BY STAFF REPORTER
A YOUNG mother left paralysed after being stabbed four years ago has said that God gave her the freedom to recover her love of life.
Abigail Witchalls, who suffered spinal injuries and lost the ability to speak after being stabbed in the neck in a random attack, said she has prayed to God for healing since sustaining the injuries.
According to the Daily Mail Mrs Witchalls said: “Since my spinal injury, I had prayed to God for healing. He did heal me. Not physically, but He freed me to love life and to know daily the joy I had longed for. This is one of God’s miracles.” A Catholic, Mrs Witchalls went on the Arundel and Brighton diocesan Lourdes pilgrimage with her husband in 2006. On earlier visits before the stabbing Mrs Witchalls had come to help those less fortunate than herself but she said that this had changed when she returned.
She said: “I had come to try and help those less fortunate than myself. To my surprise, I find that I have more to give now that I’m paralysed than I did when I was able-bodied.” Mrs Witchalls communicated by blinking and mouthing words in the months after her injury and wrote poetry about her condition by blinking. By midMay 2005 she had recovered the ability to speak for short periods of time. More than six months after the attacks she was finally discharged from hospital. Mrs Witchalls lives in a specially adapted bungalow with her husband Benoit and two children.
Last summer she wrote the introduction for a book about Lourdes.
In 2005 she was attacked in front of her son Joseph. She was pregnant with her second son, Dominic, at the time and gave birth seven months after the attack.