Healing Testimony of Victor G. Akroush
When Marian Nazar first set foot in her son Victor’s future in-laws’ home, the first thing she saw there was a statue of Saint Sharbel. Right away, she asked, “Rosie, could you get me one of those?” and Rosie, Victor’s future wife, said, “Of course!” and so it happened. Rosie’s father traveled to Lebanon, and he brought back a statue of St. Sharbel for Marian. From that point onward, Marian grew increasingly drawn to St. Sharbel, getting to know him more by reading about him on the internet. Her faith in his intercession grew because he had always been especially close to the Virgin Mary, and she herself always told people to “Pray the rosary,” which is her favorite prayer. This new relationship would only deepen with time.
In 2016, Victor and Rosie were married, and by God’s grace they were very happy with each other. Yet only a few months after their wedding––around July 2017––Victor started experiencing very intense stomach pains upon exertion. Since he was a very healthy man, he did not think too much of it until the pains became more frequent and intense. His wife was new to the United States from Canada, so she was unfamiliar with the healthcare system in their country. She thought to reach out to Victor’s sister Jumana, who works in the medical field, and they scheduled an emergency appointment with the first gastroenterologist available.
The day of the appointment, the doctor ordered routine blood work and told Victor that he would follow up with him once the results came in. No more than two days later, on August 3, 2017, Victor received a call from his doctor with critical news. The doctor informed Victor that his creatinine level was abnormally high and that he believed he was experiencing kidney failure. Victor was at work at the time, in the middle of a motorcycle repair. The doctor ordered Victor to, "drop whatever he was doing and head to the nearest emergency room immediately.” Victor, being in such disbelief, picked up the phone to call his sister Jumana and tell her what the doctor said. He initially refused to go to the emergency room since he had a lot of work to do, but Jumana insisted on accompanying him straight to the hospital. Victor was shocked to receive this devastating news. Victor’s blood pressure was 222/120 when he got to the emergency room, which was alarming for a 38-year-old man. He was at high risk for a stroke.
The emergency room staff repeated Victor's blood work, and, surely enough, all of his kidney functions were abnormal. Victor was immediately admitted to the intensive care unit, and a few blood pressure IV medications were started. Once Victor’s blood pressure was stable, more diagnostic testing was performed. At this time, two nephrologists came into the room to inform Victor, Rosie, and Jumana that Victor’s kidneys were failing, and he needed to act immediately. He was left to decide between two dialysis options, as both kidneys were only functioning at ten percent, until he could find a new kidney to have transplanted. If left in his current state, the condition of his kidneys would eventually jeopardize his life. The doctors gave him three options: hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, or do “nothing.” Victor decided to go with option three, declining any treatment, explaining to his mother, “Mom, I prefer not to be here if I have to spend the rest of my life on dialysis,” after seeing what dialysis patients go through.
His wife Rosie, meanwhile, had always had a deep relationship with Saint Sharbel, and she immediately started her prayers by asking for his intercession and for the grace of a miracle. And sure enough, within 15 minutes of her first petitions, Victor changed his mind and consented to go on dialysis. Meanwhile, he was put on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, though doctors informed him that the transplant waiting list was between 7 and 10 years.
His mother, who had been a single parent since her husband’s passing, felt she had no choice but to hide her tears and be strong for her son. Her only outlet was to sit in front of St. Sharbel’s statue, the one gifted by Victor’s in-laws, and cry beggingly at home.
Victor started at-home dialysis from 8pm to 8am (12 hours) every day, and he was to remain on dialysis until he could receive a kidney transplant. As far as a new kidney was concerned, he had two options: either receive a kidney transplant from a cadaver (recently deceased donor), which he did not want, or a family member would have to get tested for kidney compatibility. Though Victor and Rosie had a big family that was very willing to help, their best bet was one of Victor’s three siblings, as Victor is the oldest of four children (himself, Jumana, Linda, and Fadi). For this reason, his youngest sibling, Fadi, started the 10-step kidney donor process. Fadi and Victor had the same blood type, and everything was going fine until Fadi reached step 8. At this point, the doctors discovered that Fadi was borderline diabetic and therefore could not be a donor. Timing, however, was important, as Victor’s kidney function had decreased even further; his kidneys were operating at only 5% together, and the process was very hard on everyone.
