DIE, PRAY, LIVE

HOW THE PROSPECT OF DEATH BROUGHT MEANING TO A COUPLE'S LIFE

- By Anjuly Mathai

It is a true blessing to live with absolute certainty about what you believe in. In life, we are all driven by something— wealth, fame, career, family or religion. But how many of us can truly say that we have made the right choice or that we are on the right track?

Dr Sean George—who works as consultant physician and head of department of general medicine at Kalgoorlie Hospital in Western Australia—is absolute sure about what (or who) he has put his faith in. He believes in God the way the rest of us believe in electricity—we don’t doubt it because we see how everything works by it.

So the miracle that happened on Friday, October 24, 2008, did not create faith in him; it confirmed it. As he drove the 400km back to Kalgoorlie with his intern after running a medical clinic in Esperance on the southern coast of Western Australia, he started to feel a minor discomfort in his chest. While passing through a small town called Kambalda, he called his wife Sherry, also a doctor. She suggested he drive straight back to Kalgoorlie, but he got a deep conviction that he should get to the medical clinic in Kambalda. As the GP at the Kambalda Health Centre was at lunch, he asked the nurses to perform an ECG on him. Reading it, he was shocked to see that he was having a heart attack. The GP, the intern and the nurses started treating him with drugs and pain killers, but his pain got worse. He looked at the monitor and found that his blood pressure and pulse rate were going up. That is the last thing he remembers seeing.