Miracle Whip, Secret Sauce, and Falling Pianos

I watch the news these days with one eye closed. One eyes worth is all I can bear. The reason I even watch it at all is to stay current on politics which is the basis for a new screenplay I’m writing. 

You can also mix with that a dash of “car wreck” mentality. You know, when you drive past a bad car accident and you WANT to look away but you just can’t. You’re so afraid of what you’re going to see that you pull your glasses out of your purse and slow down. 

Is that just me or is it human nature? Please say human nature.  

Anyway, the events of each news cycle have been so “stick-your-head -in-the-oven” horrible for the past year and a half that local stations have actually started to devote an entire three minutes of a 1440 minute day to good news.

This morning it was about a recent medical miracle.

A thirteen-year-old boy in Alabama suffered a brain injury and actually died—for 15 minutes.  Although they got his heart to beat again, the lack of oxygen for such an extended period of time (a brain can survive without oxygen for only 4-6 minutes) left him brain-dead and on life support for several days while his parents made the agonizing decision to donate his organs.

All of the sudden, the day before he was scheduled to be taken off of life support he started to show weak signs of brain activity. That was two months ago. He still has a long recovery ahead of him but he is walking, talking, and nowhere near the vegetative state he should be in. 

“There’s no other explanation but God” he says. 

He should know.

My husband also suffered severe brain trauma due to spinal meningitis before he was my husband, so, BH. He was a healthy forty-seven-year-old man in the prime of his life and then he died. Once in the emergency room, they brought him back, did a spinal tap and pronounced him ”terminal” which meant he was pumped full of Morphine and wheeled into a room to die. As luck or fate or the angels who had listened to me cry my eyes out for a good man would have it, one lone doctor decided to treat him with everything at her disposal and within 24 hours she informed his family he’d live but would most definitely be a vegetable. (Which is why we currently have a health directive.)

But after three days in a coma, my before-husband-husband woke up quoting Proust and I.M. Pei. Okay, maybe only I.M. Pei, but my point is this: He could see, hear, and speak knowledgeably about French architecture—all of the things some of us humans can do that vegetables most certainly cannot.

“He’s a scientific miracle!” They all declared.

They should know.

Here’s what I know—

The boy is right. There is no other explanation but God. I mean, come on! 

Science can’t explain EVERYTHING. They try. We listen. They have rules and stats that are true for MOST of us MOST of the time, however…

If it ain’t your time—IT AIN’T YOUR TIME! 

If your brain dies and you wake up fine, I’d say it ain’t your time. 

If a piano falls on you while you’re walking down the street eating an eclair, I’d say carbs kill, no, I’d say sorry, it was your time. 

Nothing is certain. Apparently, not even death, (let’s shoot for taxes next).

Nothing is cut and dried, black and white, end of story, that’s all she wrote. Nothing.

I believe, or rather I know, there is a special ingredient, a secret sauce of sorts, a power greater than doctors, science and statistics. 

Call it prayer, hope, a miracle, or Miracle Whip, I don’t care, just as long as you know it exists.

That’s my good news segment for you this fine morning. Now skedaddle! Go out there and make it a glorious day! (And watch out for falling pianos.)

Carry on,
xox