Prayers for heart surgery patients

Do you need a prayer for surgery? Even if nurses take care of hundreds of patients and see them being wheeled into the operating room, we can never be too tired to send out a wish and a prayer for a successful surgery.

Here are 20 short but powerful prayers for nurses, doctors, and patients.

PRAYERS FOR NURSES

1Prayer For Guidance

Heavenly Father, please take my hands and guide them. Grant me the strength to help my patients and their families. The skill to ease their suffering the understanding to diagnose their needs. The kindness of heart to care for them and reassure their fear. Please be beside me on each and every case as I rely on you the greatest of healers. Amen.

2Prayer For Righteous Judgement

Via iamzang.com

God, the greatest master of healing arts, bless us and guide us. Make us your instrument in alleviating the pains of your ailing servants. Make our eyes alert, our hands skillful and sensitive, and fill our mental faculties with keenness to make righteous judgment so that others may live. Amen.

3Prayer For A Patient’s Recovery

I said a prayer for you today, that God would touch you with His healing hand and give you the comfort and peace you need to get through.

4Prayer For A Patient’s Continued Health

I said a prayer for you today, and know that God must have heard. I felt the answer in my heart although He spoke not a word. I didn’t ask for wealth or fame (I know you wouldn’t mind). I asked Him to send treasures of a far more lasting kind! I asked that He’d be near you at the start of each new day; to grant you health and blessings and friends to share your way. I asked for happiness for you in all things great and small. But it was for His loving care I prayed for most of all!

5Prayer For After Surgery

Via catholic-christian.tumblr.com

O merciful Father in heaven, thank You for being with (name of person) while he/she was in surgery. Thank You for blessing the surgeon with the skill and knowledge needed to do his/her work and safely bringing (name person) through this operation. O gracious Father, bring healing to (name person) and bless him/her with the best care possible as he/she recovers. Continue to bless him/her with your tender care. Grant him/her patience during his/her recuperation, help him/her grow in strength each day, and bring him/her to full recovery quickly, without any setbacks. Amen.

6Prayer For Strength And Healing

At every moment of our existence your are present to us God, in gentle compassion. Help us to be present to one another so that our presence may be a strength that heals the wounds of time, and gives hope that is for all persons, through Jesus our compassionate brother.

7Prayer For Jesus’ Healing Hands

Via Pinterest.com

Heavenly Father, we pray that You will lay your healing Hands upon all those who are sick. We beg You to have compassion on all those who are suffering so that they may be delivered from their pitiful circumstances. In Jesus, we pray. Amen.

8Prayer For Quick Recovery

May the love of Jesus and His healing power touch you in a special way this very hour. May the Savior’s strong arms and prayers of special friends embrace and hold you close until your body mends.

9Prayer For Recovery

Today I lifted up your name before the Lord in prayer. I asked him to supply your needs, and keep you in his care. I pled with him to make you well, and take away your illness and pain, like the sunshine chases rain. Amen.

PRAYERS FOR DOCTORS

10Prayer For Skill

Dear God, These strong gloved fingers which I flex, this human hand which holds the knife, sterile now and steady – need thy guiding skill to help another life. Bless now this patient – thine and mind – who, under thee entrusts to me a precious life! God of the surgeon’s tireless strength, the surgeon’s finite skill, grant that I may be guided to do thy will. Amen.

11Prayer For Guidance

Dear God, These fragile hands that cut the flesh, steady them as if at rest. Bless this patient yours and mine whose very life is your design. Almighty God I do pray guide my hand as I work today! Amen.

Also Read: 35 Nurse’s Prayers That Will Inspire Your Soul

12General Prayer For Healing

Pour out, thy healing Angels, thy heavenly host upon me, and upon those that I love, let me feel the beam of thy healing Angels upon me. The light of your healing hands, I will let thy healing begin, whatever way God grants it, Amen.

PATIENTS’ PRAYER FOR SURGERY

13Prayer For A Successful Operation

Loving Father, I entrust myself to your care this day. Guide with wisdom and skill the minds and hands of the medical people who minister in your Name, and grant that every cause of illness be removed. That I may be restored to soundness of health and learn to live in more perfect harmony with you and with those around me. Through Jesus Christ. Amen. Into your hands, I commend my body and my soul. Amen.

14Prayer Before Surgery

O Jesus Christ, Messiah and Lord, grant me joyful acceptance of the surgery which awaits me, and let this be the relief and cure which I seek. Make skilled the work of the surgeon and that of his team for it is unto their knowledge and skill that I give myself for healing. I pray You, O Lord, that this procedure will be without complication, and that my recovery will be speedy and complete. Amen.

15Prayer For Healing

O God, the source of all health. Fill my heart with faith. Be near me in times of weakness and pain Although I know You are in control, I am apprehensive about what faces me. You made me, loved me, and have provided my surgeon with needed skill to perform a miracle in my behalf. Sustain me by Your grace that my strength and courage may not fail. Heal me according to Your will. Amen.

