I Saw A Miracle Today

I saw a miracle today. The last ten days I’ve had a front row seat to a heart wrenching, but beautiful love story. For anyone who says romance isn’t alive--for anyone who says romance is silly, or insignificant, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. I’m also here to tell you that miracles do exist. As a matter of fact, after what I’ve seen, I’ll argue the fact with you until the cows come home.

Jody Payne is one of my critique partners, if you remember, I mentioned her in my post about Chocolate Martinis. She’s the colonel’s wife, the one with more life experience, but still looks too darn good in her jeans. She’s spunky, she’s spry and she’s probably the most stubborn woman I know when it comes to accepting someone’s help. Can you imagine this women with a broken shoulder, wearing a brace to keep her from moving her right arm, and telling me she can buckle her own seatbelt? And how did she get this broken shoulder? Well, it depends on who you ask. When she called me and asked if I would post on the loop that she wasn’t able to type, and therefore would be lurking, I was more than happy to do so. I posted what she asked me to, and then told the group that she had broken her shoulder by having wild, kinky sex with her husband. Since she couldn’t type, everyone had no choice but to believe me. And if you ever saw Jody and John together, that would give my story more believability. They love each other. It was apparent in how they teased and looked at one another. And when I saw John that Saturday afternoon, he was laughing about the post.

Now the truth of how she broke her shoulder is she was run over by a horse. I don’t think it was the same horse that kicked her in the head, giving her a concussion a while back, or the one who broke her ribs and caused her lung to collapse. And of course, none of these incidents were the horse’s fault; accidents just happen when you deal with big animals. But the fact that she still works the horses blows my mind. I’d have thrown in the towel at the concussion stage. But not Jody. Yup, she has an independent streak in her. But these last ten days, I’ve also learned something else about Jody Payne.

She’s probably the most courageous woman I know. This isn’t to say she wasn’t scared, or even worried, but her smile, her ability to focus on the positive, even when there seemed to be so little positive to grasp, well, it was downright amazing.

You see, Jody’s husband, John Payne, a retired Colonel, now a teacher at a college who still found time to work with the horses that stable, had suddenly started acting incoherent. Fearing he was having a stroke, she managed to get him in the car, and she drove him, with a broken shoulder, to the hospital. It wasn’t a stroke. They shortly diagnosed John of having encephalitis.

Within a few hours, John was unconscious. Within a few days, this man who was so much like Jody, a man who never slowed down, was on ventilator and a feeding tube. The doctor’s prognosis was not hopeful. But Jody’s hope never wavered. “I’m asking for a miracle,” she said. “And isn’t this what romance writers do? Write about miracles, believe in miracles?”

I visited Jody most everyday, I watched her lean over the hospital rail, over the man whom she had walked through life with for over fifty years, and say, “I’m here, John. I’m here. You are not alone.” I think she said it to him two or three times each time I would visit. My heart would clutch at the love you could see in her eyes and hear in her voice. That, I thought, is romance. That is love. And each time I went home, I hugged my husband a little tighter.

Well, today I went up to see her. They had removed his breathing tube because he seemed to breathing well on his own. Amazingly, the night before he had even woken up, had spoken but hadn’t seemed extremely coherent. But while I stood in the CCU room with Jody, she did what she’d done all those days. She leaned over that bed and said, “John, I’m here. You are not alone. I’m here.” And that’s when the miracle occurred.

John opened his eyes, he focused on her and said, “I know.”

She started talking to him. She made a joke, and when she did, he smiled. A few minutes later, the doctor came in and John responded to all his commands. The doctor was simply amazed. He looked at Jody and said, “This man is going to walk out of this hospital.”

We know John still has a long way to go before he’s completely out of the woods. But the woods we can face, because today, we saw a miracle. Today I saw the power of love.

I hope reading this blog and knowing Jody’s story will encourage you to hug the ones in your life, to never take for granted the time you have with each other. I hope it will remind you that miracles do sometimes happen. I hope you’ll send all the positive thoughts John and Jody’s way.

CC