I am posting the journal entries from my sister’s CaringBridge site (http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/tracyslatoncrosson) in order to retain that documentation in our 2014 blog book. Check out the start of the series on my blog with the “My Sister” post.
Where There Is Great Love There Are Always Miracles
By Ken Crosson — Mar 1, 2014 11:11am
As I started this journal entry, about the miraculous course of Tracy's recovery, her friend Kim came in with a gift, a beautiful framed piece of chalk art inscribed with the Willa Cather quote I'm now using as the title of this journal, from their friend Lauren. I think it expresses not only a great truth, but a perfect description of what has happened here.
Tracy's own doctors call her "Lazarus" and a miracle. One of the cardiologists, after evaluating her yesterday and being astonished by the difference in her condition from when she entered the hospital a week earlier, said, "This," meaning both her survival and alertness after such a catastrophic injury, "simply does not happen."
Another warns that after we get out of the hospital doctors will be fighting over getting her as a patient because her case is so remarkable: First, a tremendously rare coronary condition that caused a heart attack. Then, a complete cardiac arrest that in most cases is irrecoverable and that required well over an hour of resuscitation just to get her heart beating again. And now, awakening with her personality and so much of her mind intact right off the bat? Literally unbelievable.
The cardiologist who's spent the most time with her, and who two days earlier had told us our best course of action was to pray for a miracle, yesterday cautiously suggested he now hopes for a full, if lengthy, recovery. She's not out of the woods yet, he warned, but he sees no reason that with time, medication, and rehabilitation she can't get back to where she was before.
I firmly believe they're all right, and were right before. She DID need a miracle to survive -- after all, when your heart stops six times in one afternoon you're in a bad way. She DID need a miracle to wake up and still be herself. But those things happened. She DID need a miracle to have any hope of eventual rehabilitation and leading a normal life. But it looks like that's going to happen too, in time. She needed miracles, we prayed for miracles, and we got miracles. Even the doctors, when I thank them for what they did for her, demur -- it wasn't us, they tell me; they did their best, but they give all the credit to the Great Physician.
Sure, she can't read a clock and her coordination is shot, she can't remember recent history and sometimes she thinks it's 1996, but she knows who she is, who all the people around her are, and who her kids are. Everything else is trivia -- she'll either get it back in time, learn it again...or live without it, because it really doesn't matter. There is great love for Tracy in this world, and she is -- we all are -- getting the miracles that come with it. Keep praying for her as she starts down the long road to recovery, because she will need more support as she makes her way back to her former self. Thank God, and all of Tracy's prayer warriors, for affirming, even restoring, our faith.
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