It’s A Miracle: Real Life Inspirational Stories, Extraordinary Events and Everyday Wonders

RUPERT, THE PARROT

Lynn Norley of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has a very special relationship with Rupert, her African Gray Parrot.

“There’s definitely something magical about this bird,” she says. “I mean, the bird just interacts with everyone in such a way that’s so touching. His affection, and his rapport, and how he absolutely knows what’s going on around him—it’s just fantastic.”

Lynn acquired Rupert as a baby in 1986, and since then, the parrot has become a central part of her life. In fact, she literally wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for Rupert.

It all began in February of 1998, when Lynn put Rupert in his cage for the night, and went to bed herself. What she didn’t know was that in just a few hours she would wake to a living nightmare.

“I was lying there and I heard a very loud thud. Rupert fell off his perch, and then I heard him squawking very loudly. It was definitely an alarm sound. I mean, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that there was a problem,” she remembers.

Lynn went to investigate, but got no farther than the bedroom door, which opened to reveal smoke and flames. “I was faced with a wall of smoke that was horrible-smelling, and I couldn’t see anything.”

She knew that Rupert was in danger. Not thinking of the consequences, she rushed to free him from his cage as the room filled with smoke.

“When I got to the cage, I was extremely panicked, and I was sure that Rupert wouldn’t make it. This parrot can take only a little bit of smoke. I couldn’t find the door of the cage because I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t get a breath, either. But somehow I fumbled and found the cage, and I grabbed Rupert out from the bottom.”

With Rupert tucked under her arm, Lynn rushed out to her patio for air. She took a deep breath, and ran back into the smoke-filled house to rescue her dogs, Alex and Panther, who were still trapped in the fire. The dogs were frantic, and in the middle of all the chaos, Lynn felt Rupert go lifeless in her arms.

“I was sure that Rupert had died,” says Lynn. “I felt horrible, because Rupert was such a part of my life for so long, and I couldn’t just drop him on the floor.” With the fire burning around her, Lynn didn’t have a lot of time to make a decision. “I wrapped Rupert in a bathrobe, and gave him the only burial I could at the moment. I put him in the bottom of the shower stall.”

Lynn could hear the flames crackling in the hallway outside the door. She put a wet shirt over her face, grabbed her dogs, and tried to make a run for it.

“I put Alex under my arm and grabbed Panther by the collar. I planned on going out the bedroom door, but when I opened the door again, I was hit with a wall of smoke and an explosion. I realized then that the house was bursting into flames, and I knew I had to escape through one of the windows of my second-story bedroom.”

Thankfully, Lynn and the dogs dropped safely to the ground, leaving the house in flames. Firefighters doused the fire, but only after the inside had been totally gutted.

“It was terrifying, and it was horrible. I was watching my house exploding and smoke coming out of the roof,” remembers Lynn.

The next morning, with the support of friends, Lynn returned home to see the devastation the fire had caused. The building was still standing, but it was merely a shell. There was little left in its charred interior. For Lynn, however, the greatest loss was Rupert.

“It seemed that nothing in the house could possibly survive,” she says. “The windows were all blown out. In order to fight the fire, the firefighters had thrown everything out the window—my grandmother’s things, and my paintings, and all that—but they really didn’t matter. I mean, really, truly, the only thing I felt bad about was the bird.”

Lynn didn’t have the heart to go into the bathroom, so her friend Laurie Moore went in to remove the dead bird. Blackened debris had filled the shower stall after firefighters had doused the blaze, and Laurie pulled away the remains of crumbled walls.

“I started rummaging through the tile and the plaster and the fiberglass,” Laurie recalls. “I moved some of it away, and found Rupert plastered up in the corner, looking at me. ‘Rupert!’ I screamed. Both of us were very surprised, looking at each other, and when I reached down to pick him up, he bit me.” Laurie yelled out to Lynn to come quickly, that Rupert was alive.

“When I heard her scream, I couldn’t believe my ears,” says Lynn. “I ran into the bathroom, and there was Rupert, sitting in the corner of the shower stall on top of a pile of debris. He was shaking, and looked horrible.” But finding the bird living, Lynn declares, “It was really a miracle…. No one could believe the bird was alive.”

