“Yeah, you don’t usually see guys without arms and legs (in footraces),” he says.
The lifelong Rockledge, Florida resident plans to participate in the Tailgate 2 Miler on Aug. 15 because he now has the prosthetics that will allow it. They give him a new hope to help him move beyond what has befallen him the last two years.
In late 2019, Miracle developed a blood infection and was airlifted to Orlando on New Year’s Eve.
“Super long story short, I got really sick on New Year’s Day, fell into septic shock and coded … A cardiovascular surgeon happened to be doing her rounds and saw what was happening. She was in my room immediately,” he recalls.
The surgeon took a chance and put Miracle on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, a form of life support that pumps and oxygenates blood outside the body, allowing the heart and lungs to rest.
Technologies like ECMO are not entirely without risk, and while Miracle was in a 10-day coma, “basically, it sucked the blood from my extremities,” he says. “My arms and legs went necrotic. But my life was saved.”
Hospitalized for 117 days, both arms were amputated below the elbow, both legs below the knees, and at the mention of it, Miracle lights up again.
“They saved my (joints),” he says triumphantly. “I have elbows and knees.”
A sales professional, years ago Miracle worked in Texas with the Oklahoma-based contemporary Christian music group MercyMe, and they have remained “lifelong friends.”
The group is known best for its 1999 hit “I Can Only Imagine.”
Being — like the Miracles — devout Christians, the group prayed for him.
Being entertainers, they created a song inspired by him.
“Say I Won’t” (Keep on saying I won’t and I’ll keep proving you wrong) comes with a video of Miracle during his struggles and thereafter, as well as lead singer Bart Millard, like Miracle, mainly in a chair. It is, in large part, responsible for Miracle’s story having been told worldwide.
“From the moment I came home, my wife and I have prayed for purpose,” Miracle said. “I could have lost my (hands and feet), but I could have lost everything. Now I get emails from people across the world, people who want to tell their stories, and the most humbling part is that God has kept me in this position, a position in which I am able to speak and listen.”
He’s also able to continue enjoying his wife, Kelly, and watching his children grow — Johana, 17; Asher, 10; Walter, 8; and Henry 7.
His goal is to be “100% out of the wheelchair and out on the field,” he says, and no one is willing to put it past him.
As for footraces, he has “a brand new pair of legs” and praises the people of Prosthetic & Orthotic Associates in Orlando for making them. He ran for the first time, one mile on the AlterG treadmill, on June 25.
His next goal is the fall sports-themed Tailgate 2 Miler.
His team for the Tailgate 2 Miler, “Say I Won’t,” now has more than 20 people, and Miracle hopes for 100. Kelly and the kids will run with him; who else will be there, he does not say.
“I am trying to fight to learn how to walk, run and get in shape to be ready for Aug. 15,” he told race organizers Don and Denise Piercy. “There are people from all over the country flying in to run with me that know about my story.”
“We are so excited that Gary chose our event as his goal,” Denise Piercy said. “We can’t wait to see him out there.”
-MSN
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