Power of Prayer

Words cannot express how thankful I am for all of the thoughts and prayers you sent for my family. A week ago yesterday, I received the phone call that you pray you never receive, my dad’s heart had stopped and he was on life support in Aberdeen. After a fast trip to Aberdeen to meet my family we were informed that he had fallen outside of the Federal building in Aberdeen and by the grace of God he had placed people in his path to help him. A lady and her husband were driving by and saw my dad fall so they jumped out and ran to help him. He was conscious when they got to him, but then a few minutes later he was not so another man came out of the building and started CPR. As a group was gathering around him a pastor came along and started a prayer chain around my dad. Soon after, the ambulance arrived and got my dad’s heart back into rhythm, but he was still not breathing on his own. We were being faced with the question of what he would want us to do…keep him on life support or not. That was not a question we were ready to answer so we prayed. A few moments later his doctor came out and said that he wanted permission to try one more thing and we of course said do whatever you can. They decided to fly him to Sioux Falls to start him on a cooling process. They would make his body temperature lower so that hopefully his brain would rest and reset his body. After we arrived in Sioux Falls they started that process and they told us it would be 3-5 days before we would know whether he would come out of it. Well, thanks to all of the prayers God sent us a miracle. He was supposed to be in the cooling process for 24 hours and half way through that he woke up. He squeezed our hands, wiggled his toes and blinked his eyes…was such an amazing sight to see! No words can express the emotion we felt at that time. That evening they started warming him up again and by Saturday morning he was warmed back up to his normal temperature. By noon or so he was breathing on his own and he was taken off of the ventilator. WOW!!! He instantly started talking to us, but had no recollection of what happened & no short term memory. If you have ever seen the movie “50 First Dates,” that is exactly what was happening. We could tell him something and a few seconds later he would forget and ask the same question again, but we didn’t care. We would answer the same question over and over as long as we had our dad. My mom said she wanted a phone number to call someone and he rattled it right off and knew who we all were so that is all we cared about. We have a rather large family so there was always one or two people with him at all times and our “family room - waiting room” was full! By that night they wanted to move him out of the ICU, but the hospital was full so there were no rooms available for him so he stayed in ICU until he was moved to the heart hospital on Monday afternoon to put his defibrillator/pacemaker in and on Tuesday afternoon he returned home. Therefore, in the time that it was supposed to take us to know whether he would wake up or not he was already back home. If that doesn’t scream an Easter miracle, I don’t know what does. The power of prayer is such an amazing thing!! My sister has been in contact with the lady that saw him fall so that is the only reason we know what really happened that morning since none of us were with him. So we are so grateful to her, the man who performed CPR (which we are still trying to find him so we can THANK him), the pastor that started the prayer chain around him and all of our family, friends & church families for praying for him and our family.  The pastor in Aberdeen started his prayer chain at his church, the lady that found him started her prayer chain in Conde, my aunts & cousins started prayer chains at all of their churches, my sisters & I all asked to have our prayer chains started at our churches as well. Thanks to all of them God answered our prayers and my dad is home recovering. Thankfully, he did not have an actual heart attack either. He has had an irregular heartbeat and for some reason his heart got out of rhythm that morning which caused him to pass out and the hard fall made his heart stop which is why they implanted the defibrillator.

My family has always had a strong faith, but after this it is even stronger and now even more than ever we believe in miracles. We've seen one happen right before our eyes.

Thank you!! ~ Jodi Burma