Today, Lynn and Rupert are living happily together in a new home. Lynn owes her life to her pet bird. It was Rupert’s warning calls that saved her from the fire. But what saved Rupert?

“I don’t know how the bird’s alive,” Lynn reflects. “It’s a miracle that this bird lived through that. I mean, it’s totally astounding. Between everything that Rupert inhaled, and everything that happened to him … if even a small part of any of those things had happened to any other bird, it would never have had a chance to live. And everything that happened to Rupert was so intense. It was just really a miracle.”

DOG ANGEL

In 1993, John and Toni Sheridan shared their home in rural Virginia with a very special companion, a dog named Sailor who had been a member of the family for more than a decade.

Toni says, “I guess I loved Sailor so much because we really got him as a little pup. He was just five weeks old. We brought him up, we nourished him, and he was just closer to us than a baby.”

Sailor may have been Toni’s baby, but he was John’s best friend.

“Every time I hopped into my pickup to go somewhere,” John explains, “he’d be right there alongside me with his head on my knee.”

And then, returning from a drive one morning, Sailor waited a moment before his normal routine of jumping out the passenger side of the truck. But this time, something went wrong.

John remembers, “He hit the ground, and he let out a yip, and he just laid there. So I figured, well, in a few minutes he’ll get up and walk around, but he just laid there the way he hit the ground. And I knew darn well something had happened. He was paralyzed.”

John and Toni rushed Sailor to the local vet.

Toni continues, “The vet said he was hurt internally, and, you know, there was very little he could do. And he suggested putting him to sleep, and there’s no way we wanted that. We wanted to keep him and see what would happen.”

“So we took him home,” says John. “We put him in the bedroom there and made a nice bed for him and he just laid there. I tried to give him some water and he wouldn’t drink. I tried to give him some food and he wouldn’t eat. After two days or so, he got steadily worse. His eyes were closed half the time and I told Toni, ‘He’s paralyzed. He can’t move. So … I think tomorrow morning when the vet opens up, we’ll have to take Sailor there and put him to sleep.’”

But Toni refused to give up hope. She told John, “‘I’m going to go and say a prayer. I’m going to ask God to send us an angel.’ I prayed and I prayed and I prayed for him.”

But Sailor wasn’t getting any better. And it was killing John to watch his faithful friend suffer.

“So I looked at Sailor, and I said, ‘Well, I guess you know it’s the end.’ So I slipped off his collar, and I went out to the shed. I had a couple of dog collars from previous dogs I had, and I hung Sailor’s collar next to them. It was something I hated to do, but it brought tears to my eyes. Those three collars represented almost forty years of faithful companionship.”

The next morning, John was up an hour before taking Sailor to the vet. And that’s when something entirely unexpected happened.

John recounts, “I looked up and I saw this little brown dog coming down the driveway. She looked lost. And I looked, but there was no collar on the dog. So I said, Well, heck, she must be hungry. I took her in the house, but she wouldn’t eat anything. She started walking around the house. She walked into the bedroom where Sailor was, and she sat down right in front of Sailor, just looking at him. After a minute or so, she went up and she nudged Sailor. And believe it or not, he slowly tried to get to his feet. He was shaky as all heck. He got up and he walked to the door, and that little dog went out, and Sailor followed her out. I couldn’t believe it, that Sailor was almost ready to be put to sleep, and here he was walking around wagging his tail and all.

“So I called Toni, and she came out and she said, ‘Oh, my God, Sailor’s alive! God must have sent an angel.’”

Toni agrees. “Something happened. I don’t know what kind of angel He sent, but He sent something to get Sailor up and moving and following that little dog the way he was, and I was just overjoyed.”

But there was still the question of this stray dog. Where had it come from? And was some anxious owner desperately searching for it? John called the local radio station to report a lost dog. A few hours later, the dog’s owner called to retrieve her pet. Her name was Karen Jarett.

John explains, “She had just moved up recently from Atlanta, Georgia. They lived three or four miles away, with a big wooded section between us. The dog didn’t know this area, and ran into the woods and never came back. Something brought that dog through those woods right to my house, and right to Sailor. And in my opinion, that dog saved Sailor’s life.”

