How Did He Just Wake Up?

I hung up the phone in shock. I never felt so helpless.

My brother was lying in a deep coma in a Bronx hospital, and none of his nine siblings were in America. My parents were dead, and the closest relative was my mom’s brother who lived in Canada. He had already booked a flight to New York for the same night.

Sitting in a village in Saudi Arabia, where I worked as a community health nurse, I cried and prayed.
Across the oceans in New Zealand my oldest sister did the same. In India, where the other seven siblings lived, they got together to talk to my uncle who was now at his bedside.

My uncle told them the doctors did not know what was going on. He said my brother, who worked as a RN in a dialysis outpatient center, was giving a report to another nurse and suddenly fell and had a seizure. He came out of it and insisted on continuing giving the report. He then had another seizure and a sudden cardiac arrest. He was twenty-three years old, single, never sick, did not drink, smoke or do drugs and was not on any medications.

They called 911, and he was rushed to a local ED where he was resusitated, put on a vent, but had no reflexes. A CT scan of his head did not show anything abnormal. Labs were all normal and so was the chest X-ray and EKG. The neurologist who admitted him to the ICU wanted to do an exploratory crainiotomy (brain surgery) and my uncle consented on our behalf.

The next day, an hour before he went to the OR, my brother’s eyes opened and he started fighting the vent. The tube was removed and he had no issues and was fully functional. He credited it to the Divine Mercy Of Christ and the intercession of Sr Faustinia, a polish nun who saw Jesus.

The doctors and nurses have no explanation as to what happened and how he recovered. He went on to have new adult onset seizures, but they are very much under control.

Esther Pottoore
Yonkers, New York