On December 18, 2020, during the COVID-19 shutdowns, a quiet wedding unfolded in a small church in rural Missouri. The pews were almost empty—parents, siblings, and close friends spaced far apart. The rest watched on Zoom as the officiant’s voice carried through the sanctuary:
“Cole, do you take Kiley to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward …”
Cole Lemasters was 18, hours removed from his calculus final. Kiley Daniels was 18 too, her hair pinned beneath a simple veil. High school sweethearts, hands clasped and eyes locked and grins wide, this was the kind of couple that might make you wonder, Is this just puppy love?
“… for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health …”
For many couples, those words are abstract promises meant for a distant future. For Cole and Kiley, sickness had already come.
The July before their wedding, Kiley collapsed from a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. The scans revealed glioblastoma—the same aggressive brain cancer her father was battling. By November, her father had died. In July after Kiley’s seizure, the doctors predicted she herself had only three months left.
So at 18, Kiley wrote a will, picked out a casket, and planned her wedding.
“… to love and to cherish …”
Glioblastoma is ruthless. Median survival: 14 to 18 months. Fewer than 10 percent of those diagnosed make it five years. The clock was ticking.
“… till death do you part?”
As the officiant finished his question, Cole—knowing he might not be promising the rest of his life but only the rest of hers—looked at Kiley and smiled:
“I do.”
After a quick honeymoon in Kansas City, where doctors and family were close, the couple stuck around, living in Kiley’s parents’ basement while waiting for the pandemic to pass.
By spring, life settled into a very fragile routine, but a routine nonetheless. Cole enrolled at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Kiley moved with him, working part-time and doing small projects. College didn’t make sense when doctors said she might not outlive the year.
Then again, nothing long-term made sense. They didn’t talk about kids or careers. They learned to live in short intervals, one MRI to the next. “Every three to four months, we repeated the same cycle: scan, wait, pray,” Cole said.
Yet somehow the result was the same every time: no regrowth or recurrence. “By some extraordinary grace,” Cole said, “every scan was showing stability.”
Eventually, those three-month increments turned into a year. Then another. Then another. In 2024, Cole graduated and found a job in Columbia. Kiley, having earned her associate’s degree at Moberly Area Community College, was working part-time as a barista. And in July 2025, she celebrated five years since doctors told her she had three months to live.
Kiley was a living, breathing miracle. And for the young couple, every day was a day to be grateful.
Yet even in their gratitude, Cole couldn’t shake the thought: How is this possible? Is this truly a miracle? Or a statistical anomaly?
“Less than 1 percent of glioblastoma patients are under 20,” he said. “Only 4 to 7 percent live five years without recurrence. Do the math—that’s a 1 in 20 million chance. Put those together and you’re talking about lightning-strike-odds… but even more rare.”
Cole believed God could do the impossible, but the improbability still gnawed at him. So after Kiley’s latest MRI, he tried something new. Highlighting the radiology report with his cursor, he copied and pasted it into ChatGPT. The chatbot doesn’t always give solid health advice, but Cole hoped the artificial intelligence program could help him untangle the dense verbiage. “Anyone who has had to read one of these reports knows that it can be some of the most cryptic language ever digested,” he said.
The report read like the others, with one slight difference: “There is a tiny, newly developed ovoid enhancing focus within the high left frontal subcortical white matter anterior to the resection cavity with corresponding FLAIR hyperintensity.”
“Try to make sense of that with a degree in journalism,” Cole quipped.
ChatGPT explained this as a common side effect of prior treatment. Nothing alarming. But when he asked more questions—about past scans and her original diagnosis—the program suggested a plot twist: Kiley may have been misdiagnosed.
Cole knew this couldn’t be true. Kiley had consulted some of the best experts in the country. There was no way their doctors had run five years of tests and treatments on a misdiagnosis. They would have found this out by now. Right?
His curiosity got the best of him. Feeling as if he was dipping into conspiratorial waters, he asked ChatGPT to elaborate.
