what you're doing, but everything keeps going also. And what I learned from you guys is Pam, I never saw anyone do it better since or after the way you updated Facebook, the way that you let us know. Like I couldn't pronounce half the words.