Recognizing this, Jumana, Victor’s oldest sister (the nurse) started looking for different programs to find her brother a kidney. During this process, she came across the Kidney Paired Exchange program, which involves two living donors and two recipients. If the recipient from one pair is compatible with the donor from the other pair, and vice versa, the transplant center may arrange for a "swap" that would enable two simultaneous transplants to take place. Since Jumana’s blood type was not compatible with Victor’s, she signed up for that program and started testing in the hopes of swapping with another pair. And indeed, she matched with a recipient in Wisconsin, and all she needed now was a donor for Victor to exchange with.
Everyone in both Victor and Rosie’s families was praying to St. Sharbel.
Every night after supper, at 6pm, Rosie’s parents in Montreal had the habit of kneeling and praying at their home shrine, so they devoted special prayers for Victor so that Jumana’s swap would work and he wouldn’t have to wait 7-10 years for a cadaver kidney, as it was originally thought, all the while surviving on dialysis. Rosie’s dad made a special trip to Lebanon, and before going anywhere, he went to visit St. Sharbel’s tomb to pray for Victor’s healing and brought back some blessed oil.
During the same period, Rosie’s aunt Victoria in Lebanon who would always––rain or shine––take the public bus up to Annaya to partake in the monthly procession to St. Sharbel’s tomb on every 22nd of the month, met Hilani Abi Khalil, who was healed by St. Sharbel’s intercession and had miraculous formations of incense on her left hand and carried Christ’s stigmata. The two women prayed together for Victor’s healing, and Victoria carried on praying daily for him within her community, transporting a statue of St. Sharbel from house to house to beg his intercession. Victor’s great aunt, a Franciscan nun, also heard about his struggle and started praying for him and sharing the novena to St. Sharbel with his mother, Marian, who also prayed it in addition to a novena to St. Rita. Marian also mobilized her priest, Father Drummond of St. Michael's Parish in Annandale, VA, the Legion of Mary, and the Legion of St. Thomas, and Victor’s grandmother prayed the novena in front of her own statue of St. Sharbel, saying, “O Saint Sharbel, you see all people, this is my daughter’s son. They were recently married, they want kids. Please, try to see him. I beg you to see him.”
She would stay up late every night and pray from his novena. Then, on March 13, 2018, 7 months after Victor’s diagnosis and only 2 months after his sister, Jumana, had started the kidney swap process and matched, Rosie received two phone calls.
The first was to let her know of her dear cousin Rita’s passing. Rita had died in Lebanon, and being a devotee to St. Sharbel who loved Victor, Rosie immediately prayed to her to ask for St. Sharbel’s intercession and to “directly” ask the Virgin Mary for Victor’s healing as soon as she got to Heaven.
Two hours later, the second phone call came: a match was found for Victor––an anonymous 23-year-old donor in Silver Spring, MD—and the transplant was to take place on April 10th. What was striking was the fact that this donor was not actually part of the Kidney Paired Exchange program at all. He was a young man who had simply walked into the hospital one day and told the staff, “I just want to save a life.” He came into the hospital for no other purpose than to donate his kidney; he didn’t have anything to do with the program nor did he know Victor or anyone in his family, and his kidney matched with Victor’s better than his own brother’s. In fact, of the millions of people on the waiting list database, Victor was the only match for this man’s kidney in the United States. When asked why he would do such a thing, the young man simply said, “I only need one kidney to live, and I’d like to give the other one to save someone else’s life.” Since he has opted to remain anonymous, the family only met him later on, when they reached out to him through the hospital and he replied back with his phone number and the desire to connect. His name is Jesse, and he’s Jewish.
