Elgin victim of 'Miracles from Heaven' disease meets Hollywood counterparts

Laura Mooberry Keating of Elgin has no trouble remembering when her life turned upside down. It's when she suddenly was laid low by the same rare, hideous disease faced by the little girl who is the subject of the current hit movie "Miracles from Heaven."

The 35-year-old former teacher remains practically homebound by that sickness you've probably never heard of, unable to eat anything by mouth. She knows it could kill her at any time, and it likely will kill her before she reaches old age. But it gave her a chance to attend the Hollywood premiere of the film, where she met the actors, real family and real doctor involved in the story. And as with the family in the film, her troubles have not shaken her faith that she still can depend on God and Jesus Christ.

"Miracles from Heaven," which opened nationwide March 16, tells the true story of a Texas schoolgirl named Annabel Beam who suddenly developed abdominal pain, swelling and vomiting.

Little Annabel finally was found to be suffering from a rare, life-threatening disorder called gastroparesis, in which the nervous system fails to tell the stomach and small intestine to move food onward in the digestive process.

The mother in the movie, played by Jennifer Garner, fights to get her daughter treated by the country's foremost expert, Boston pediatrician Samuel Nurko. But even Nurko has minimal success until, following prayers asking God to heal the little girl, Annabel suffers an accident that nearly kills her but somehow starts her stomach and intestines working again.

Asked when her own sickness began, Keating will tell you: "March 7, 2014, at 11 o'clock in the morning."

She was then teaching a special education class at Illinois Park Elementary School in Elgin. Some of the teachers would go to a nearby restaurant for lunch.

"I was eating a hamburger and french fries," she said recently as she sat on a couch in her far-west Elgin home, holding a heating pad over her aching belly.

"Those were pretty much the last things I would ever eat normally. I have dreams about that day. ... All of a sudden I had this horrible tummy ache and my stomach became bloated, like I was pregnant."

At the hospital, the emergency room staff looked at her bulging, nine-month-pregnant belly and said she must be in labor. "I said I am not pregnant," Keating recalled. "They smiled and just thought I must be in denial."

Finally, a month later, her illness was diagnosed as gastroparesis, a disease with no known cause. And no known cure.

<h3 class="breakHead">Going forward</h3>

Doctors advised her to eat a low-fat, low-fiber diet. That didn't help. She kept hurting. She couldn't keep anything down.

By Easter weekend 2014, five weeks after the attack, she had lost 40 pounds. Doctors threaded a feeding tube through her nose and into her small intestine. That didn't work either.

The movie includes a scene in which Annabel's mother, played by Garner, shouts that she will not leave the hospital until someone figures out what is wrong with her daughter. Keating said she lived through a very similar scene: Her mother, Jane Mooberry, told medics that she was not leaving the hospital until someone figured out how to get her grown-up daughter some relief.

"When I went to see the movie with my parents, that was a very hard scene for us to watch," she said.

Finally, on Easter in 2014, doctors implanted a peripherally inserted central catheter line to feed nutritional fluid directly into a vein in her arm.

Back at home that April day, her husband, Gifford Elementary teacher Pat Keating , videotaped the Easter celebrations that he and their two preschool-age daughters were enjoying, to show to her in the hospital.

The catheter line nutrition kept her going, "but it's not good for long-term use," Keating said. It has caused her to develop pancreatitis, which increases what she says is constant pain. It can cause liver failure. It always poses the threat of blood infection, like one which almost killed her in January. The catheter line had to be moved multiple times as one after another failed, and now she has a plastic tube sticking out of her chest.

Two drugs are known to help ease the symptoms, but she turned out to be allergic to one and the other caused her to tremble like a Parkinson's patient.

Asked to estimate her lifespan, she said one doctor told her 10 years was about all she could reasonably expect - if she can avoid another big infection.

Meanwhile, her nutrition supplies, which must be custom-mixed based on tests of her blood, cost $1,000 a day, though her husband's insurance covers most of that.

"Last July we went to Disney World, thinking that might be our last trip," Keating said. "Northwestern and the University of Illinois and the Cleveland Clinic had all said they couldn't do anything more for me. I told my husband I just wanted to live to see my daughter Madison get onto the school bus for her first day of kindergarten" in August 2015.

<h3 class="breakHead">New friends</h3>

She learned about the Beam family's story and the upcoming movie through a fellow gastroparesis patient named Stephanie Torres. Torres lives in Kansas and befriended Keating through a Facebook site dedicated to the disease. They became telephone buddies.

"One day I jokingly said that we should finally meet at the premiere of 'Miracles from Heaven,'" Keating said. "It was a joke. But then I suddenly realized that my best friend from the seventh grade at Ellis Middle School now works in Hollywood as a producer."

Keating emailed the Hollywood friend, Jodi Hildebrand.

"Jodi said she works for Sony and that's the studio releasing the movie, so sure she could get tickets for us," Keating said.

Keating flew to Los Angeles. Torres flew there from Kansas. And these now close friends met for the first time, in the baggage claim area of Los Angeles International Airport.

They attended the screening at the ArcLight Cinemas in Los Angeles, both wearing backpacks containing the liquid nutrition that even then was feeding into tubes in their veins. When the movie ended, they introduced themselves to the real Beam family. When she and Torres explained their health status, Mrs. Beam's eyes "just welled up with tears," Keating said.

"The movie is a wonderful depiction of what families go through in times of crisis - not just what I'm going through, but any kind of crisis," Keating said.

Hildebrand then arranged for the two women to attend an "after party" at a restaurant, where they met the actors and the real Dr. Nurko.

Nurko is portrayed in the movie as having a charming, comical bedside manner with the children he treats. And he comes across that way in real life, Keating said.

"He started by telling Stephanie and me, 'Too bad you girls are too old for me.' We just looked at him in bewilderment," she said. "And then he explained, 'Because I'm a pediatric doctor.'"

But when she described her condition to Nurko, Keating said, "he gave me that look I have learned to get from doctors - that sad look" that says her prognosis is not good.

"We also talked to Jennifer Garner and got our picture with her," Keating said.

She and Torres learned that Garner's personal assistant is Maureen Grosser, an Elgin native who was attending Elgin High School at the same time Keating was in the 1990s.

The disease is not the first big health crisis Keating has faced. Several years ago she had bones in her face fractured and her hands cut in a car crash with a drunken driver, who was killed. But she said these woes haven't undercut her faith.

"I think my faith actually has become stronger," she said. "I don't believe I got sick because God is punishing me for something. I don't think God said one day that 'I'm gonna make this man get drunk and drive into Laura's car.' I think God is there is there to carry me after these things have happened."

She recalled the poem "Footprints in the Sand." The narrator explains she was walking side by side with Jesus, but in some stretches only one set of footprints can be seen. The woman explains that those were the tough times. But Jesus wasn't abandoning her; he was carrying her.

In human form, Keating said, this has included food brought in for her husband and children by members of her church, First Presbyterian of Elgin, plus toys and presents for the children collected by other Elgin Area School District U-46 employees.

Keating said she and Torres haven't been so inspired by the Beam girl's miracle cure that they think they should suffer a severe head injury like she did. "But after the movie Stephanie and I were joking, 'Should I push you down this escalator and make you all better?'"

"Even if I can't eat, I'm getting all the nutrition I need," Keating said. "Some people couldn't pay the $1,000 a day because they have no insurance. And there are others who can't eat because they have no food."