Miracles in the ER Read Online Free PDF Page A

and watched as the boy took a breath, and then another.
    “He’s breathing!” His father jumped up from the chair and bounded over to the side of the stretcher. “I saw it, he’s breathing!”
    An hour later, BJ and his parents were on the way up to the ICU. He still had a pulse and a good blood pressure. And he was still breathing on his own.
    ‘How do you explain that, Doc?” Denton was helping us straighten up the room and was restocking his emergency supplies. “He was under water for at least five minutes, maybe more.”
    “You said the water was cold,” I ventured, wondering the same question.
    “It was freezing. Apparently they get the water from a well, and the nights have been cold. That’s supposed to help, I know, but…do you think he’s going to be okay? I mean his brain and everything.”
    “He was making purposeful movements and was starting to look around,” I answered. “Those are good signs. And when you consider the condition he was in when you found him, and when he got here…It usually doesn’t turn out this way.”
    “He’s going to be okay.”
    There was that tone of voice again, that assurance. Denton and I spun around and looked at Lori. Her back was to us as she organized supplies on the countertop.
    She slowly turned and faced us.
    “Something told me, and I just know. He’s going to be fine.”

T HE Miracle OF A NSWERED P RAYER
    The L ORD is near to all who call on him,
    to all who call on him in truth,
    He fulfills the desires of those who fear him;
    He hears their cry and saves them.
    P SALM 145:18-19

Chauncey Taylor
    Ida Fleming was in room 3, gasping for breath and barely clinging to life. Again.
    She was eighty-three years old and her failing heart brought her into the ER once or twice a month. This was the third time in four weeks. Things were getting worse.
    “Ida, if we can’t turn things around pretty quickly, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go back on a ventilator.”
    She looked at me with kind, fearless eyes, and nodded her head.
    Lori Davidson had started an IV and was pushing some medicine. Hopefully this would improve things, but we would soon reach the point where nothing we did was going to help.
    Always cheerful, always calm, Ida had been in and out of the ER and the hospital since I’d begun working in Rock Hill. It was impossible not to be drawn to such a beautiful spirit. She was a rare woman.
    Several years earlier, I had seen her in the ER when she was not short of breath. She wasn’t a patient, but had ridden in the back of an ambulance with her twenty-five-year-old grandson, Chauncey Taylor. He had been involved in a drug deal gone bad, been shot twice in the belly, and had dragged himself onto her front porch. Bleeding and stoned on an assortment of illegal substances, he had pounded on the wooden deck until she came to the door.
    Chauncey nearly died that day. Most of his blood was left behind on Ida’s porch, and we barely got him to the OR in time. Ida had been standing beside him in major trauma when I walked back into the room. The nurse stepped out into the hallway, and it was just the three of us.
    “Doctor, if you don’t mind, I’m going to pray.”
    I stepped over beside her, rested both hands on the stretcher rail, andclosed my eyes. What followed was a woman of faith talking with her Lord. No pretense, no flowery language or lofty petitions. She asked the Lord to save the life of her grandson. And believing and knowing he was going to do that, she asked him to change his life. She asked him to lead Chauncey away from drugs and alcohol, and from the company of his so-called friends who “brought him to low places.” Then she patted the unresponsive Chauncey on his shoulder and uttered a simple yet promise-claiming “Amen.”
    Chauncey survived his gunshots and lived. It took him a while to get back on his feet, but when he did, it was the same old thing—drugs, alcohol, and the law.
    We treated him for a variety of