Annabel Beam, 8, cried for a long time while her mother, Christy Beam, the author of “Miracles from Heaven,” tried to comfort her daughter. “Why am I like this? Why can’t I be like my sisters? How can this keep happening when so many people with so much faith have held me up in prayer so many times?”

Christy had no answers because she had been asking the same questions that Annabel was asking.

Annabel was suffering from pseudo-obstruction motility disorder and antral hypomotility disorder. Dr. Samuel Nunko, director of the Center for Motility and Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, explained to Annabel, “You have this condition in which the muscles in the GI tract do not work. And when that happens, when you take food by mouth, the food doesn’t go anywhere, and you cannot absorb it. And, as all of us know, when you cannot eat and get nutrition, then you cannot survive.”

Annabel suffered from malnutrition, dehydration, dangerous bodily obstructions, chronic pain that included migraine headaches, and required frequent trips to the hospital emergency room. She often relied on the IV as her sole source of hydration and nutrition. And, as Christy explains in her book, Annabel’s mental state from all this “was as tenuous and terrifying as the lurking disorder in her intestines.”

“Mommy … I just want to die and go to Heaven and be with Jesus where there’s no pain,” Annabel said.

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