Man Crushed in Half by Truck, Sees Angels, & Regenerates Organs
The events of November 16, 2006, changed my life forever.
I will never forget what happened on that day; it will be with me as long as I live. Many of us can think of defining moments in our lives. Sometimes they are marked by tragedy, sometimes by triumph; rarely are they marked by both. But this was one of those uncommon days.
I was a self-employed diesel mechanic who performed on-site repairs. On this particular day, I was at a customer’s shop about 45 minutes from my home. The vehicle that I was working on was a Peterbilt logging truck. I had worked nearly 12 hours that day in order to complete my portion of the engine repairs, and I was just finishing up. I had been working with the driver of the truck, and after we put the engine back together, we began checking it over and testing the repairs. The rest of the truck had not been completely reassembled, but the driver planned on finishing the remaining work the next day. I began to put my tools back into the tool boxes on my service truck as the semi engine ran up to operating temperature. The driver asked me, since I was there, if I could also diagnose a non-related oil leak before I left. I was in a hurry to get home, but I thought this task would only take a few extra minutes.
I rolled underneath the front of the truck feet first on a creeper and started wiping off the area that appeared to be leaking. All of a sudden, the truck fell off the jack and crushed me against the concrete floor. The front axle had come down across my midsection like a blunt guillotine, the five to six tons of weight nearly cutting me in two. From my viewpoint, it looked and felt like I was cut in half as there was less than an inch of air space between the axle and the cement on my left side and about two inches of space on my right side. In a moment of panic, I tried to bench press the ten thousand plus pound mass off of me. When reality set in, I realized the gravity of the situation and called out “God help me!” twice. I listened as the truck driver called 911. When he got off the phone, I begged him to shut the engine off because the vibration of the engine directly above me was transmitted through the axle and right into my body. Small amounts of blood started to come out of my mouth when I tried to talk. I watched as the driver repositioned the jack and raised the truck up off of my body. I was scared of it falling again, and I wanted to get out from underneath that truck in the worst way. The large chrome front bumper was just behind my head, and I reached both hands back and grabbed the bottom of it. It took all the strength that I had for me to pull myself far enough that my head was out from underneath the truck. I stayed conscious long enough to see the first person who responded to the 911 call.
The next thing I remember, I was at least 10 or 15 feet above the scene, looking down at myself and the whole situation. The strangest part about my “out-of-body” experience was feeling like I was just an observer to what was happening below me. It was as if I was watching a movie. I felt no emotion, only a sense of peace. I heard one man say to another that there was no way I was going to live, and it didn’t matter to me one way or another. From my viewpoint, I could tell that my body was still mostly under the truck but that my head was sticking out from under the front bumper. I could see that my eyes were closed and that my head was turned toward the driver’s side of the truck. The man I had been working with was on his knees above me and was crying and patting me on the head as he was talking to me. I could hear and understand every word he said.
The most incredible thing wasn’t that I was having this experience; it was what I saw next. On either side of my body were twin angels, also on their knees, facing the front of the truck. From my vantage point, I was watching from above and behind them. The driver of the truck is over six feet tall, yet the heads of these angels were at least a foot and a half taller than his head. If they would have been standing up, I think they would have been close to eight feet tall. They had very broad shoulders and looked to be extremely muscular. There were no wings. Each angel had positioned his arms under the truck, angled toward my body. The angels had ringlets of long blond hair that fell at least half way down their backs. They were wearing white or ivory robes. It was hard to tell the exact color because of a yellowish light surrounding each angel. They seemed to be glowing. I also noticed that the robe fabric was very unusual. It was a woven material, but the thread size was very large, like miniature rope. It appeared to be very strong and durable. The angels never moved; they were as steady as statues. I couldn’t see their faces because my view was from behind them, but from what I could see, they were identical in appearance.
Life or Death
More people began to come to the scene of the accident, and I continued to watch from above. A red-haired emergency worker arrived, talked to someone, and walked up the driver’s side of the truck. She moved the truck driver out of the way and asked him my name. She held my head, patted my cheeks, and told me to open my eyes. She kept repeating herself in a loud voice, and the next thing I knew, I was no longer watching from above but was looking at her through my own eyes. She told me that it was very important for me to keep my eyes open. I thought about what she was saying and realized that I had been out of my body until she got me to open my eyes. This made me believe that what she said was true and important; I was on the verge of death! Then I thought about the angels that I had seen. I looked where they had been, but I could see nothing there now with my human eyes.
As I lay there, I heard a voice in my head telling me to shut my eyes and just give up. When I did shut my eyes, the incredible pain stopped, and I could feel my spirit drifting away from my body. But there was also another voice; this one was quieter, more like a whisper. It told me that if I wanted to live, I would have to fight, and it would be a hard fight. It was almost as if the red-haired emergency worker could hear that voice too because she then asked me what I had to fight for. All I could think of was my wife and four children. These two voices, or conflicting thoughts, volleyed back and forth in my head. If you think of that old cartoon with the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, you can use it to picture what was happening. The louder voice that was telling me to give up and die was not from God, but the whispering voice that told me to fight was. As always, the devil promotes death and God promotes life. It’s also interesting to note that God will always tell us the truth. He warned me that it was going to be a hard fight, and it has been. It seems that, most often, the right choice is not the easiest one.