16Prayer Before Surgery

Loving Father, as I face this new experience in these different surroundings, I come to You for courage, wisdom and peace of mind. I know that Your Healing Power is here both in me and my doctor. I trust his skill and wisdom, and he tender care of the nurses. Dear Lord, take over this operation and let Your Power be felt through all these forces. Let Your Perfect Wholeness be mine, that I may live to glorify You in every area of my life. I pray all this in the Powerful Name of Jesus, my Lord and Saviour. Amen.

17Prayer For Preparation Before A Surgery

Lord Jesus, help me as I prepare for this operation. In Your love, guard and protect me through the skills of the doctors and the care of everyone else. Bring me back to health and full recovery. Lord Jesus, I praise You forever and ever. Amen.

18Prayer From Deuteronomy

Via hopehelphealing.com

Lord, help me suffering to lead me to return to You with a repentant heart; ready to follow Your commands and praise Your Name for Your patience with me. In Jesus Name, Amen.

Also Read: 50 Best Bible Verses for Nurses

19Prayer After Surgery

Via prayersbyemail.com

Blessed Savior, I thank you that this operation is safely past, and now I rest in your abiding presence, relaxing every tension, releasing every care and anxiety, receiving more and more of your healing life into every part of my being. In moments of pain, I turn to you for strength. In times of loneliness I feel your loving nearness. Grant that your life and love and joy may flow through me for the healing of others in your name. Amen.

20Healing Prayer

Lord Jesus, heal me. Heal in me whatever You see needs healing. Heal me of whatever might separate me from you. Heal my memory, heal my heart, heal my body, heal my soul. Lay Your hands gently upon me and heal me through Your love for me. Amen.

We hope that you found an appropriate prayer for surgery and that your patients go home happy and healthy.

For comments and suggestions, feel free to post in our FB page!

♥ Connect with NurseBuff on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter!

www.nursebuff.com

Adam Pick is a heart valve patient and author of The Patient’s Guide To Heart Valve Surgery. In 2006, Adam founded HeartValveSurgery.com to educate and empower patients. This award-winning website has helped over 10 million people fight heart valve disease. Adam has been featured by the American Heart Association and Medical News Today.

www.heart-valve-surgery.com

Many – if not most – people believe that prayer will help you through a medical crisis such as heart bypass surgery. If a large group of people outside yourself, your family, and your friends add their prayers, that should be even more helpful, or so such reasoning goes.

Researchers have been trying to prove this and even to measure the effect of prayer. Since 1988, at least two studies have found that third-party prayers bestow benefits, but two others concluded that there are no benefits. These and other studies have been soundly criticized for flaws in both method and outcome. The fuzzy results goaded researchers to conduct the largest and most scientifically rigid investigation to date. It covered 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston. The cost was $2.4 million, paid by the John Templeton Foundation and the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation of Memphis.

In a clear setback for those who believe in the power of prayer, their prayers were not answered. Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.

Dusek

“We thought that the certainty of knowing about the prayers of outsiders would reduce complications that accompany bypass surgery,” notes Jeffrey Dusek, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. “But the results were paradoxical.”

Dusek and his colleagues are quick to say that the study results do not challenge the existence of God. Also, the investigators did not try to address such religious questions as the efficacy of one form of prayer over others, whether God answers intercessory prayers, or whether prayers from one religious group work better than prayers from another, according to the Rev. Dean Marek, a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Other participants in the study, who include researchers from Harvard Medical School and Harvard affiliates Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, agree. As do the teams from medical institutions in Oklahoma City, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tenn., and Rochester, Minn.

Some skeptics believe that studying prayer wastes time and money because its reach goes beyond science. Dusek and Marek, scientist and clergyman, disagree. There’s enough anecdotal evidence that prayer influences recovery after surgery and in other circumstance to take a scientific look at the results, they say. “Physicians and health-care providers want to understand if prayer can be used as part of medical treatment,” Dusek points out. “In this example, could prayer be used in addition to drugs and other treatments to reduce the complications of coronary bypass surgery?”

The answer apparently is “no.”

STEP up to pray

Known as STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer), it investigated patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery, wherein a vein is grafted into the heart to bypass clogged blood vessels. According to the STEP report, 350,000 people in the United States and 800,000 people worldwide have such grafts each year, making it one of the most common surgical procedures.

Researchers enrolled the first patients in STEP in 1998. Collection of data ended in 2001 and analyses of it were finished in 2005. People of any or no religious faith were eligible to participate. Those chosen included Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and people of no faith.

The 1,802 participants were divided into three groups of about 600 each, with a mean age of 64 years. One group received no prayers. A second group received prayers after being told that they may or may not be prayed for. Members of the third group were informed that others would pray for them for 14 days starting on the night before their surgery.