Many signs revealed to Marian that Jesse was God-sent. On the day of surgery, the moment a tall, curly-haired young man walked into the hospital with his mother, Marian felt in her heart that this person she had never seen before was the one coming to save her son’s life. It turned out that she was right; the young man she’d noticed in the hallway happened to be her son’s donor-to-be. Knowing that both Jumana and Victor intended to undergo surgery that day, the nurse sitting next to Marian also took out an icon of the Holy Family and gave it to her, saying, “I never usually do this, but I feel you and have great affection for you, and I would like to give you this icon that my brother, a Catholic priest, gave me to protect my own family.” At that time, Marian was very emotional: she had a son desperately needing a kidney transplant, a daughter who was undergoing surgery to donate her own kidney, and a total stranger who stepped up out of nowhere to save a life…and who matched exactly with her son in all tests: the blood type, the tissue type, the antibodies and the serum crossmatch.
Victor’s whole story is really hard to believe. How can someone in his situation not be in excruciating pain at all times? How could it be that he didn’t feel anything and kept a smile on his face, stayed functional and aware of everything? He was relatively asymptomatic, so much so that if it weren’t for the initial pains and the blood work, no one would have even suspected his kidneys were failing––he had no problems with urination or walking whatsoever. He even kept working at his job until the very last minute when he was called for the transplant.
How could he find such a perfect donor so quickly––7 months instead of 7 years was practically unheard of––and how could such a donor even exist, walk into a hospital not even an hour away, and out of the entire database of kidney transplant candidates, match only with Victor? The doctors had never seen something like it.
So, Victor Akroush was diagnosed with kidney failure on August 3, 2017. With many prayers for Saint Sharbel’s intercession, he matched with Jesse on March 13, 2018, and on April 10, 2018, he underwent a successful kidney transplant. He received a live kidney from a 23-year-old man within seven months of starting dialysis.
A Second Blessing
To express their gratitude, Victor and his wife went to Lebanon to visit St. Sharbel in Annaya as soon as they received the okay to travel from Victor’s nephrology team (August – September 2019). There, they prayed, drank from the water, and visited everything. At the end, Rosie asked Victor what he had prayed for. He told her, “I wanted to say thank you because St. Sharbel healed me.” Then she asked him if he had asked for anything. He told her he asked for a child, a baby boy. Exactly one month after they came back, Rosie sat Victor down and told him that she wanted to talk to him. Victor thought something was wrong, but Rosie handed him a positive pregnancy test. The baby was a boy, and they named him George Sharbel after this miraculous Saint.
The family believes that it was all made possible through faith and fervent prayer all throughout the 7 months and to this day. They all continue to pray for St. Sharbel’s intercession on a daily basis.
Victor’s mom, Marian, took a vow to tell St. Sharbel’s story to everyone she meets. And Victor’s wife, Rosie, also introduces everyone of all faiths to the Saint.
In 2016, Victor and Rosie were married, and by God’s grace they were very happy with each other. Yet only a few months after their wedding––around July 2017––Victor started experiencing very intense stomach pains upon exertion. Since he was a very healthy man, he did not think too much of it until the pains became more frequent and intense. His wife was new to the United States from Canada, so she was unfamiliar with the healthcare system in their country. She thought to reach out to Victor’s sister Jumana, who works in the medical field, and they scheduled an emergency appointment with the first gastroenterologist available.
The day of the appointment, the doctor ordered routine blood work and told Victor that he would follow up with him once the results came in. No more than two days later, on August 3, 2017, Victor received a call from his doctor with critical news. The doctor informed Victor that his creatinine level was abnormally high and that he believed he was experiencing kidney failure. Victor was at work at the time, in the middle of a motorcycle repair. The doctor ordered Victor to, "drop whatever he was doing and head to the nearest emergency room immediately.” Victor, being in such disbelief, picked up the phone to call his sister Jumana and tell her what the doctor said. He initially refused to go to the emergency room since he had a lot of work to do, but Jumana insisted on accompanying him straight to the hospital. Victor was shocked to receive this devastating news. Victor’s blood pressure was 222/120 when he got to the emergency room, which was alarming for a 38-year-old man. He was at high risk for a stroke.
The emergency room staff repeated Victor's blood work, and, surely enough, all of his kidney functions were abnormal. Victor was immediately admitted to the intensive care unit, and a few blood pressure IV medications were started. Once Victor’s blood pressure was stable, more diagnostic testing was performed. At this time, two nephrologists came into the room to inform Victor, Rosie, and Jumana that Victor’s kidneys were failing, and he needed to act immediately. He was left to decide between two dialysis options, as both kidneys were only functioning at ten percent, until he could find a new kidney to have transplanted. If left in his current state, the condition of his kidneys would eventually jeopardize his life. The doctors gave him three options: hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, or do “nothing.” Victor decided to go with option three, declining any treatment, explaining to his mother, “Mom, I prefer not to be here if I have to spend the rest of my life on dialysis,” after seeing what dialysis patients go through.
