DR. MARC SIEGEL: My Personal Miracle: A physician’s lessons in faith and healing

We all have miracles in our lives, and they happen every day. When I first began to study medicine, the intricacies of the human body and how it functions declared itself to me as one of G-d’s miracles.

I wasn’t alone among budding doctors in seeing it this way, in never seeing faith or the human soul or spirituality as standing in opposition to science. Great technology helps a physician to preserve and extend life and to relieve suffering. Faith helps us to believe that each life is precious.

But miracles are not predictable. G-d grants us the miracles He wants us to have, not always the ones we may pray for.

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Back in the 12th century, Hannah found that her prayer to have a child was only answered because G-d knew that her son Shmuel (Samuel) would go on to become a great prophet. Shmuel in Hebrew means G-d hears. He heard Hannah’s prayer.

In my own life, we prayed for a third child and were gifted with one from G-d. While my wife was pregnant, I was praying on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and reading Hannah’s prayer when I saw that the man in the pew in front of me had a little baby on his shoulder. “What’s his name?” “Shmuel.” When I got home, my young daughter was excited about a television program called “The Powerpuff Girls” and mentioned a character named Samuel. We had our name for our new son.

But when Samuel was born, he couldn’t hear, a cruel twist on the name, and so I prayed to G-d again and sure enough, after clearing out his ear canals a day later, he smiled in response to our voices and passed his final hearing test before leaving the hospital.

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Unfortunately, his infant years were marked by repeated ear infections, a reminder to me that G-d controls his miracles — not us — and that they may be fragile. But Samuel grew into a very kind, loving child and then an extremely intelligent adult. I could see that G-d had a purpose for him in this world.

My parents are both over a hundred years old because of the physicians who have refused to give up on them even when they both sustained hip fractures.

Dr. Marc Siegel and his new book “The Miracles Among Us.”  (FNC)

My father has survived to age 102 despite an emergency bowel operation and being put on a ventilator at age 98. That was followed by dialysis over the past four years, all because of his fierce love for my mother and because of doctors, nurses and aides who all believe that a single life is precious and needs to be cherished. My father says that the secret to a long life is to duck whenever someone throws a punch.

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Recently, I met a woman who showed me a necklace she wore around her neck with a pendant that said “Milagros” which means miracle in Spanish. Right before she was born, she was suffocating from a lack of oxygen. A nun who was in the room handed her mother this necklace and said, “if you promise to wear this all your life, your daughter will be fine. God’s presence is in this room.”

Her mother quickly agreed, and she was born completely normal, though many years later she was found to have a benign brain tumor which required repeated surgeries and radiation — all of which she survived, clutching the same pendant in her hands before she went in for each procedure.

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We are all in G-d’s hands, I thought as she told me the story.

Doctors and their patients need to realize this. It makes us all more humble and promotes kindness and healing.

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