The prayers came from three Christian groups, two Catholic and one Protestant. The investigators report that, “We were unable to locate other Christian, Jewish, on non-Christian groups that could receive the daily prayer list required for the study.” Such lists provided the first name and initial of the last name of the patients.

The intercessors could pray in any way they wished but with limitations. Prayers started at a standardized time, lasted a given duration, and included the message “for successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.” This system provided a practical way to conduct the research, but limited its results to one type of prayer.

Many different kinds of complications can occur during, and for 30 days following the surgeries, such as abnormal heart rhythms. Among the group that knew outsiders were praying for them, researchers recorded 197 cardiac complications, compared with 187 and 158 in the other two groups. Eighteen percent of those who received outside prayer without their knowledge suffered major complications like heart attack or stroke, compared with only 13 percent of the group that went without such support.

In total, complications occurred in 59 percent of those who were prayed for, compared with 51 percent of those who received no prayers, a significant difference.

Deaths during the 30 days after surgery were similar across groups, 13 and 16 in the prayed-for group, 14 in the no-prayer group.

The big mystery is why there was an excess of complications in patients who knew all those people were praying for them. The researchers admit they have “no clear explanation.”

One theory is that those who knew so many outsiders were praying for them felt a stressful anxiety to do well. “It might have made them uncertain, wondering, Am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?” says Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at Integris Baptist Medical Center, who was part of the research group in Oklahoma City.

“We found increased amounts of adrenalin, a sign of stress, in the blood of patients who knew strangers were praying for them,” notes Dusek, who is also associate research director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute. “It’s possible that we inadvertently raised the stress levels of these people.”

The full STEP report was published in the April 4 issue of the American Heart Journal. Herbert Benson, director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and lead author of that report, notes it is not the last word on the effects of intercessory prayer. Questions raised by the study, he says, “will require additional answers.”

news.harvard.edu

So you know…. I am not the best when it comes to organized religion.

I would say that I am more spiritual than religious. I do believe there are higher powers that tie us all together. And, I do believe the molecular meatpack, we call our body, offers us a special opportunity to create something meaningful during the seventy or eighty years that most of us traverse the Earth.

Okay. I just wanted to make sure you knew where I was coming from before I dive head-first into the topic of prayer before heart surgery.

Religion, Prayer & Heart Surgery

Just before my aortic valve replacement, my Uncle Marc advised me that prayer before surgery was not a bad idea. Marc is more than an uncle to me. Marc is a mentor in many aspects of my life.

So, I took Marc’s suggestion and contemplated the notion of prayer, even religion, before my heart surgery. Looking for answers, I jumped onto Google and immediately learned a lot about the mystical approaches to securing positive surgical outcomes following cardiac procedures. As you might might imagine, the results of clinical studies were mixed on this topic.

Some of the studies suggested positive results of prayer before surgery:

A 1993 Israeli survey following 10,000 civil servants for 26 years found that Orthodox Jews were less likely to die of cardiovascular problems than “nonbelievers.”
A 1995 study from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., monitoring 250 people after open-heart surgery concluded that those who had religious connections and social support were 12 times less likely to die than those who had none.

Some of the studies suggest that prayer by third-parties prior to surgery was a non-factor and potentially more harmful:

A 2006 Harvard study of more than 1,800 patients concluded that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of heart surgery patient complications.

Given The Research On Prayer Before Heart Surgery…

As an optimist, I could not see the danger in personally engaging in prayer before surgery. I did not “get religion” prior to surgery but I did spend several quiet moments thinking great, big healthy thoughts for myself and those around me.

I even took it one step further… On the morning of my surgery, I requested that my close friends and family spend a few minutes channeling healthy thoughts to my heart.

I think some members of my support group got a head-start. The night before my heart valve surgery, I was having dinner with Robyn (my wife) at PF Changs Chinese restaurant in Manhattan Beach, California. Just as their famous Chinese lettuce wraps were served, a wave of goodness and warmth covered my chest.

Robyn noticed my face change. She asked me with some concern, “Are you alright?”

I responded, “Something very powerful is happening. I’m not sure how to explain it. But, I’m now ready for surgery. I know that everything is going to be alright. Oh yah, pass the hot sauce.”

Call me crazy… Call me weird… Call me nuts… Call me anything you like…

But, I will never forget that moment at PF Changs.

I hope that helps share some ideas about the concept of prayer before surgery. I was not going to post this because I know that religion can really turn people on and really turn people off. But, in the end, we are here to learn from each other about all things relating to heart valve surgery. That said, I hope you are okay with this blog.

Keep on tickin!
Adam

Written by Adam Pick
– Patient & Website Founder

Adam’s Newest Blogs Adam’s Newest Posts

Boston Scientific Gets FDA Approval For Lotus Edge TAVR! Learn More.

Surgeon Spotlight: Dr. Marc Gerdisch Receives 100 Patient Testimonials! Learn More.