I learned a lesson in faith the night of Sept. 7, when my sister-in-law Carolyn Conol was flown by air ambulance to The Queen's Medical Center after a dreadful traffic accident on the Big Island's Volcano Highway.

Carolyn's minivan was hit broadside as she made a turn, crushing the driver's side.

Others in the two vehicles escaped severe injury, but Carolyn was unconscious and barely clinging to life as she waited for emergency help.

She arrived at Queen's with fractures of her collarbone, pelvis, left arm and several ribs.

Of most concern were bleeding brain injuries that left her comatose and unable to breathe without a ventilator.

That's where the question of faith came in.

Carolyn and her family are devout Jehovah's Witnesses, a religion that forbids use of transfusions or products derived from blood in medical treatment.

Doctors feared that without the aid of blood-based clotting agents to stop the bleeding, her brain might continue to swell with fatal results.

Those in the family who don't share her religious beliefs felt frustrated that she might perish because doctors couldn't use all the weapons in their arsenal.

But there was no doubt what her wishes would be and we fully supported her husband Junior's decision to withhold forbidden treatments.

How much would life have meant to her if she had awakened to find she had been saved by means that violated her beliefs?

My wife Maggie took comfort from knowing her sister's spiritual certainty that she would be going to a better place if she didn't survive.

Carolyn was true to her faith and her faith was true to her.

The next morning, her brain injuries clotted and the bleeding stopped from treatments limited to what her convictions allowed.

Carolyn, 53, is not out of the woods.

She shows encouraging signs of awareness, but still slips away sometimes. She's breathing on her own, but needs a tracheotomy to clear fluids from her lungs and fight off pneumonia. She's fed by a tube, and there's been little movement on her left side since the accident.

She's a giving person who has touched many lives, and now has the benefit of a lot of people in her corner.

The Queen's waiting room was crowded in the days after the accident with family, friends and fellow Witnesses, many of whom flew in from the Neighbor Islands and Mainland to be with her.

Junior sleeps in a chair at her bedside and is constantly at her side seeing to her smallest comforts, often joined by one or more of their sons, Jino, Jake and Jacin.

A nurse asked what Carolyn did.

She's seldom worked for money, but she's been more active and productive than most.

She's a stay-at-home mom who anchors her family and has raised three great boys. She puts in long hours pioneering for her church, as she and her friends were doing the day of the accident.

She's taken care of her aging parents. When her father died from cancer, she crawled into bed with him on his last night so he wouldn't take his last breath alone.

When we said goodbye to Carolyn after a recent visit, she waved and flashed the shaka sign, a small reminder of her playful sense of humor and the mischievous smile she can muster when amused.

Carolyn's resolute faith — and her family's faith in her — have carried her this far.

I look forward to reporting how far the wonders of modern medicine can now take her toward reclaiming at least some of the rich life she enjoyed before the tragic events of Sept. 7.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.