Guest Author @cecilia86740330
As some of you may have already heard, because the good news has begun circulating: Joe is home.
Before you’re tempted to think “well of course he is, he was young and healthy”, what we didn’t know is that he wasn’t. Joe was an undiagnosed diabetic and we found out too late. We have been provided with many miracles to get us here.
As I said before, my husband is a very private person, he typically prefers people to be given details privately rather than publicly, but in this case we both want to sing from the rooftops the goodness of God and the power of intercessory prayer from friends here on earth and in heaven. It was your prayers that got us to this point and we truly can’t thank you all enough. Your prayers saved my husband and brought him home to us. It is for the love of our friends that he was healed.
Joe went into the hospital on 1/8 and on the morning of 1/11, according to his nurse, he “began to crash” and they “almost lost him”. That night, another nurse explained to me that Joe had sustained “critical damage” to his lungs from covid pneumonia. His lungs had incurred “fiberatic changes to their tissue” and had become hard and stiff causing his body, and the ventilator, to have difficulty inflating them. I was told these changes were “irreversible” and that if he survived, the lives of people in his condition are forever changed, he could need oxygen support the rest of his life and potentially even a lung transplant. I was also informed that his doctors would be initiating calls the next day to inquire after the availability of ECMO machines in the area (a 2nd stage life support machine that would do all the work for Joe’s heart and lungs in hopes that it could give his body time to heal). I was told *if* there was one available and *if* he was accepted as a candidate for the machine, it would be “a long road to recovery with no guarantees”. I was told to prepare myself for “more bad days than good”, but that we just “hope to end on a good day”.
That next day, our family decided we needed to seek a miracle for Joe’s healing, with the help of someone on their way to being recognized as a Saint, and were led to Blessed Father Michael McGivney, a hardworking humble parish priest who was devoted to helping families in distress, particularly families with a missing father in the home. Before this day, I hadn’t known anything about him but would later find out he died of pneumonia from a potential coronavirus in the 1880’s and died on the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe, whom Joe and I named our youngest son for.
Later on Jan. 12th , I got the call that Joe had been accepted as a candidate for ECMO in Baltimore. In a conference call with the hospitals in Frederick and Baltimore, they made sure I understood that Joe was in a fragile enough state that there was a real possibility he could die on the way to Baltimore but also if he stayed where he was, he wouldn’t survive either. We were left with little choice but to try to get him to Baltimore.
Our family sent out a message that evening, to everyone we knew to pray the intercessory prayer for Joe’s healing. An hour or two after that first conference call, at 12 or 1am, I received another phone call, informing me that while running preparatory tests for transportation in the morning, they discovered Joe’s blood oxygen gases had suddenly doubled from 57 to 112 and he was “no longer a candidate for ECMO”. This was our first miracle.
After that, Joe remained stable for days, not getting any better but not getting any worse. Until my sister-in-law Teresa and her husband Vince, made the impulsive decision to make a pilgrimage and drive up to Connecticut to pray at the tomb of Blessed Fr. McGivney for Joe’s healing. That day, there was the next small step of improvement. We took this as sign we were directing our prayers the way God wanted us to. As Catholics, we believe God likes to use his creation, including his Angels and Saints, to bring glory to himself. He sometimes wishes to draw attention to particular servants of His (in this case, Blessed Father Michael McGivney) in order to reveal His goodness through them.
On Teresa and Vince’s way to Connecticut, both my mom, and one of our loving priests, began making phone calls to the Church they would visit, to see if there was any way to obtain a relic of Father McGivney, for Joe to be blessed with (2 Kings 13:20-21, Mark 5:25-29, Acts 19:11-12). Relics, particularly first class relics (bone fragments), are difficult to come by but we know they’re powerful tools for our use when available, so we had to try. Unbeknownst to each other, the day before the trip to Connecticut, both Teresa and Father Bill had stopped by the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Shrine in Emmitsburg, MD to ask Mother Seton, who was gifted many relics when she as alive, to help us obtain a relic of Blessed McGivney... Well, “ask and ye shall receive”, we didn’t just get one relic but *two* first class relics that day. Simultaneously, our loving friends Courtney and David had been working their own connections to try to obtain a relic for us as well and had also been successful! As Fr.Bill said, "In one day we managed to single handedly corner the market in Blessed Fr.Michael McGivney relics!" lol. This was our second miracle
Teresa and Vince rushed back from Connecticut as quickly as they could so Fr.Bill could bless Joe with the relic, on the feast of Jesus’s first public miracle at the wedding of Cana, on 1/16. Unfortunately, when he arrived at the hospital the staff wouldn’t let Father in to bless Joe but they had reached a compromise and the charge nurse agreed to touch the relic to Joe’s hand and “say a little prayer”. The next day was the first day Joe was awake a lucid since he went into the hospital and the kids and I were able to facetime with him while he was ‘awake’.
However, I was still bothered that our priest hadn’t been allowed to formally bless him with the relic. Priests have God given supernatural authority over us, their blessings are powerful, I wanted to make use of that for my husband's benefit. Also, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that God wanted to use a priest to shine a spotlight on the life and good works to his other beloved priest, Blessed Michael McGivney. I called the hospital back, explained the situation, and was granted a “one-time visit” for Joe to be blessed by our parish priest.
That next day, 1/20, was Joe’s last “bad day”. Four days later he was taken off the ventilator, two days after that he was out of the ICU, and he made such strides in physical, occupational, and speech therapy that he’s now home without a need for oxygen and appears to have more “damage” from the ventilator than from covid... This is our third miracle.
Everything God puts in our path in life, whether good or seemingly bad, has the same purpose: to call us, and those around us, closer to Him. When we experience joy it’s easy to see or feel God’s love for us. When things are difficult it can be harder to see, but if you pay attention, His love is in those moments too…sometimes even more so. He wants us to know Him intimately, including His own agony in the garden and suffering on the cross, so He provides us with opportunities to know this suffering so that we might unite our suffering to His and know His love for us.
In my darkest days this past month I was granted a special grace of feeling God’s love for us, through you all, in those moments. We were so overwhelmed with the literal thousands of prayers and hundreds of masses being offered for Joe from every direction, it was clear as day that God had been building up a community around us for years to prepare us for just this moment. It no longer seemed like ‘bad luck’ but God’s loving plan for our family. Our biggest hope is that this experience hasn’t just called our family closer to God but other’s as well, that this suffering might not go to waste.
I thank you all for your patience in my lack of updates and inability to return many messages these last few weeks. I don’t anticipate that getting much better any time soon as we’re soaking in the quiet and the family time as much as possible.
Our family thanks all of you for your prayers and support these past few weeks. Your prayers gave me strength when I had none, they saved our family, and I don’t know where I’d be without you all.
*Updated to add* : something I hesitated to say originally because it seemed a little more personal, but that Joe would like to share, is that he had been under spiritual attack after initially waking up in the ICU. He was being plagued with visions of demons day after day who were distorting the images of our family hanging up in his room. But when the priest entered his room, with the relic and the Eucharist in his possession, Joe said everything went quiet and became peaceful, they all immediately went away and never returned, even after the priest left.
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