At the hospital doctors took inventory of her injuries. Her ring finger was hanging on by a small piece of skin. Her hand was split open, and she sustained serious injuries to her head, neck and back. Part of her scalp had been torn away, and several teeth had been cracked. But of all the injuries, the damage to her right hand was the worst. Two knuckles were reduced to powder and bone fragments, and her hand had to be held together by three metal pins. Six months after the attack, she still couldn’t use her hand.
“I felt and looked worse than hopeless, with a shaved top of my head, totally red, swollen eyes, a gash on my face, a weird-looking right hand, terrorizing fear and barely enough energy to get dressed in the morning,” she says.
The attack also left her with severe emotional pain as it compounded the loss of her mother, brother and grandfather, who all died when she was a child. It took about nine months of deep inner healing combined with juicing, detoxing, vitamin-mineral IVs and physical therapy for her to recover from the physical and mental effects of the attack. And though she followed the advice of a nutritionally-minded physician, took nutritional supplements and ate a “near-perfect” diet, she knows her knuckles reformed primarily because of prayer.
After her recovery, she attended Bastyr University, a leading naturopathic college. Representatives from the Juiceman company visited the campus looking for a student to help write a booklet about juicing to be included with the juicers. She helped write the booklet and later started free seminars for the company, where she shared her story of healing.
Through her affiliation with Juiceman, she became known as The Juice Lady, and the connection opened other doors, including her work with QVC and boxing champ George Foreman.
Calbom, whose father was a healing evangelist until her mother died of cancer when Calbom was 6, says she “absolutely” believes in divine healing. But she says there’s a flip side.
She has repeatedly seen people who are healed return to their old lifestyles and get sick again. Many times people say that’s because the person didn’t stand in faith. “But nobody ever addressed what made them sick in the first place,” she says. “What was it in their lifestyle? If you continue on in the lifestyle that made you sick, you’ll get sick again.
“That’s what God has put so much on my heart—that He’s given us these things for our healing, but it’s real, whole food, not things that manufacturers and big plants have tampered with. If we keep putting that in our bodies, it can only produce illness. It cannot produce health. We weren’t designed for it. So I see prayer and doing the right things, as far as our diet goes, go hand in hand.”
