“I tell everyone, if they want to call it a modern-day miracle, this is a miracle,” said Regan, 59, and a Catholic. “I have friends who are atheists who have called me and said, ‘I am going back to church.’ “
I know some part of this is the simple desire to express boundless gratitude that a loved one survived. And another part is the ridiculous “drama” writing on the part of the reporter.
But after a while, it just gets tedious. Like the 20th time you’ve seen an “evil twin” episode on a TV series. Or the 10th “hot young vampire” movie.
[Or the “confrontation at the mike, with much scowling” in pro wrestling: “God is afraid to face me in the ring! He’s goin’ down! He’s goin’ down, and not all his heavenly posse can save him! All those sissy angels and that skinny gutless so-called son of this — conceived out of wedlock, but he goes around BRAGGING about the nail holes in his hands, trying to distract people from the fact that he’s just another of God’s little bastards — they’re gonna see who the real champion is! The whole world will know the real hero of Philosophical Pro Wrestling is me, Chuck Darwin, the Evolver!”]
If you read this story carefully, it’s a story of an accident victim who has an aneurism which is repaired by surgery. Doctors initially feared extensive brain damage, and braced his parents for the worst. But after several days, when an MRI showed the boy’s brain was in better condition than they originally thought, and he started to improve, they went “Oh, good. This kid is probably going to recover.”
Then reporter Susan Donaldson James waded in, possibly under orders: “Let’s see one of those Christmas miracle stories. You know the drill — a freezing kitten coming into a warm church, one twin donates a kidney to the other. Yeah, that’s it, a medical story! People just eat that shit up, and hospitals always have something you can tweak. On my desk by 9 p.m.”
During surgery, Spetzler clipped the balloonlike aneurysm in the blood vessel — “as if I were patching a tire,” a procedure that eventually worked.
For days Schmid didn’t seem to be responding, but what puzzled his doctor was that he did not see fatal injuries on the MRI scan. So he decided to keep Schmid on life support longer.
Later in the article, after you wade through the “miracle” talk, it turns out the victim was in an induced coma. And that the story dates from late October.
Which, for a possibly-amateur writer who had no idea how to make a TRUE story interesting, sort of killed the thrill. Cue the god-talk, and break out the 72-point MIRACLE!!! banner. Everybody goes home happy.
Except people interested in real stories and a rational outlook.
But hey … fuck them, right?