I Believe in Miracles...Yes I DO!

Mimi, my most dear MIL, and I really do mean that most dear part, was looking forward to her 90th birthday on March 6th, living a good and for the most part trouble-free independent life, aside from a few aches and pains and her quite controllable emphysema (no, she didn't spend years and years smoking, actually only about 10 of her 90 years), when the most awful thing happened to her two days before her 90th birthday. She fell in her Chicago driveway on March 4th. After yelling as best as she could for 40 minutes, a neighbor, who happened to be returning home finally heard her when he stepped out of his car, (March in Chicago? Not a good thing to be lying outside in your driveway for 40 minutes...it's cold!). He called an ambulance and she was taken to the ER.

Turned out she broke both the lower bones in her left arm and sprained her left foot. Some birthday present! She was in the hospital for about a week and then moved to a rehab hospital last Monday. Last Friday morning GB gets a call from her doctor that things just weren't right and she was going to have to go back to the hospital. They kept her on some kind of special oxygen machine for most of the day, and of course, all the while she's cracking jokes and being her typical entertaining self. I talked to her at 4:40 that afternoon and aside from being hard to understand because of the oxygen mask she was wearing, all was ok - not great, but ok.

5:15 the hospital calls us and asks straight away, with no preamble, if Mimi has a living will and a DNR.....they then asked us if we wanted her intubated....OF COURSE we wanted her intubated, especially since she was together enough to say she wanted it. In that short period of time from 4:40pm to 5:15pm she had developed a life-threatening pneumonia. It was simply unbelievable. Needless to say this was devastating to GB, and eventually to all that love her, as it was so very sudden and truly unexpected. We scrambled and got GB to Chicago on the last flight out Friday, Mimi's sister, Micki, flew in from Florida yesterday and we all basically began a - awful phrase - ~death watch~ as her doctors finally told us they didn't see much hope and it could be at any time.

Yesterday evening I called those I needed to and sent out a mass email to all her people letting everyone know that she had taken a turn for the worse, it didn't look good in the least and to please remember Mimi in their thoughts and prayers.

Flash forward to 9:00am this Palm Sunday morning. Dreading it, I called the hospital to see how she did during the night. I then got the surprise of my life - the most wonderful surprise of my life. Her nurse told me that they noticed sometime between 7am and 8am that Mimi seemed to be trying to breath on her own though her ventilator was still going. So they decided to keep her intubated (so if her numbers started to drop she could quickly be put back on the ventilator), but turn off the ventilator machine. She did just beautifully. At 2:00pm this afternoon her tube was removed and she has continued to improve ever since. Of course, the next 48 hours are critical, but as the docs and nurses all say: "We are cautiously optimistic. Every good hour she has makes the outcome of this look brighter and brighter."

I called and emailed all her people once again letting them know that there, indeed, had been a miraculous change in her prognosis. As dear friend Dick B. said: "I knew it! Prayer works! It works!" It does indeed.

Our Mimi is a strong and stubborn, (don't tell her I told you that last part) woman. I really do believe that with all the prayers and good thoughts flying her way, she decided this wasn't the way she wanted to get out of here, that it wasn't her time yet.

We are all so very thankful. 90 is a very long time to live (unless you're a parrot or turtle, of course), and she's pretty much had a good good life....but I'm glad we have more time, even if it's not a lot of years in the grand scheme of things (she is 90), to be with her.

Bless you, Mimi, you are amazing and we love love love you!
And we're so glad you're still here!
Miracles, ya gotta believe in miracles!

If you folks don't mind, offer up a prayer
or a good thought for her, will you?
Thank you, thank you!

~~~

xoabb