My First Miracle (Luke 1:37)

For nothing will be impossible with God (Luke 1:37)

Barely born in 1956, I clung to life.  You see, I had epilepsy and a fever of approximately 40'C.  That day I almost died. My mother described the color of my little body as of a really deep red. This was the miracle, I would survive this. Later, she told me that she had been, of course, panicking as I was her first child.  Now as you probably know we were in Belgium at around 1956.  They didn't know much back then about this and the doctor advised my mother to dip me in ice cold water.  She was willing to do whatever it took to keep her baby alive.  She had to dip me in cold water which today would not have been done.

Maybe related to this, later I needed help because I was too slow in school.  They moved me to a slower paced school.  Slow in school, later, meant I would be slow in my jobs which unfortunately required speed and concentration, baking and cooking.

From the age of 5-18, I had to take EEG Test which were long and painful on the head back then.  The doctor placed a helmet made of thick rubber strands on my head. Then hard metal blocks slipped here and there underneath the strands pressing against the cranium.  Slowly, the operator would connect wires to each blocks to a machine that would record the electric signals of my brain.  The result would be a nice drawing of straight lines going up and down.  The whole process I think would take about an hour.  It was very painful.

Besides that, I was on medications all this time for epilepsy.  Before traveling  to Canada, they gave me a special visa with a red round sticker.  It was downright humiliating.  We had great difficulties to enter Canada in 1977 because of that red blotch on this piece of paper.  Before I left for Canada the Belgian doctors gave me a supplementary drug for my 'supposed epilepsy'.  When in Canada for about a year, we found a neurologist who had a good reputation in Canada.  He got me off all medications over a period of few months and basically told me I didn't need them anymore.  Since  1977, I have been off those medications for good and I am free of epilepsy.