This week's story prompt:  Do you believe in miracles and if so, have you ever witnessed one?  Describe-- brought to mind two different situations that I consider to be miracles.

Miracle # 1:  When I was a little girl we were  living on Seventh East in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it was in the dead of winter.  I still remember mom going to dad saying, "We are out of coal.  Nothing to heat the house with.  Do you think we better use the tithing money for the coal?"

Daddy said, "No.  We don't touch the tithing money.  That belongs to the Lord.  He will see to it that we are going to be okay."  With that, Daddy went to work.

Later that morning, a dump truck of coal came, delivered to the house.  Daddy didn't have any idea where it came from.  Neither did mother, because they hadn't ordered any.

You can either call that a miracle, or not.  But in the eyes of a little girl of 5 or 6 years of age, it was a miracle.  [This would have been about 1932 or 1933 during depression years.]

Miracle # 2:  My late husband, Paul R. Meacham, had served on the police force in San Francisco, California.  The time was 1963.  He had undergone a physical and given a complete bill of health.  The next day, he was called out on riot control and his back-up man didn't back him up.  Due to the stress, he suffered a heart attack and subsequently received a disability pension due to injuries receive in the line of duty. 

Some years later, in 1976, he was in  Idaho working with "Whitey" Checketts.  "Whitey" was building a house in Twin Falls and Paul went out to help him do the dry walling.  "Whitey" was Jim's brother.  Paul and Jim had grown up in their early years together.  Jim's mother and Paul's mother were living together when the boys were little. 

Digressing, Paul and Jim were somewhat like brothers, since they were so closely associated with each other.  Delores (Paul's mother) and Jim's mother were sharing an apartment but they were working opposite shifts.  When one was off shift the other one was on, so there was somebody at home with the boys all the time.  To show you how close they were, they would nurse each other's babies when they were off shift, out in California.

While Paul was helping "Whitey", he suffered a slight heart attack.  It became necessary for him to have a heart bypass and they were unable to do this in Twin Falls, so he was transported by ambulance to St. Luke's Hospital in Boise.  Here he had a quadruple bypass to his heart.  He was in the hospital for twenty-one days.  I was told that if they didn't get him out of the hospital, he would die there.  So I offered to take him to live with me where I could take care of him.  But that's another story.

Paul and I were married on August 8, 1983.  In August, 1986 Paul received a heart transplant.  After his heart transplant, he had been in and out of the hospital a couple of times before the event I refer to happened. This was probably a couple of years after his heart transplant. 

I was sitting by his bedside at the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City.  The nurse came in to give him his medications. Paul had been on the pill form of anti-rejection medication since his transplant.   Instead of giving him the anti-rejection drugs in pill form, she gave him the injection form through the Intravenous tube.  He immediately went into heart failure and cardiac arrest! 

As soon as he went into cardiac arrest, the nurse hit the button for "Code Blue".  It was just amazing to me how fast everyone came into the room, including the doctor.   Of course, the doctor's office was just around the corner from the corridor of Paul's room but he was seldom in his office.  He happened to be in his office when "Code Blue" was called.  Boy, he was there in a minute!  

When he came in, he told me I needed to wait out in the hall.  I went out into the hall.  It wasn't long until he came out there and told me I needed to call the family.  I said, "No, he's going to be fine."  But he kept insisting that I call the family, because never, or rarely, did the patient survive this type of situation.  

I was carrying the family phone numbers in my purse, and I had been carrying them since his heart bypass surgery in Boise, Idaho.  We never knew when we would need the phone numbers.  I went down the hall to the phone and informed the family.

He came out of it just fine!  They never, ever gave him a shot of the drug again.  They had put the anti-rejection drug right in the bloodstream, and boy, he was knocked out cold and clinically dead!  

To me, his survival from the cardiac arrest was a miracle!  He lived until June 30, 2005.