His wife Rosie, meanwhile, had always had a deep relationship with Saint Sharbel, and she immediately started her prayers by asking for his intercession and for the grace of a miracle. And sure enough, within 15 minutes of her first petitions, Victor changed his mind and consented to go on dialysis. Meanwhile, he was put on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, though doctors informed him that the transplant waiting list was between 7 and 10 years.
His mother, who had been a single parent since her husband’s passing, felt she had no choice but to hide her tears and be strong for her son. Her only outlet was to sit in front of St. Sharbel’s statue, the one gifted by Victor’s in-laws, and cry beggingly at home.
Victor started at-home dialysis from 8pm to 8am (12 hours) every day, and he was to remain on dialysis until he could receive a kidney transplant. As far as a new kidney was concerned, he had two options: either receive a kidney transplant from a cadaver (recently deceased donor), which he did not want, or a family member would have to get tested for kidney compatibility. Though Victor and Rosie had a big family that was very willing to help, their best bet was one of Victor’s three siblings, as Victor is the oldest of four children (himself, Jumana, Linda, and Fadi). For this reason, his youngest sibling, Fadi, started the 10-step kidney donor process. Fadi and Victor had the same blood type, and everything was going fine until Fadi reached step 8. At this point, the doctors discovered that Fadi was borderline diabetic and therefore could not be a donor. Timing, however, was important, as Victor’s kidney function had decreased even further; his kidneys were operating at only 5% together, and the process was very hard on everyone.
Recognizing this, Jumana, Victor’s oldest sister (the nurse) started looking for different programs to find her brother a kidney. During this process, she came across the Kidney Paired Exchange program, which involves two living donors and two recipients. If the recipient from one pair is compatible with the donor from the other pair, and vice versa, the transplant center may arrange for a "swap" that would enable two simultaneous transplants to take place. Since Jumana’s blood type was not compatible with Victor’s, she signed up for that program and started testing in the hopes of swapping with another pair. And indeed, she matched with a recipient in Wisconsin, and all she needed now was a donor for Victor to exchange with.
Everyone in both Victor and Rosie’s families was praying to St. Sharbel.
Every night after supper, at 6pm, Rosie’s parents in Montreal had the habit of kneeling and praying at their home shrine, so they devoted special prayers for Victor so that Jumana’s swap would work and he wouldn’t have to wait 7-10 years for a cadaver kidney, as it was originally thought, all the while surviving on dialysis. Rosie’s dad made a special trip to Lebanon, and before going anywhere, he went to visit St. Sharbel’s tomb to pray for Victor’s healing and brought back some blessed oil.
During the same period, Rosie’s aunt Victoria in Lebanon who would always––rain or shine––take the public bus up to Annaya to partake in the monthly procession to St. Sharbel’s tomb on every 22nd of the month, met Hilani Abi Khalil, who was healed by St. Sharbel’s intercession and had miraculous formations of incense on her left hand and carried Christ’s stigmata. The two women prayed together for Victor’s healing, and Victoria carried on praying daily for him within her community, transporting a statue of St. Sharbel from house to house to beg his intercession. Victor’s great aunt, a Franciscan nun, also heard about his struggle and started praying for him and sharing the novena to St. Sharbel with his mother, Marian, who also prayed it in addition to a novena to St. Rita. Marian also mobilized her priest, Father Drummond of St. Michael's Parish in Annandale, VA, the Legion of Mary, and the Legion of St. Thomas, and Victor’s grandmother prayed the novena in front of her own statue of St. Sharbel, saying, “O Saint Sharbel, you see all people, this is my daughter’s son. They were recently married, they want kids. Please, try to see him. I beg you to see him.”
She would stay up late every night and pray from his novena. Then, on March 13, 2018, 7 months after Victor’s diagnosis and only 2 months after his sister, Jumana, had started the kidney swap process and matched, Rosie received two phone calls.
