A Miracle

I was reading an odd article on a lazy afternoon when I came across the word “Miracle”. Sometimes we come across some stories that appears to be so real and at times we are confronted with incidents those are difficult to distinguish from fictions. 
I was taken to a journey down the memory lane to more than 20 years to the early nineteen nineties and I had just lost our father and I had left my job in Delhi and temporarily moved back to our home town. I used to spend my evenings hanging out with few of my classmates who were fresh out of medical colleges and doing their intern-ships at the government hospitals and also working part time in some private clinics.

One particular night we were standing at a street corner with the doctors after their duty at the clinic was over. We were having some silly men talks over cups of tea and cigarettes. We noticed a three wheeler auto rickshaw rushed past us and the desperation of the driver appeared to be transporting a patient to the main government hospital nearby. It was quite common to turn three wheelers into ambulances in many small cities across India and it became obvious that there was a patient in the back seat. One of the friends got up and said that “let me pass by the emergency and check what was wrong with this patient”. He bid us bye and jumped into a waiting bus saying “I was to go to the hospital and meet a friend anyway.”

When he reached the emergency, he found that a man lying on the observation bed neither breathing nor having a pulse, we learnt later. He was presumed to be dead and the doctors there were waiting for another half an hour to confirm his death and issue the necessary documentation. Unfortunately, the hospitals in smaller Indian towns then and even today are not equipped with the equipments and gadgets that we are so used to see discovery channel and the likes or the Hollywood movies.

He said “let me try to pump up the heart manually” and climbed up on the dead man’s chest to press the chest with both palms. A trait he learnt in the college days not long ago. After a while heart responded and the man started to breathe again.

This was snatching life from the claws of death or was it a miracle? Every time I remember this incident, I wish it happened with my father.........