Tomorrow is my birthday ... I'll be 55 years old.  The big "double nickel"!  Woo hoo!

I wrote the following piece a few years ago as part of an article for a magazine.  It's the story of how I came into this world ... and my way of saying "thank you" to my parents, God and His angels.

(((BIG HUGS))) and much love to everyone! 

   The universe certainly didn’t make it easy for me to be born into this lifetime!  If the theory that we choose our parents before we incarnate into their lives is true, then I definitely chose a path of great resistance.  

   My mother, Carolyn, married my father, Robert (“Bob”) Coffey, in the fall of 1940.  Two years later, she gave birth to a son, Bobby Jr., who lived only 21 hours before dying due to complications during his delivery.  Sadly, my parents were told that the odds of them being able to have another child were slim-to-none.

   Shortly thereafter, my father enlisted in the United States Navy as World War II raged throughout the world.  During a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Okinawa, the ship that my father was aboard sank during a typhoon.  Bob, who was a cook, floated overboard on a collapsible kitchen table and was marooned on a coral reef until he was found by a rescue ship several days later.

   Several years later, mother developed cancer in one of her ovaries and it was surgically removed.  My parents resigned themselves to the fact that they would probably never have a biological child.

   Despite the odds, when Carolyn visited her doctor in late 1953, complaining of abdominal maladies, she received the shocking news that she was pregnant.

   “You’re crazy!” she told the doctor.  “You know I can’t have children.”  Unfazed by her reaction, he merely smiled and told her to “wait a few months and you’ll see I’m right.”

And right he was.  Miraculously, there I was, growing inside this woman, who, for all intents and purposes, should not have been able to have a child.

   Mother’s due date came and went, but she did not deliver.  Finally, her doctor determined that I was trapped by scar tissue that had formed on her uterus following my brother’s traumatic birth over 12 years earlier.  An emergency C-section was quickly scheduled and Mother was taken to the operating room.

    While on the operating table, Mother’s blood pressure took a nosedive.  She remembered hearing a nurse say “We’re losing her,” then suddenly two beautiful, glowing angels in white robes appeared on either side of her.  They took her by the arms and started to lift her off the operating table, but she resisted.  “Please don’t take me,” she pleaded with them.  “I don’t want to leave my baby.”

   The angels looked at each other, then smiled down at her and disappeared.   As her soul was placed back into her body, Mother let out a piercing scream and in the next instant, she heard me begin to wail as I made my dramatic entrance into the living world.  “Is my baby all right?” she asked.  “You’re baby is fine, Carolyn,” the doctor told her. “It’s a boy.”  “Thank you, God,” Mother weakly muttered, yet without a doubt, I know that He heard her.

      I was baptized into the Catholic faith at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Elmira.  At the age of just six weeks, it became necessary for me to undergo surgery to correct a serious urological obstruction.  My parents were told that there was a strong possibility that I would not survive the operation.

   Upon hearing this, Mother took me directly across the street from the doctor’s office at St. Joseph’s Hospital and into the Church.  There, she made a solemn promise to God: “If You let my child live, I will do everything in my power to encourage him to serve You,” she prayed.  Mother’s prayer was answered; I survived the surgery.  And I truly believe that I am fulfilling the promise my mother made to God, on that brisk October day in 1954, by doing the work that I now do.  ^i^