As the owner thanked John for saving her dog, she pulled a collar from her bag. And at that moment, John understood what had happened.

“She had a collar in her hand, and she put it on the dog,” John says. “And I looked at the collar and I called Toni. There was ‘Angel’ written on the name tag. Toni saw it, and she said, ‘That’s God’s angel.’”

Toni says, “I thanked God because I knew it was through Him that this happened with Sailor. And I knew that if it wasn’t for Him, this miracle would never have happened, because to me it was a miracle.”

John wonders, “How could a dog come through three or four miles of woods in a strange place? And come right up, nudge my dog, and bring him back to life? This is something that happened without any help from mankind. Something stronger than a human being saved Sailor.

“And it was that little dog.”

WOMAN’S BEST FRIEND

Nestled among the majestic redwoods of Northern California is the quaint town of Garberville. In 1999, Nancy and Jeff Best were raising a family there, while running a popular coffee shop, the Java Joint.

“Our lives were a little hectic at the time,” recalls Nancy. “We had three kids going to three different schools. My husband had taken a job in the Bay Area, which is a good four-and-a-half-hour drive away, so during the week he’d be gone and I would have to run the shop.”

Even with her active schedule, however, Nancy dreamed of adding another member to her family.

“I’ve always been an animal lover,” she says. “My mom used to call me ‘Dr. Doolittle’ when I was little, because I always had animals around me.

“I’m particularly fond of dogs,” says Nancy. “I had been pestering my husband about getting a yellow Lab every time I would see one. I would hint, ‘Christmas is coming, I want a yellow Lab.’ But he kept saying that we really shouldn’t get one at that time.”

“I didn’t want a dog, because our lives were kind of in flux then,” Jeff says. “We were renting the house and we just didn’t need a dog.”

But a few weeks before Christmas, opportunity rang.

“I received a phone call from a friend of mine who had spotted some yellow Labs,” says Nancy. “She said, ‘Nancy, these dogs are just beautiful. You have to come down here right now. The man who’s selling them is just here for a minute, he’s traveling. If you don’t come now, you’re going to miss your opportunity.’”

Nancy decided that she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass her by, and she took off to meet her friend without telling Jeff where she was headed.

“I got in the car and drove to the park,” says Nancy, “and as I drove up, I saw these beautiful puppies. They were so cute, they were the most darling yellow Labs. They were healthy, and their tails were wagging, and they were all running around in a little bunch. I knew that I wasn’t going to leave without a puppy.

“And at this point I didn’t know if I wanted a boy or a girl,” says Nancy, but she bonded instantly with one of the puppies. “When I held her, I knew she was the one I was going to take home.”

“So anyway, she showed up with this puppy, and I was not happy about it at all,” recalls Jeff. “I wanted her to take it back.”

“Which I couldn’t do, because the owner of the dogs had already left,” counters Nancy. “So that worked out really well.”

It didn’t take long for the puppy to soften Jeff’s hard heart.

“I mean, puppies, you know, you fall in love with a puppy almost immediately, so it worked out pretty good that way,” admits Jeff.

Nancy named the pup Mia. And Mia grew to become a true member of the family.

“Mia’s kind of like Nancy,” says Jeff. “She likes to have fun, she likes to be with people. She’s just a nice dog, always friendly, ready to cuddle up or be scratched behind the ear or whatever.”

When Mia was about fourteen months old, Nancy started to feel run-down, and her dog’s behavior began to change.

“With my life so hectic at that time, I was feeling a little tired. I was just getting worn out. I was physically tired. I knew if I didn’t start taking a rest during the day I couldn’t continue,” says Nancy. “When I would lay on the couch, Mia would usually lay next to me, and it would be pretty uneventful. But during this particular time when I was starting to feel really tired, Mia would come up and lay her nose on my chest and start sniffing. And at the time I didn’t think anything of it. I thought maybe she was smelling meat or some kind of food from the Java Joint that I might have had still on my shirt,” explains Nancy.

“This proceeded again. She came back to me a couple of days later, and did the same sniffing and licking in the same spot. I was so tired and I was so bothered by the fact that she was doing this, that I actually got mad and put her outside,” Nancy admits.

