A few entries back, I told how baby Miranda's parents each had an experience with what I'm convinced was an angel...each of them had a brief talk with a man who appeared to be a janitor for the hospital (each of them saw him in a hallway with a mop in hand), and this man told both Randy and Melissa that he'd pray for Miranda, who had both pneumonia and a collapsed lung. Within minutes, that little baby was well on her way to recovery and is now home with her parents and doing  just fine!

 

So...are y'all ready for another one??! I'll try and make this as short as I can, so bear with me:

 

RC's dad George was diagnosed with a very rare form of skin cancer roughly 3 years and some change ago. Since then he's gone through one treatment after another at a very well known & widely respected hospital at an equally well known & respected university here in central North Carolina (it's the one that a very famous basketball player attended back in the 1980s)...

 

  So anyway....even though he's not one to have a lot of patience with this whole cancer treatment routine, George has been a real trooper through it all! Well that all changed recently when he ended up back in the hospital with a case of pneumonia! Unforutnately it didn't take long before we found out that pneumonia was the very least of George's problems though....it was discovered that all of the cancer treatments had caused some very serious problems with his heart...so serious in fact that the doctors felt that he needed open heart surgery or he was going to die....within a matter of days!!! One doctor even went so far as to suggest that the surgery be performed THAT DAY!!

 

Well George had reached his limit....he refused the surgery and said he was going home. And he did. Over the course of the next few days we all begged him to at least get a second opinion. He finally agreed and ended up going to a hospital in Raleigh where they told him some pretty infuriating news: some of the treatment he'd gotten was not only not necessary, but actually quite dangerous...AND there were some tests that SHOULD have been run on him that WEREN'T!! None of these revelations changed the fact that heart surgery was required though....but the doctor did tell him that he could wait for a few weeks so that he could build up some strength beforehand.

 

Thankfully these last few weeks have been good for George. His strength was built back up, but more importantly his SPIRIT was built back up. Oh sure, he (and everyone else!) was scared as hell that he wouldn't make it but at least he was going to try to do something about his condition. It was decided that he needed triple bypass and valve replacement surgery...but the good news was that IF he could withstand the surgery itself he'd actually feel like he did 20 years ago!

     Well folks..today was the day. George went into the hospital this morning for the surgery...and I"m happy to say that not only is he doing fine but he's doing REMARKABLY well! He ended up having just a double bypass & single valve replacement, which was good because it made the procedure take less time. RC told me that he looked really good too..he's actually got some color back in his face now! And RC's mom called about an hour ago and said that he's doing so well that they were taking the respirator off at 9pm instead of midnight like they'd initially planned. If he continues to do this well, George may actually be able to come home in FIVE days instead of seven!! Cool huh??

 

Now here's where the angel part comes in [I bet y'all thought I'd never get to the point, huh?]...

 

----> Shortly after the surgery started, RC and his mom went downstairs to get some air (and pray of course!)...on the way down this one corridor RC's mom said something about the "high smelling PineSol someone's been mopping with....."

    And did I mention that this hospital is the same one Miranda was in when she was sick?!