Over the next few years she would visit 40 doctors, but nobody could ever diagnose the problem. Maybe those 15 years she worked as a typist to earn extra income for the family took their toll. Maybe it was a sports-related injury. She's visited psychologists and chiropractors and a man who ran his hands in the air over her body searching for "electrical fields." They all threw up their hands.

One day while composing at the piano she found that her hand could no longer play. She angrily slammed the piano shut. How could she be writing music to glorify God and have this happen, she wondered? How could God let this happen?

"I'm not proud to let anyone know that," she says.

During her round of doctor visits, she visited an osteopath who was blind. "The irony of me complaining to a blind man," she says. "I asked him how he dealt with his handicap. I needed peace of mind. He smiled and told me, 'You'll learn so much from this that you couldn't learn any other way. You won't trade it for anything. You'll learn about the Lord's timing.' Well, it happened. It's not a big deal anymore."

But first she had to change her composing style. She used to experiment with melodies on the piano, but that became too painful. Now she writes lyrics while sitting in an easy chair, and then she writes the song in her mind, hearing the melodies and harmonies. Next, she plays the piano to find the exact notes and records them in pencil. For a time, she wedged a pencil over the thumb and little finger to keep the three middle fingers out of the way, but she no longer bothers. She manages to play the bass clef with only her thumb and little finger.

"She walks through fire every time she writes a piece," says Doug. "It hurts while she's writing and then for a day or so afterward."

"Sometimes she sits in there and writes, and I don't see her all day," says John, "but she pays for it. It hurts her."

For 20 years, she rarely played the piano, but while serving a church mission in Chile a couple of years ago she forced herself to play for church services again because there was no one else.

"I've followed the case of a concert pianist named Leon Fleischer for 25 years," she says. "He lost the use of one of his hands in exactly the same way I did and had to give up performing. Eventually he started giving one-handed concerts. Everything he tried, I tried, all to no avail for either of us. Just recently he tried botox shots in his forearm, and he is now giving two-handed concerts in Carnegie Hall. So, very soon I will go try the same thing and hope for similar results."