And she kept her outside the next day as well, but eventually Mia snuck back into the house.

“My daughter had come home from school,” says Nancy, “and after she opened the door, Mia came barreling into the house. She dove into my chest, with her nose again in the area she had been sniffing and licking before. I started to rub it with my hand, because it did cause a great deal of pain.

“And at that instant, I felt the lump.”

“Despite having had a mammogram before that was negative, indeed there was a lump of tissue there that was new and different from the previous exams,” reveals Nancy’s physician, Dr. Mark Phelps. “Unfortunately, the lump did have the little specks of calcium that make us real suspicious.”

Dr. Phelps recommended further testing to determine whether the lump was malignant.

“It was very scary,” recalls Nancy. “I never thought I would get cancer. I always thought everybody else got cancer, and I lived a pretty healthy lifestyle. It was a shock.”

“The diagnosis was, unfortunately, a new breast cancer called ductal cancer,” says Dr. Phelps. “It’s one that can be extremely dangerous, that spreads quickly, and the timing is critical. Gotten early, these are the cancers you can cure, but just a little too late and they spread.”

“When the doctor called me with the results,” says Nancy, “the first thing that I thought was, I was going to lose my family, my children. I wouldn’t get to see them grow. Other than the fact that you think you’re going to die, you have to think about the things you haven’t done yet. And you know tomorrow is not promised to anyone. I had that feeling in an instant.”

Nancy was immediately scheduled for a partial mastectomy and the removal of nearby lymph nodes where the cancer might have spread.

“My fear was for any suffering Nancy might have to endure,” says Jeff. “I gave her a kiss for good luck, and I was just trying to keep her positive. But, you know, there’s always that thought in the back of your mind that you can’t help but think: Your wife is going to die.”

As Jeff waited, the surgeons removed twenty-six lymph nodes from below Nancy’s arm.

“All of the lymph nodes were negative for any spread. The cancer was confined just to the small area,” says Dr. Phelps. “She was able to remove the cancer and preserve her breasts, and go through the treatment with a very high likelihood of complete cure.”

“If this cancer hadn’t been detected at that time, my doctor feels that it could have gotten a lot worse. He said the chance of it spreading would’ve increased,” reveals Nancy. “Had Mia not discovered it at that time, my chances for survival would have been greatly reduced.”

“The fact that the dog was able to do this is just remarkable,” says Dr. Phelps. “I’ve heard little bits and hints. You hear them from cancer specialists now and again ’cause they’ll hear the stories. But I never thought I would see a case like that. Who would ever think?”

“I think the miracle here,” says Jeff, “was that Mia was determined to let Nancy know that there was something going on there that wasn’t right, and she kept at it until Nancy realized it.”

To show Mia how much they appreciate the miracle she gave them, Nancy and Jeff reward her each morning with a special treat.

“My husband makes breakfast for the kids in the morning, and Mia waits anxiously every day for her pancake,” says Nancy. “And she’s just thrilled to be spoiled like that. She’s the little princess of the house now.”

And Jeff realizes how close he came to not allowing her to be part of their family.

“I thought about the fact that I never wanted the dog to begin with, and what an amazing thing it was that we got her,” Jeff remarks. “I mean, I didn’t want it, and Nancy kind of snuck down there and bought this dog behind my back, and then it turns out to be a savior dog, you know. So it was a tremendous thing.”

“For Mia to find this cancer, and just five months after I had a negative breast exam, is a miracle. It’s nothing less than a miracle to me,” declares Nancy. “If Mia could understand words, I would tell her thank you. Thank you for alerting me to something that could have taken my life, something that could have taken me away from my children, my husband, the things I love most.

“I would tell her that she is my miracle, and there is a reason that I have her, and that I love her.”

REMARKABLE RESCUES I

SECOND CHANCE ANGEL

1999 was a bad year for Rob Gingery of Memphis, Tennessee. Recently divorced, and separated from his son, Rob channeled his depression into motorcycles and living on the edge.

“He was at the point in his life where he didn’t care anymore. He’d party all the time, and then he’d want to know where the next party was,” remembers his girlfriend Cale Smith. “He was always cutting up on his motorcycle—the faster, the better.”

