The headline made me stop scrolling: “Man Declared Dead, Comes Back to Life After 45 Minutes.”

I clicked through to read the details. The man’s wife had been woken up by his irregular breathing. Without any warning, he’d gone into full cardiac arrest and was rushed to the emergency room.  The doctors had done all they could to revive him, but he was later pronounced dead.

When family was called into his room to say goodbye, his son stridently declared out loud that his dad would not die that day. Minutes later, the father’s heart began to beat irregularly and a week later he left the hospital. No heart transplant needed. No vegetative state. He was fully recovered.

Doctors were stunned and they declared it a miracle. The father said prayers and God’s work had saved him.

We’d also prayed for a miracle and begged God to restart a heart. 

[Read more…]

“Mom, you need to take me to the ER.”

My college son had just walked in the kitchen door from his last day of work and was supposed to head back to the university the next morning.

He usually walked in quiet and hungry but this night, his escalating voice and sharp cries of pain told me something was very wrong.

He was holding his back and said he’d felt a sudden sharp pain that got worse and worse as he drove home.

When your grown boy is becoming nearly incapacitated from pain before your eyes, you know the ER isn’t an exaggeration.

I grabbed coats and car keys, made phones calls to cover my younger kids and drove him as gingerly as possible to the nearest emergency center, each turn and bump causing Seth to grimace from the pain.

By the time we arrived, he needed a wheelchair. We left with follow-up appointments and a prescription that did little to ease his excruciating pain through the weekend.

Three days later, an MRI revealed the cause:  [Read more…]