The first was to let her know of her dear cousin Rita’s passing. Rita had died in Lebanon, and being a devotee to St. Sharbel who loved Victor, Rosie immediately prayed to her to ask for St. Sharbel’s intercession and to “directly” ask the Virgin Mary for Victor’s healing as soon as she got to Heaven.
Two hours later, the second phone call came: a match was found for Victor––an anonymous 23-year-old donor in Silver Spring, MD—and the transplant was to take place on April 10th. What was striking was the fact that this donor was not actually part of the Kidney Paired Exchange program at all. He was a young man who had simply walked into the hospital one day and told the staff, “I just want to save a life.” He came into the hospital for no other purpose than to donate his kidney; he didn’t have anything to do with the program nor did he know Victor or anyone in his family, and his kidney matched with Victor’s better than his own brother’s. In fact, of the millions of people on the waiting list database, Victor was the only match for this man’s kidney in the United States. When asked why he would do such a thing, the young man simply said, “I only need one kidney to live, and I’d like to give the other one to save someone else’s life.” Since he has opted to remain anonymous, the family only met him later on, when they reached out to him through the hospital and he replied back with his phone number and the desire to connect. His name is Jesse, and he’s Jewish.
Many signs revealed to Marian that Jesse was God-sent. On the day of surgery, the moment a tall, curly-haired young man walked into the hospital with his mother, Marian felt in her heart that this person she had never seen before was the one coming to save her son’s life. It turned out that she was right; the young man she’d noticed in the hallway happened to be her son’s donor-to-be. Knowing that both Jumana and Victor intended to undergo surgery that day, the nurse sitting next to Marian also took out an icon of the Holy Family and gave it to her, saying, “I never usually do this, but I feel you and have great affection for you, and I would like to give you this icon that my brother, a Catholic priest, gave me to protect my own family.” At that time, Marian was very emotional: she had a son desperately needing a kidney transplant, a daughter who was undergoing surgery to donate her own kidney, and a total stranger who stepped up out of nowhere to save a life…and who matched exactly with her son in all tests: the blood type, the tissue type, the antibodies and the serum crossmatch.
Victor’s whole story is really hard to believe. How can someone in his situation not be in excruciating pain at all times? How could it be that he didn’t feel anything and kept a smile on his face, stayed functional and aware of everything? He was relatively asymptomatic, so much so that if it weren’t for the initial pains and the blood work, no one would have even suspected his kidneys were failing––he had no problems with urination or walking whatsoever. He even kept working at his job until the very last minute when he was called for the transplant.
How could he find such a perfect donor so quickly––7 months instead of 7 years was practically unheard of––and how could such a donor even exist, walk into a hospital not even an hour away, and out of the entire database of kidney transplant candidates, match only with Victor? The doctors had never seen something like it.
So, Victor Akroush was diagnosed with kidney failure on August 3, 2017. With many prayers for Saint Sharbel’s intercession, he matched with Jesse on March 13, 2018, and on April 10, 2018, he underwent a successful kidney transplant. He received a live kidney from a 23-year-old man within seven months of starting dialysis.
A Second Blessing
To express their gratitude, Victor and his wife went to Lebanon to visit St. Sharbel in Annaya as soon as they received the okay to travel from Victor’s nephrology team (August – September 2019). There, they prayed, drank from the water, and visited everything. At the end, Rosie asked Victor what he had prayed for. He told her, “I wanted to say thank you because St. Sharbel healed me.” Then she asked him if he had asked for anything. He told her he asked for a child, a baby boy. Exactly one month after they came back, Rosie sat Victor down and told him that she wanted to talk to him. Victor thought something was wrong, but Rosie handed him a positive pregnancy test. The baby was a boy, and they named him George Sharbel after this miraculous Saint.
The family believes that it was all made possible through faith and fervent prayer all throughout the 7 months and to this day. They all continue to pray for St. Sharbel’s intercession on a daily basis.
Victor’s mom, Marian, took a vow to tell St. Sharbel’s story to everyone she meets. And Victor’s wife, Rosie, also introduces everyone of all faiths to the Saint.
