The summer of 2001 seemed like a lifetime of events all occurred within such a short period of time.

I won't go into all the details, but we were moving to another state by summer's end, having sold our house, and were stressed to say the least with all that involves.

Usually very healthy, my parents, who were getting up in age, (70's), had several hospitalizations during that summer of 2001.

Early in 2001, my father experienced pain in his hip area and went to a Chiropractor for some relief.

The Chiropractor said, "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the x-ray technician at the hospital, took the wrong x-rays. She took x-rays of your stomach. I say this is good news, because the bad news is that you have an Aortic Abdominal Aneurysm, which is what we call a double bubble, one on top of the other, or two tiers of a single bubble on your abdominal Aorta. It's very serious, and looks as if it's about to burst".

You can imagine my father's state of mind at that point. He was afraid to move. He was in fact a walking time bomb. A rupture of the Abdominal Aorta is most often fatal. The problem my father faced was that he had a heart catharization a year before and the doctors found a 30% blockage in the Aorta itself, as well as four arteries, which were blocked in varying degrees. Only one was life threatening, but the heart surgeons agreed that since my father had suffered a stroke some 5 years earlier, and since he was trying to practice better health habits such as walking and staying away from animal products, he would stand a better chance of survival without the by-pass surgery, at that time. The problem with the Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm was that as soon as they touch the aorta, the plaque would fly which could cause a stroke or a heart attack while he was on the operating table. They gave him a small window of surviving an operation to repair the aneurysm in his stomach.

Being an avid prayer, I immediately put my father on the prayer line and a friend sent me holy water from Lourdes, France, where the Blessed Mother appeared to Bernadette. My father was to drink a sip of the Lourdes holy water every day and say the prayer, which accompanied the holy water. People were praying for my father all over the world. We were convinced that he was going to die if not before surgery, then surely during surgery.

After what seemed an eternity, my father emerged with a smile on his face. I asked if they were finished taking x-rays and he said, "yes, but, some people want to talk to you". Two doctors and an x-ray technician approached me. I thought to myself, "Dear God, how much worse can it get?". The technician came up to me and said that my father had some very extensive x-rays taken. The one x-ray to pin point the location of the aneurysm was an especially expensive x-ray, and therefore they take only one of those usually. In my father's case they took three because they could not find the aneurysm. It had disappeared. Only a ripple remained in the spot where the aneurysm had appeared in all the previous x-rays, which they compared to the newest x-ray. There was no scientific explanation for the aneurysm's disappearance.

The doctor went on to add that the real miracle was that in the prior x-rays, your father's Abdominal Aorta was something like 17 centimeters, which is normal for a man his age, however, and the plaque blocking the Aorta was also visible.

In the x-rays taken today, the Aorta was only 10 centimeters, that of a teenage boy, and there was no plaque.

I was in a dead stare as the doctors spoke to me, not even noticing that a crowd of people had lined up behind the doctors and the technician.

One of the doctors asked me, "what did you do?" I looked at my father who was now grinning from ear to ear, and he said that he told the doctors and the technician about the prayer line, all the prayers, our faith, and the holy water from Lourdes. I confirmed to the doctor what my father told him.

The doctor turned to acknowledge the crowd of people behind him, and asked if I would be so kind as to take prayer requests for these people had seen the before and after x-rays and recognized this as a miracle.

A few months later my father had his hip surgery which was a great success. A year later my father had quadruple by-pass surgery to open his arteries and his aorta. No sign of the Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm has ever recurred.