UPDATE: Thom Peters’ extraordinary life and faith

Rehab using a free-standing exoskeleton

I direct the entire readership to an article in the UK’s best Catholic weekly, the Catholic Herald (recently revamped into a magazine format and for which I have a new, revamped column).

They did a story on Thomas Peters (son of the canonist) who had his blog American Papist and worked in defense of the unborn and of marriage, specially with National Organization for Marriage.  A couple years back he damaged his spinal cord in a swimming accident and is now living a whole new kind of life.

Be sure to go HERE and read.  I don’t want to give up too much of it here, but here is a sample:

Thom had been on a work retreat in Maryland and just before dinner announced that he wanted to go swimming. No one saw him for “quite some time” – until he was found floating face down in the water. His spine was wrecked and he didn’t quite get to the appropriate medical facilities fast enough. “In these cases, it’s all about how fast they treat you.” The precious “golden hour”, in which so much can be done to repair the spine, ran out. “I missed it. I totally missed it,” he said.

What followed must have been agonising. He later wrote: “It took six weeks to patch me up to a medically stable position suitable enough to transfer me to a rehabilitation centre in Washington DC. For six weeks in Baltimore, nurses and doctors battled infections and secretions to heal the damage my lungs had suffered from ingesting filthy water. I was placed in a metal halo in an effort to save my fractured vertebra. And when that effort ultimately failed, I underwent a two-day surgery to replace the damaged vertebra with a titanium cage.

The surgeons also fused my fourth and sixth vertebrae to strengthen my neck. I was intubated, given a tracheostomy, re-intubated and put back on the tracheostomy.”

But Thom never gave up.

I will add this.

When we pray for miracles, they are not always granted, although our prayers are never in vain.  However, if we don’t ask for miracles, we won’t receive them.

Pray for miracles.  Pray for a miracle for Thom!  Pray for that whole family.

May God reward you.