A Fort Wayne, Indiana, restaurant owner who endured cancer and other life-threatening medical complications says the experience led him to embrace redemptive suffering and reorder his life around family and his Catholic faith.
Jimmie Schindler, owner of Guadalupe's Mexican Grill, told Today's Catholic he was diagnosed with stage 3B Hodgkin's lymphoma in early 2022 after consecutive bouts of COVID-19 and influenza left him malnourished and symptomatic. Doctors gave him a 60% to 70% chance of survival.
After completing chemotherapy, Schindler then developed pneumonia and sepsis while still immunocompromised, and doctors placed his survival odds at roughly 30%.
"Nurses were running around; my wife was sobbing," he recalled.
He requested a priest, received the Anointing of the Sick, and recovered after a week in intensive care.
But only a week later, a procedure to drain fluid from his lungs resulted in a punctured artery, causing internal bleeding that went undetected for more than two days.
"Dying would be merciful," he said of the pain at its height.
Schindler said he chose to offer his suffering as prayer for three people facing seemingly hopeless situations: a baby born with half a heart, a friend's terminally ill relative, and a child caught in a dangerous custody battle.
Doctors performed emergency surgery. As staff worked to place an IV beforehand, Schindler briefly regained consciousness and noticed a nurse's scapular.
"You must be Catholic!" he told her.
"You're awake!" she responded.
"You must be Catholic!" he repeated.
After she confirmed she was, Schindler asked, "Have you ever heard of Guadalupe's Mexican Grill?" When she said no but shared her devotion to the Virgin Mary, including her tattoo of Our Lady on her back, he closed his eyes and said, "Ave Maria!" The nurse told him the IV went in at that moment.
A physician later told him he had never seen a patient survive that type of bleeding for more than six hours.
"The doctor afterwards essentially said I'm the luckiest person on the planet," Schindler said. "I received an insane amount of graces."
The crises pushed Schindler to reexamine how he was living. He had been running 80-hour workweeks and, by his own account, was a nominal Catholic — attending Sunday Mass out of habit rather than conviction. His cancer diagnosis changed that.
"I realized that my primary role as a dad is to get my kids to heaven," he said.
He cut his workweek to roughly 10 hours and instituted nightly family sessions of prayer, catechism, and Scripture reading.
"The Holy Spirit can use suffering for good," he said. "I saw people going back to the Church, praying Rosaries. … I even had an atheist friend who started praying."
He also said that all three of the intentions he offered up his suffering for — the baby with the heart condition, the friend's terminally ill relative, and the child caught in the custody battle — were “fully answered.”
Schindler and his wife Katie, who doctors said likely could not have more children after his treatment, welcomed a sixth child last year — a daughter they named Bernadette after Our Lady of Lourdes, since he was first diagnosed on her feast day.
Schindler said his restaurant reflects the same conviction. Guadalupe's features a crucifix, statues of Mary, and the phrase "Viva Cristo Rey!" on a wall.
“Anything I do now, I'm not really interested unless it advances the cause," he said of his Catholic faith.
A second location for Guadalupe is planned for South Bend, Indiana in the coming months.