Miracle Man

The title draws on several threads, and the central one is a near-fatal event in December 2018. The author, who had gone to the gym that day, went on to a medical appointment, where he was rushed to the emergency room at Hoag Hospital because his blood pressure had fallen so low that staff were astonished he had walked into the office. His next memory is of waking up with relatives around him, and of his wife telling him he had spent three weeks on life support. His heart had stopped three times, and doctors had agreed to disconnect him, believing he had no chance of recovering.

The author then looks back on a life shaped by physical challenges that began at birth. He was legally blind, and no one realized it until a first-grade teacher told his parents that she did not think he was slow but did not believe he could see. Many people assumed his health problems were exaggerated or imagined. Through these experiences, he has come to see his life as a sequence of unlikely recoveries.

The book moves from one incident to the next and builds toward its most dramatic section: the three weeks he spent on life support and the almost four months that followed in the hospital.