a little kiss

I've had trouble posting anything recently because my focus is on my running. As most of you may know, I am running the NJ Marathon and raising money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. I've been so focused on my running and health - and so far, knock on wood, doing really well - that blogging is down a few steps on the list. In all, my running is taking an hour or two or three out of my day.

But, I'm still surfing the web and finding inspiration. This one comes via Deacon Greg Kandra and tells a great story:

A woman who doctors believed could remain comatose indefinitely recently
revived after her husband asked her for a kiss.

Just ten days after giving birth to her son, Telford, Shropshire resident
Emma Ray suffered a heart attack and collapsed while shopping with her husband,
Andrew. Andrew performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her, after which she
was taken to a hospital where doctors were able to restart her heart.

“She could wake up the following day, she could wake up in a month, or you
may be left with a sleeping beauty,” Andrew Ray said a doctor told him,
according to the Daily Mail.

Andrew went to great lengths to try and rouse his 34 year-old wife from her
comatose state, playing recordings of their baby son Alexander and of their
daughter Ella and songs from their wedding reception.

“I would speak softly to her, clasp her hand, pinch her fingers, all the
time telling her I loved her or begging her to wake up. By the time I asked her
to kiss me I was approaching my wits' end,” he told the Daily Mail.

He bent over his wife’s hospital bed and said “Emma, if you can hear me,
please just give me a kiss.”“'What happened next was beyond my wildest dreams,”
he told the Daily Mail. “She turned her head towards mine, puckered up her lips
and gave me a little kiss.”

“I couldn't believe it. My heart felt like it was going to leap from my
chest –it suddenly felt like a huge weight had been lifted.”

Doctors who witnessed the kiss were astonished by her response.Emma ray
continued to drift in an out of consciousness. Her brain had been oxygen-starved
after her heart attack, resulting in short-term memory loss.

She was eventually allowed home but requires ongoing rehabilitation for the
brain damage.

“The recovery is awful because I have so little memory,” Emma told the
Daily Mail.Her husband said he was grateful his wife had survived.

“She can walk quite well holding hands now, and at least our kids still
have a mother and I still have a wife,” he said, according to the Daily
Mail.