It explained that in 2021, a year after Kiley’s diagnosis, the World Health Organization reclassified brain tumors with an IDH1 mutation. If Kiley’s original scan included that mutation, her cancer would no longer be classified as glioblastoma, but IDH-mutant astrocytoma—which would still be serious but far less aggressive.
That sent Cole digging. If he could find Kiley’s initial biopsy report from 2020, he could check to see if she had tested positive for this IDH1 mutation. Fortunately for Cole, his mother-in-law had given him a box of Kiley’s old medical records earlier that week in case he ever needed them. He needed them now. So setting aside his Tuesday evening, he began to dig.
“When the first few pages discussed an appointment for a flu shot she got in 2005,” he said, “I knew I was in for a long evening.”
Page after page went by—five years’ worth of pages about cancer. Five years of confusion, fear, and waiting. Five years of seizure scares and medical bills. Five years of three-month increments. Five years with a death sentence.
For Cole, it felt as if five years had passed that Tuesday night when he pulled another sheaf from the box and found precisely what he was looking for: the initial biopsy. He dusted it off like an archaeologist and began skimming. But it didn’t take long before he realized that, yet again, the report was nothing but medical jargon, too sophisticated for him to understand.
And so he began uploading pages from the report into ChatGPT, one after another, letting the AI sort through the data until, eventually, one hour and 60 pages in, the model located the line he was looking for in the molecular genetics report. The line with the mutation, the line with the answer, the line with the power to change their future. IDH1 R132H mutation—positive.
“My initial reaction was like I was reading some sort of crazy state secret, like aliens were real or that Tupac was alive,” Cole remembers. “Still, I was cautious. Her doctors at the time were experts. But the IDH mutation wasn’t always routinely tested then, and the classification standards differed. So we brought this to her current neuro-oncologist, who confirmed it. … She was indeed misdiagnosed. Not by error but based on what was known at the time.”
For five years, they’d believed Kiley had one of the deadliest cancers known to medicine, with a recurrence rate still above 60 percent even after years of stability. Now they were hearing that her cancer followed a different path. IDH-mutant astrocytoma, a tumor with a median survival of 7 to 15 years, a five-year survival rate near 50 percent, and a recurrence risk under 5 percent after five stable years.
And Kiley had just hit that five-year mark.
Her treatment plan would now shift from aggressive, end-of-life vigilance to long-term management—fewer emergency assumptions, more measured monitoring, and care aimed at preserving life rather than bracing for its end.
“This doesn’t erase the weight of it all,” Cole said. “The fear, the grief, the exhaustion. Kiley has been living under a sentence she didn’t deserve. But now that sentence is lifted.”
Kiley calls it a “good hurt.” For five years, she lived as if death were always at the door. She planned her funeral. She encouraged others battling glioblastoma. Now she wrestles with the reality that she never had it.
“I still feel a strange survivor’s guilt,” Kiley said. “For a long time, it felt like I had narrowly escaped something deadly. Even now, it’s hard to make sense of being here when others aren’t.”
“God has walked with us every step of this journey,” Cole said.
God was there in the diagnosis. He was there when Kiley’s father passed. He was there on their wedding day and through the five years of waiting. And in a way they never imagined, God even showed up in an AI chatbot—without which that biopsy report, the line that changed everything, would still be buried in a box collecting dust.
And now they see God’s kindness in giving them something they didn’t think they’d ever have: time.
“Her life expectancy is no longer measured in months but in decades,” Cole said. “She can breathe again. We can dream again.”
For the first time in their marriage, they can imagine beyond the next scan, dreaming of a house, careers, even children.
“From the beginning, we believed our story wasn’t just ours,” Cole said. “It’s about asking questions, seeking truth, and trusting that God is still working even when the road seems unchangeable.”
The vows they spoke on their wedding day—“in sickness and in health”—still hold. But they are no longer bound to the same ticking clock.
“I won’t say that ChatGPT saved her life,” Cole said. “But I believe God used it to save our future.”
Luke Simon is the Co-Director of Student Ministries at The Crossing. He is an MDiv student at Covenant Theological Seminary, and his writing has appeared in publications including The Gospel Coalition and Mere Orthodoxy. Luke lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife, Gisele.
