Doctors were confounded when they couldn’t explain how a pastor dead for 12 minutes was able to make a miracle recovery.
Pastor Jim Dumont and his wife Pam were in Maine visiting relatives when he collapsed, his wife knew it was something serious when she saw him lying on the ground. “It was a dread,” she said, “It was a huge, rising up of anxiety inside of my heart. I knew something was wrong.”
“I got to the end of the driveway and down the hill at the boat launch I saw two ambulances and a police car and there was my husband.”
Pam recalled his skin color changing to purple, and his eyes were yellow and red.
She called an elder, Paul, from their church for prayer. “She said, ‘Paul, Paul, you’ve got to help me, I’m in trouble. Jim is laying on the road we don’t know if a car hit him, but he has no pulse and I need you to pray,’” Paul said.
“And the Spirit rose up inside of me, And I said, ‘Pam, he will live and not die.’ And that’s according to Psalms 118:17. ‘He will live and not die, and he will declare the goodness of God.’” Paul and the congregation gathered to pray for their pastor.
Dr. Guzowski, the doctor who worked with Jim, recalled being concerned that he would have sustained brain damage. “The most we knew at that point was that his heart had stopped for 12-15 minutes, was reported downtime,” she said. “That becomes important because for every minute that your heart is stopped beyond a critical limit, you have decreased blood flow to all your organs, particularly your brain. And we always worry about in that settings could there be a potential brain injury.”
Doctors were hoping that by placing Jim in a medical coma, it would help prevent further damage, but he stayed in a coma for days beyond a 36-hour window the doctors were hoping for. “Each day that passes that someone doesn’t wake up, we get more and more concerned, I know their sense of fear was there, mine was too,” Dr. Guzowski said.
The couple’s son is a “physical medicine rehab doctor,” and when he visited his father, he did all to help bring his dad out of the coma: He slapped his hands and feet, tried to move him around — but to no avail.
“The event happened on a Monday and it was a Friday and he really wasn’t making any sort of neurological recovery, and it was pretty concerning,” their son, Dr. Justin Dumont said.
On day six, Pam was given the terrible news that he has brain damage, they said their good-byes and as per Justin’s wish, his four kids got to say goodbye and see their grandfather one last time.
Meanwhile, God had other plans, and it became clear when the grandkids gathered around him and sang and prayed, Jim’s eyes suddenly opened.
“My son came running into the waiting room, he said, ‘mom you have got to go in there, and he’s coming alive mom,’” Pam recalled. “It was just joy unspeakable. It was a miracle before the eyes of the nurses, and the technicians, be – they came in, tears in their eyes. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it.’”
“You don’t realize how much you love somebody until you see them gone,” Pam said. “And now every day since it’s like a gift.”
Doctors said that the artery behind his heart collapsed and then miraculously opened again on its own. Jim is doing well and has no brain damage. He can speak, and he’s writing a book called “Let’s Pray,” which, according to their church’s website, “chronicles God’s guidance and answers to prayer in their life.”
“You know, we know what we know about the medical part of things, but what we don’t know is the factors outside of our control,” Dr. Guzowski said. “And the power of people’s faith is, is real.”
“Don’t ever underestimate the power of our resurrected Savior,” Jim added. “The Bible says, ‘He’s able to do above and beyond what we can hope or imagine.’”
What a wonderful testimony of the power of prayer and the miraculous healing power of God demonstrated in the life of Pastor Jim Dumont.
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