We Believe in Miracles ? And CPR

Eight years ago I nearly lost a son.

I was finishing up errands when my cell phone rang  My home number, but a voice I didn’t know – calm, insistent, pressing the words into focus. My 5-year-old son Jesse in trouble. A near-drowning. Helicopter on its way. No time for me to get there. Call back in five minutes to find out which hospital.

I hung up, not quite breathing, and dialed my husband’s cell phone.

“Barbara, what’s happening? There’s a helicopter over our house!” Tripp was pulling into our driveway. Thank God one of us was there!

“It’s Jesse!  Hurry – and call me back!”

Then I was alone with all the questions:  How had this happened?  Had someone forgotten to lock the gate to the pool? Would he live? 

Jesse’s sweet smile, almond eyes and silky brown skin seemed suddenly more real, more necessary than the sidewalk under my feet. The EMT had said something about brain damage. Oh, woe if Jesse – already challenged with Down syndrome – should have to work harder than he already did!

Tripp had a better perspective: “Thank God He’s alive,” he said when he called back. Thank God for close calls, moments of reprieve, and maybe a miracle.

Jesse was already whirring above the San Francisco Bay to Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Thank God he’d be there before I could even get on the freeway.

With no traffic, it would take me an hour. Time to reassure my kids via cell phone and to hear the whole story.

Jesse hadn’t been alone. Everyone was swimming, but no one heard when he’d somehow slipped off the seat in the hot tub where little kids like to hang out.  He went under without a sound. 

My oldest son Josh spotted him and pulled him out like a soggy rag doll.  Jesse’s skin was blue, his eyes rolled back, his chest still.

“We need to do CPR!” Matt said.

And the two oldest brothers went to work – opening the airway, giving two quick breaths, checking for the pulse. Then, because there was no pulse, chest compressions. Ben called 911. Thank God he called them first!  Thank God my children showed common sense.  Thank God Josh and Matt knew CPR!

And here’s why those inclined to believe in Providence see life filled with more intentional meaning than those who think in terms of simple twists of fate:

In 1995 Tripp and I were required to pass a CPR course in order to adopt Jesse. For some strange reason we decided to have our whole family trained.  I say strange because at the time Josh and Matt were only 12 and 11, we had no pool, and recreational water play consisted of blowing up an inflatable circle, filling it with a few inches of water, then spending hours looking for leaks. Not much chance of drowning there.