In 2019, Tammy Peterson was told she had roughly ten months to live. Doctors had found a rare, usually fatal kidney cancer. Surgeons removed half of her left kidney, and the complications that followed left her body leaking lymphatic fluid. Her hair fell out. Her weight dropped to ninety pounds. Raised without a practiced faith, she had no habit of prayer to lean on when the worst news of her life arrived.
God reached her through a friend. Queenie Yu brought Tammy a rosary blessed by Pope Francis and offered to pray with her while she underwent treatment. Every morning at 10 a.m., for five straight weeks, the two women met in the atrium of Toronto General Hospital and prayed. Tammy also began the Novena for the Sick, and on its fifth day she experienced what she believes was a miraculous recovery. With a confidence she could not fully explain, she told her husband, Dr. Jordan Peterson, that she would be well by their 30th wedding anniversary on August 19, 2019. She was.
The healing opened a door she kept walking through. Over the following years Tammy, by then a podcaster with a wide audience, moved steadily toward the faith she had met in that hospital atrium, studying and preparing with Queenie Yu, who became her confirmation sponsor. On March 30, 2024, at the Easter Vigil at Holy Rosary Church in midtown Toronto, she made her first confession, was confirmed, and received her first Communion alongside eight fellow parishioners. "I kind of feel like we are in the time of Noah, and it's time to batten down the hatches," she said of her decision to enter the Church with her whole life, doctrine and all.
Tammy's story began at the lowest point a person can reach: a terminal diagnosis, a wasting body, and no words to pray. God met her there anyway, through a faithful friend, a borrowed rosary, and prayers she was only just learning. The One who found Tammy Peterson in a hospital atrium is not hard to find. He is already near, and a single honest prayer is enough to begin.