My sister was the beneficiary of three medical miracles. She never talked about them in these terms, and probably didn’t see them as miracles, especially the last one. But we did, and were grateful for all three.
When she was born she suffered from celiac. Nobody knew it at first, and there are pictures of her as a toddler with a sickly face and distended stomach. 1 My parents took her to a doctor in Philadelphia who diagnosed the disease and put her on a gluten-free diet. According to my grandmother Helen, Shar was the first child with celiac successfully diagnosed and saved. Since the disease had been identified and named years before, she must have meant the first child in Philadelphia or with this particular doctor. 2 Shar grew up without acquiring a taste for baked goods, and although she did stray off the gluten-free diet occasionally, she basically stayed on it for the rest of her life.
The second miracle was a happy one. Shar lived the life of a single woman in New York city for many years, going out to the Hamptons shared house in the summer, dating, travelling. We often compared our quiet suburban family life with her more glamorous one. But it turned out that she yearned for a child of her own. Although she refused (wisely) to marry Bill, she was willing to have a child with him. She was able to conceive at the advanced age of 42, without any medical intervention, and to give birth safely, with the aid of a C-section. The result was a healthy daughter who became Shar’s closest companion.
The third miracle was probably due to geography. Shar’s apartment on East 94th Street is a five-minute drive from Mount Sinai Hospital. When she had her first massive stroke in November 2015, the medics rushed her to the hospital, where she was saved through hours of surgery and days of intensive care. If she had lived further away from a top-notch hospital, or if her dog had not alerted Lauren that something was wrong in the early hours of the morning, Shar would not have been saved, and we would not have had the nine bonus months of her life. She didn’t see this as a miracle, and always referred to the first stroke as the “incident”, but we knew better and were grateful.