JACKSON, Miss. — Hal Hart, a man whose faith got him healed of Cancer.
So much so he trusted God to wash away the Stage 4 bone cancer and metastatic lung cancer that consumed his torso, lodged a golfball-sized tumor in his neck, robbed his compact frame of 30 pounds, and wracked his body with pain so intense he couldn’t bend over.
Told by his Jackson oncologist in late 2012 that the cancer was inoperable, the Byram resident traveled with wife Peggy to the famed M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, just to make sure.
“I wanted to be able to say I’d been to the best,” said Hart, an orthopedic technologist at Mississippi Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center.
He went to M.D. Anderson on Jan. 17 and was handed a scan showing the dark marks of his cancer splotched from his neck to his pelvis. Hart went back home, grabbed the hands of Peggy and their two sons and prayed. He went to his mother’s house. She prayed with him.
“She said, ‘Lord, you gave me Hal. I am giving him back to you,’ ” Hart remembered.
Reluctantly, he began taking a medication that is no cure for cancer but often buys time for patients with his form of the disease. He returned to M.D. Anderson April 11.
His scan was clear.
He had another in July: Clear.
“Hal is a walking miracle. He is a walking miracle,” says Bob Lodes, longtime MSMOC administrator, who admittedly is not a doctor.
Here is Hart’s story of twice defying cancer, the first time through surgery and the second time through his belief that God would heal him if medicine could not.
Hart grew up on Jackson’s Cohea Street, poor in possessions but not in spirit. “I’m a boy who came up in a shotgun house, and you could see the dirt on the floor,” said Hart, 49.
“You can grow up in the ghetto, but the ghetto doesn’t have to grow in you.”
Someone adopted his family, Hart said: Dr. J.O. Manning, one of MSMOC’s founders and an orthopedic surgeon. “My mom was his maid. She rode the city bus to work for more than 30 years,” Hart said.
The family moved to Short Davis Street, near Manning’s clinic which then was located near downtown. “I started picking up paper at the clinic” and tending to the grounds, Hart said. “That led me to come here.”
