“Dad, if God reveals himself to you – would you believe?” asked Brent. “I don’t know, I can’t promise that, son. But if God reveals himself, then I’d have to give him some consideration, now wouldn’t I?”

I didn’t know about this conversation until about three hours after it happened. What I did know was this.

“Pat,” another one of my husband’s brothers was on the line, “Dad has had an apparent heart attack. We’ve called the ambulance but it’s not here yet. The said that because we live out in the country it may take up to 20 minutes before it gets here. Could you meet us at the hospital in Marysville?”

My husband said “Sure. We will be there as soon as we can. “

So my two daughters, my husband and I loaded into the car and started on the drive that would take us to the hospital that was about an hour’s drive north of where we lived in Sacramento.

The ride was quiet and each of us prayed that God would be merciful and allow Cal to live.

Shortly after we arrived the doctor came in to discuss what was happening to my father-in-law.
“Do any of you know what a dichotomy is?” asked the doctor. I answered “Either something that is split in two or something that looks like one thing but is really something else.”

The doctor answered, “Well, that is the condition of your dad’s heart”.

All of us in the room pretty much stared at the doctor like deer in headlights. I thought to myself “what the heck does that mean?”

Anyway, the doctor went on, “In other words, his condition is beyond my care. We are going to drive him to the Sacramento Medical Center. The doctors at the Med Center are more prepared to handle unusual cases than we are. The ambulance will be ready shortly. You can follow the ambulance and they will give you more information there.”

So my family followed the ambulance back to Sacramento and parked at the Med Center. I don’t remember how the family from Marysville drove down – but the four boys and most of the families followed.

Again the trip was quiet. Worry and prayer filled the trip. I wondered if the problem was so critical why they didn’t life-flight him to Sacramento and what did the doctor mean by beyond his care. (I wondered if maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.)


We congregated in the waiting room at the Sacramento Medical Center and waited for several more hours before we heard anything. It was during this time that Pat’s brother told about his conversation with his dad. He seemed to feel guilty (and scared) that this was really God’s hand. I agreed to pray with Brent that God indeed would work a miracle in such a way that we’d know it was His hand that was in this whole process.

Eventually, a doctor came out and said, “I really can’t give you too much information about your dad’s condition right now, but he is in the care of some of the best doctor’s in the nation at the moment. Anyway, something tells me that your dad will be all right. He still is in very serious condition, but after being through what he’s been through and surviving…. He’s going to be in surgery for the next five hours so you might as well go home and rest. The next few weeks may be long and stressful. Can I get a phone number to call in case there is any change?”

We live in Sacramento – so my husband gave our number and promised to be there in the morning. For the next few weeks he visited every morning. Our girls and I visited with him in the evening.

One of the evening visits, the head of heart surgery stopped in to visit. After explaining who he was, he walked over to my father-in-law. “I just want to shake the hand of the recipient of a bonafide miracle. We see a lot of things happen here, but this is truly amazing. You are one lucky man, sir.” He turned to my husband, “You know there is no way that you are alive today. You should have died before the ambulance reached your house. There is no humanly possible way that you did not bleed to death within the first twenty minutes after your heart attack. Instead you lived over three hours until we could help you here.”

“So what exactly happened?” one of us asked to which the doctor replied, “The aortic valve split from his heart. This is the vein that goes directly to the brain. So even if it was a slow leak and not a split, he should have suffered severe brain damage…. But as you see he is doing very well. I see no reason why he shouldn’t recover.”

My husband said, “that must have been because of our prayers”. The doctor replied that it had to be, because from his viewpoint what happened to Cal was a down right unexplainable miracle.

We talked about it after the doctor left and Cal’s blood pressure went up and we were sent home that evening. But we went home praising God for his awesomeness.

Did Cal become a believer? I think that he is now open to consider who God is. He has a problem with all the doctrine of the church that he is going to, instead of just accepting who God is and trusting Him. I pray that Cal can sometime separate the doctrine from the God and just be friends with the one who truly loves his soul.