On the last day of 2021, yesterday now, my neighbor died. He's been in poor health, and we have been checking on him. Another neighbor stopped in to see him about 11 am, and Marty dropped dead in front him.
There is an ambulance station only blocks away, and the call for help was answered quickly. Paramedics were here in minutes. Marty was unresponsive, not breathing, and had no pulse. Dead as a doornail. But paramedics aren't folks easily cowed, even by death, and they quickly went to work on him, injecting elixers, breathing for him, and pumping his blood by hand.
After a few shocks with the paddles, I heard the first 'I got a pulse'. From 37, to 47, to 220, then 97. His temperature had dropped to 93, and his O2 to 82, but he came back to life, right there in front of me. I watched him struggle as they got him in the ambulance to transport him to the airport right across the street, for the flight to the big city hospital.
A miracle.
Marty's had a rough go of it as a horse rancher. Some years ago while fishing steelhead on one of Oregon's many steelhead rivers, he stood up under a logjam and drove a steel spike through his head and into his neck. I never did learn how he got unspiked, and it's not a moment I want to imagine, either, but he did and lived.
There were some medical challenges from it, he says, and eventually he had to sell the ranch, his steelhead boats, and was able to move here, next door to me.
He's been a good neighbor, his habits admirable, and his cat has instituted a sort of Pax Romana, which has prevented yowling cat fights late at night, to everyone's benefit but the local vet.
I look forward to seeing Marty soon, if they can fix him up like they did me after my heart attack. I like Scampers a lot, and look forward to liking him over at Marty's place soon, instead of in mine.
I have felt for some time the increasing sense of impending import, of amazing and abnormal things in the offing. Like I did after 9/11, I chalked it up to evil afoot, to the unending horror and terror that 9/11 brought to America and the Middle East as political savages took advantage of our national outrage to bring war to innocents across the world.
But I do not think this is the same. I think miracles are coming. The evil men seeking to do humanity harm are even more powerful today, because of their success using 9/11 to increase their wealth and power. They intend, and are achieving, worse harm and evil today then they did then.
But I think they will fail, because impossible things are going to defeat them, like dead men coming back to life. Do you feel it too? I witnessed a miracle on New Year's Eve, and I report this omen to you.
We are stronger than we know, and our enemies will fail to destroy us.