And then one afternoon in May, Rob and Cale were leaving a restaurant along with Rob’s close friend, Randy Brewer.

“Rob and I were going to ride our bikes over to his house. Cale was riding with another friend of ours in their car,” explains Randy.

After the couple said their good-byes, Randy and Rob sped out of the parking lot. As they headed back to Rob’s house, the two friends played a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, each trying to outrace the other at speeds of up to a hundred miles per hour.

Randy recalls, “We were hot-rodding back and forth, you know, on the main streets. When we got in the neighborhood, we turned the corner and Rob just shot off. I wasn’t really familiar with all the streets, so I drove at kind of a slower pace.”

Meanwhile, Cale and her friend Kat had taken a different route to Rob’s house.

“We went kind of the back road, and as we got there I noticed that his motorcycle wasn’t there. I looked at Kat and I said, ‘He’s down.’ She told me not to jump to conclusions, but I knew he was down, I could feel it.”

The two women sped off in search of Rob and Randy to make sure they were all right, but they didn’t have to travel far to discover that Cale’s horrible premonition had come true.

“When we turned the corner, there he was. The motorcycle was flipped upside down, and pipes were sticking out. It was a mess. Rob was lying on the curb with blood all over him.”

“Cale was hysterical,” remembers Randy. “She was crying, hanging over him, trying to see if he was alive.”

“The paramedics came at about the same time, and they jumped out and pulled me away from him,” says Cale. “We didn’t know if he had a broken neck—we didn’t know anything. When the paramedics finally got him on the gurney, Rob kept saying, ‘Where’s Cale? Where’s Cale?’ He looked at me and gestured for me to give him a kiss, so I leaned down and gave him one, and then he shut his eyes. I thought he’d died. I really thought that was it.”

Rob was still alive, but badly injured. The paramedics rushed him to the Regional Medical Center in Memphis. His injuries were extensive, including four skull fractures, a broken hand, and a broken leg. But it was his behavior that had Dr. Preston Miller most concerned.

“It’s pretty typical for folks who have a significant head injury to be combative or confused or a little bit out of it,” Dr. Miller explains, “so he went from our shock trauma room to the CAT-scan room, where he had a CAT scan of his brain.”

The CAT scan revealed that Rob had received a traumatic head injury. A small blood clot had formed in his brain.

“Those sometimes stay the same and sometimes get worse,” says Dr. Miller. “There’s no way of knowing. If they stay the same, it’s great, but if they enlarge, it either leads to serious brain damage or death.”

Cale was there when they did another CAT scan early the next day. “By about 7:00 in the morning, the blood clot had tripled in size. So the doctors rushed in and started telling us that they needed to do emergency surgery.”

Rob was rushed to an operating room where neurosurgeons spent the next several hours opening his skull and removing the blood clot from his brain. When they finished, there was nothing left to do but wait and pray that Rob would regain consciousness.

Meanwhile, Cale struggled to deal with the grim possibilities. “The doctors came out and said he could be a vegetable. I thought about what I would do if he did die. I cried more than anybody knew. Not only was I going to lose the person I was with, but Rob’s also my best friend. I never gave up hope on him, though. We prayed, and we prayed, and we prayed.”

Miraculously, two and a half hours after the surgery, Cale’s prayers were answered.

Rob remembers, “I wake up, and I’m in a room by myself. I’ve got hoses and IVs hanging off me, and I don’t have a clue as to where I’m at. I don’t remember having a wreck. Then the nurse walks in and tells me to be still, and all I can say is ‘What am I doing here?’”

“He got better like overnight,” Cale marvels. “I mean, he had brain surgery on Monday and was at home in bed by Friday. It was totally miraculous that he recovered the way he did.”

But as astounding as his physical recovery was, it was nothing compared to the life-altering change that had taken place in Rob’s attitude.

“I had a whole new perception, a whole new feeling inside. I felt clean. This wreck was the best bad thing that ever happened to me because it was a reality check. It sobered me up, straightened me up.”

But there was still one nagging question in his mind.

“When you hear about a child that dies in a car wreck or about anyone that passes away, you wonder why a person like me was saved. You wonder, Why am I here? Was it just an accident that I lived?”