I was transported by ambulance to a local hospital and then flown to our state’s largest trauma center. I stayed awake the whole time, fighting to hang on and refusing to close my eyes. When the emergency doctors starting scanning my body, they were astounded. There were so many injuries that they couldn’t decide where to start or what to do. They had given me several units of blood, but it just kept leaking out into my stomach cavity. As they were sliding me back in for another CAT scan, everything started to go dim for me, and although I hadn’t been able to talk for quite a while, the Lord gave me the strength to tell them that I was going to die and that they had to do something right now. The doctors told me several weeks later that, as soon as I said that, both numbers in my blood pressure reading dropped out of sight! They removed me from the machine and rushed me to the operating room.
The doctors operated on me only long enough to reattach the veins and arteries that had been severed. The head trauma surgeon had been called in from home. He told my family that, in all his years as a trauma doctor, he had never seen anybody so badly traumatized and still be alive. He told my family that he was going to cross his fingers and wait at least six hours to see if I was still alive before he would operate on me again. My wife told him that he could cross his fingers but that she and others were going to pray for my life. The prayers were answered, and the doctors resumed operating on me the next morning. They had to remove most of my small intestine and perform various other repairs to combat my several internal injuries. They decided not to do anything with the two vertebrae that were spider cracked in my spine; they would try to let them heal on their own.
The next thing I remember was waking up a few weeks later. I had had three operations during that time, and my wife never left my side. The night of my accident, she was at our children’s school for parent-teacher conferences. When she got home and heard the news, she dropped to her knees and turned it all over to God, knowing that He would give her the strength to get through whatever lay ahead. The only thing that she took with her to the hospital that night was her Bible. To everyone’s amazement, I was sent home a little more than a month after the accident. But after a few days, I was back in the hospital with severe complications stemming from a damaged pancreas and spleen.
I spent a few more weeks in the hospital, but I got out long enough to spend the Christmas holidays at home. Then I returned to the hospital. This cycle repeated itself a few times, and then the doctors decided that they would have to perform another major operation. They had to remove another section of my small intestine that had died and was almost completely closed off. We were told that an adult needs a minimum of 100 centimeters of small intestine to be able to live by eating food. I was already down to this critical minimum length before my fourth operation, and then they removed more. Before the accident, I weighed over 180 pounds; three months afterward, I was already down to 126 pounds because of the inadequate amount of small intestine left in my body.
More Miracles
Nine months after the accident, I was at the hospital for some tests in preparation for my fifth operation. While performing the procedure, the radiologist and his supervisor found that I now have at least one third, or around 200 centimeters, of small intestine. (We have since found out that there is actually even more, about one half or 300 centimeters.) When they looked at the doctors’ notes from the previous operations, they found that they had recorded a total length of 100 centimeters several times during the first three operations and this was before removing more in my fourth operation. It was hard for them to believe that the head of the trauma department and other doctors had made multiple mistakes on my chart and in their calculations, since these men are at the top of their field and have a spotless reputation.
Upon further research the before and after x-rays and CAT scans show that they didn’t make any mistakes. Something had happened that the doctors couldn’t explain. Intestines had come out of nowhere, but how?
What the doctors didn’t know was that several people had been praying for me and that a man named Bruce Carlson had flown in from New York to pray over me after my fourth operation. This man has often displayed the gift of healing, and the Lord has used him to heal hundreds of people. The Bible tells us that we, as Christians, are to pray with expectation for sick people to be healed. Sometimes God chooses not to heal someone in the method or timetable that we want, but that is His decision, not ours. As believers, we are told to pray with expectation, and the results are up to God. When Bruce Carlson prayed over me that day, he put one of his palms on my forehead. He asked the Lord to answer all of the prayers that people had been praying for me, and when he said that, I felt something like electricity flowing from his palm and into my body. He prayed for my small intestine to supernaturally grow in length in the name of Jesus, and as he did, I could feel something wiggle around inside my stomach. Of course, I didn’t know for sure that my intestine had lengthened until the radiologist told me a few months later.
It has now been a few years since my accident and I have almost no side effects or physical problems at this point, despite the tremendous amount of trauma that my body incurred. My weight has also climbed back up to about 170 pounds, thanks to the added intestine. Now that more time has passed, the doctors have also told me just what a miracle it is that I am alive. They said that, because of the arteries and veins that were completely severed, I should have bled to death internally in about eight to ten minutes or less. Rather, it was over two and a half hours from the time that I was injured until they started to operate on me! They also told me that according to an extensive study that had been done on the subject a few years before my accident, I am the only case that doctors know of where a person has had major arteries severed in five places in the chest and still lived. All other cases have come in dead on arrival. I told my doctors that I know why I am still alive. I got to see the two angels that saved my life!
Saved by Angels
When I tell people about seeing the angels who saved my life it has permanently affected many of them. It makes it hard for even skeptics to argue with the reality of these miracles when they are shown the medical facts. More than once, I have seen people break down in tears after hearing this story because it touches them deep inside. People are affected when confronted with the truth of God’s reality, mercy, and love. Because of the power of this testimony and to be obedient to God we have founded Sweet Bread Ministries, which is now our full-time work. We travel around the world telling others what God has done for us and what He will do for them. Listeners are compelled to consider the reality of God, angels, healing, and most importantly their salvation. Many people report being healed of all kinds of sicknesses, diseases, addictions, and emotional issues after attending one of our meetings. What a blessing it is to see God do miracles in other people’s lives. It is clear to us that, although this accident started out as a tragedy, the Lord has used it to bring triumph for His Kingdom.
