Paul Walsh was 17 years old when
the car he was driving hit a tree on Chester Pike in suburban Piladelphia on an
icy December night in 1983. One doctor described his head injuries as the
equivalent of dropping an egg on a cement sidewalk. Not only was his skull
shattered, every bone in his face was broken and there was a tear in his brain.
Doctors at Crozier Chester Medical Center said he was irreversibly brain
damaged and would never regain consciousness.
But as the old saying goes, “never say never.”
On Saturday, May 14, 2005, Paul
Walsh received a bachelors degree in liberal arts from Neumann College In
Aston, PA. “I’d like to teach special ed,” said the 38-year-old graduate, who
is employed as a full-time health care associate with Elwyn, Inc., a
residential day program for the mentally disadvantaged. “I’d like to continue
working with mentally disadvantaged persons.”
Paul’s recovery from massive head
injuries in 1984 was “unexplained, on a purely medical and scientific basis”
said one of the physicians who treated him, Michael Ryan, M.D. In a written
statement, Dr. Ryan said: “It is my feeling that without the help of the
supernatural influence, Paul would today be dead or continue to be in a
comatose state.”
Although he recalls little of his
four-month ordeal following the accident, his mother, Betty Walsh, remembers
every detail, from the moment she got the phone call on the night of the
accident. “The nurse told me to come to the hospital right away,” said the mother
of ten from Ridley Park, PA. “It was
hard to even recognize Paul. His face was so swollen, like a pumpkin, and
totally wrapped in bandages. It didn’t look very good but he did recognize my
voice because he moved when he heard me.”
After ten hours of surgery the
following day, during which Paul lost four and half times the amount of blood
in his body, he was transferred to Crozier-Chester Medical Center where his
condition remained critical.
At first, he seemed to be improving
and was even talking a little, but there was a suspicious fluid dripping out of
his nose. Everyone thought he had a cold and a month went by before doctors
discovered the fluid wasn’t from nasal congestion - it was spinal fluid. A cat
scan revealed a tear in Paul’s brain.
“That’s when they realized he was
worse off than they thought,” Betty said.
Doctors tried to repair the tear
but the inside of Paul’s head was too shattered. They resorted to draining the
fluid with spinal taps and then a catheter, but Paul’s condition continued to
deteriorate. He began slipping in and out of consciousness.
Another cat scan revealed that he
had hydrocephalus and the ventricles of his brain were filling with fluid.
Doctors prepared him for emergency surgery to put a shunt in his head to drain
the fluid when they discovered yet another serious complication - he had also
developed spinal meningitis. “At this point, there was no hope,” Betty said.
“The ventricles just kept filling with fluid and it flattened the frontal lobe
of his brain which one doctor told me was his whole personality.”
Even though Paul was alive, in
essence, he was gone.“They kept saying ‘you have to stop hoping. . . the way he
is now is the way he’s going to be. He is permanently and irreversibly
brain-damaged.’” But Betty was not about to give up on her son. Even though she
had nine other children at home, she felt like the woman in the Bible who had
ten coins but lost one and could not stop searching until she found it.
“We just decided Paul needed a
miracle,” Betty said. “In the end, if Paul didn’t get better, I would accept
it, but in the meantime, I was really going to believe I could have a miracle
and I would at least pray with faith.”
A woman from St. Madeline’s in
Ridley Park, gave her five prayer cards for people who were in the process of
beatification and needed a miracle. Every day after Mass, she and her mother
would go to the hospital and pray the rosary over Paul, then say the five
prayers. “Whenever I came to the Padre Pio prayer, Paul blessed himself, even
though he was totally unconscious,” Betty said.
Several people witnessed the
phenomena, including a few nurses. Betty decided to call a local group of Padre
Pio devotees and report what was happening. They decided to send someone to the
hospital with one of the gloves worn by Padre Pio over the bloody stigmata
wounds in his hands. On Monday, March 12, Paul was blessed with the relic and
within days, one of his many serious ailments had miraculously vanished.
Betty called the group again and on
April 6, 1984, the glove was once again brought to Paul and laid on his
head. “I knew immediately something
happened because it was like an electric shock went through him,” Betty said.
“He opened his eyes and looked around the room, very clear-eyed. Then he fell back
into the coma again but I just knew something had happened.”
She was right. The next day, when
she returned to the hospital she was shocked to find her son sitting in a chair
and watching television. He turned and said “Hi Mom.”
The nurse rushed in and told Betty:
“He’s been talking all day!” When she
called the neurosurgeon to tell him Paul Walsh was talking, the doctor said,
“It’s not possible’ and hung up on her.”
But it was true. “They gave Paul
another cat scan and all the doctor kept saying was, ‘I don’t believe this. I
don’t’ believe this.’ The frontal lobe of his brain wasn’t smashed anymore.”
Even more inexplicable was what
happened days later, on Easter Sunday morning, when Paul and his roommate woke
up to find a man standing at the foot of Paul’s bed. Described as “an old
priest in a brown robe,” Paul thought it was Betty’s brother, Charley, who
bears a remarkable resemblance to Padre Pio.
“I remember being very certain that
my Uncle Charley had been in to visit me,” Paul said. “I did see him. He was
very happy and smiled at me. And then he left the room.”
Betty knew it couldn’t have been
Charley because he lives in Boston. She folded up a picture of Padre Pio,
hiding the name, and showed it to Paul. “That’s who visited me,” he said. “Isn’t
that Uncle Charley?”
Weeks later, Paul Walsh walked out
of Crozier Chester Medical Center, completely healed.
If there was any doubt in their
minds that Padre Pio interceded in Paul’s healing, those doubts were put to
rest a year after the accident when the family received an unexpected phone
call from Bill Rose, who lived on the property where Paul hit the tree. Rose
claimed he heard the crash the night of the accident and ran outside to find
Paul laying on the ground with his face in a gutter. He knew the person was
dying and while someone called for an ambulance, he held Paul’s head up out of
the gutter and prayed for his soul.
“Within the first few minutes of
your son’s accident,” he told Betty, “I did the only thing I knew that had any chance of saving your sons life...
"I dedicated him to Padre Pio and asked Pio to intercede before the throne of Grace!”
