the power of words - of belief - and of KNOWING...

this is a story of several things - it is the story of my son stephen and his experience with the power of WORDS and of THOUGHTS...it is a story of spirit and of body, of INTENTION, of BELIEF, but FAR MORE than mere BELIEF - a story of KNOWING - and of SURVIVAL against all odds -

in 1999, stephen found himself at death's door after four separate physicians had failed over the course of a week to correctly diagnose his real medical problem and that was a pulmonary embolism - the bottom line was that on august 29, he found himself back in an emergency room of the first hospital he had gone to for help a week earlier - this time, within an hour, the correct diagnosis was made - but for stephen it was too late according to the doctors who advised me to call in our minister and to contact his siblings to come home - he was immediately placed on life support in icu - his sisters were called in from the east coast, his other sisters rushed to the hospital, friends came and some of them performed group prayers while he was still in the ER - his ex-wife out of state was called in - once in ICU his condition deteriorated moment by moment - medications were increased then decreased - medications were added and then removed - machine after machine was hooked up to this organ and then another organ - the second night he was taken to a small surgical room where a heart procedure was done and we [his family] were called into the room to say "goodbye" - i remember being led into this procedure room - my daughters were there and stephen's father and stepmother and sister were there - and there was my son lying on a stark operating table - naked except for a single sheet from his waist down - his skin was dark gray - almost a lavender gray - his body was swollen - the room felt frigid - i stood there in the middle of the floor - frozen, transfixed in time - time stood still - i remember standing there desperately trying to intellectually emotionally make sense of what i was seeing - the almost-corpse of my child - everyone was sobbing - and i remember the eyes of them all - they were all looking at me - trying to see what i was going to do and how i was going to do it - and i remember saying to myself, literally, SUCK IT UP - DO NOT GIVE IN TO THIS - YOU MUST NOT BELIEVE THIS - YOU MUST NOT SEE WHAT THEY SEE - HEAR WHAT THEY HEAR - FEEL WHAT THEY FEEL - SOB WHAT THEY ARE SOBBING - YOU MUST KNOW YOU DO KNOW that he will not die - and i remember the wetness of tears falling down my cheeks and the salty taste of them on my lips - and in this moment - this microsecond - my body physically straightened - i remember it as if it were yesterday - my body straightened and i looked up at all of them, wiped my tears and walked over to my son and told him that he was fine - that we were there with him waiting for him to awaken - and then i turned to the others in the room and whispered to them that they had to save their tears and their prayers for somewhere else - that when they were in stephen's presence - and mine - they could have no other thought except that he was going to awaken and he would be well - it was simple, really - clear as day to me - we had to not only believe, we had to KNOW - and so, thenceforth and forever more, whenever a doctor would come to me - and they did, several times daily, sometimes hourly, with more negative medical news, each of them was met with the same response - when one told me that 99% of his patients did not make it at the point where stephen was, i said HOW WONDERFUL!!! THAT MEANS HE HAS A ONE PERCENT CHANCE AND THAT'S ALL HE NEEDS - THAT'S GREAT NEWS! - when they came to me and told me they had nothing else to offer but more experimental procedures that had never even been tried on a human, i said OH, THAT'S GREAT NEWS, YOU'VE GOT PROCEDURES UNTRIED STILL - HOOK HIM UP! and when i would walk into his cubicle and find them clustered there around his bed, shaking their heads, and mummering negativities, i would call them out onto the floor and tell they that they were prohibited from using any of that language, saying any of those negative words, in the presence of my son - and, further, that i did not want them saying them ANYwhere - if his own physicians did not know he was to improve, how could he? - every day i took something else that he liked to him - one day i took his favorite pizza and sat it beside him to smell - and we stood around his bed talking about how good the pizza was - i took his favorite willie nelson music and played it in a boom box in his cubicle - he was on four life-support systems but that was just his body - i knew that the "real" stephen was there smelling the pizza and singin' with willie - and so, with my sometimes not so gentle prodding, the doctors began to change - the nurses were more cheerful around him - from that moment in the cardiac procedure room, not another tear left my eyes - i made my life as "usual" as possible - i went to and from work and the hospital - his sisters went back to the east coast - and then the time came for all life support to be removed - he had been left on longer already than was feasible - he had to be weaned from it all else face the issues if he weren't - and so there were weeks then of the ups and downs of that process - but through it all, we went on with as much of things as usual as was possible - and then, one day when i got there, his eyes were open - he was still on a ventilator and several other machines - but he was awake - and from there - another month and he came home - he had a long road of recovery and was left with some deficits - but today he is able to work and do most of the things he did before - for me, this was such a turning point in my individual life - in how i began to see things differently - to do things differently - to THINK things differently, to SAY things differently - i experienced first-hand the POWER OF THOUGHT - the POWER OF KNOWING over belief - the POWER OF WORDS - i no longer allow negativity around me in friends, television, movies, books, employment - i no longer keep negative words in my vocabulary - i seek out positivity - now, that is not to say that i am 100% successful in these things, 100 % of the time, but i am cognizant of them every single moment and that is all i can do - one moment at a time -

POSTSCRIPT: i want to clarify my comment regarding prayer above - while i do totally understand the m any different ways of accomplishing the same thing and do not wish to negate in any way anyone's individual chosen methodology - ie, prayer, belief, thought, whatever - for me, in the context of that moment, the manifestation of any of those things meant that there was the possibility of my son's death - and i refused to accept that - the saying of a prayer, for example, meant to me, in that moment, that a prayer NEEDED to be said - i simply chose not to NEED but to KNOW - there is a difference - do you know what i mean? i hope so! namaste' - j