November 25, 2025 • 25 mins
Discover the powerful connection between faith, healing, and the human spirit in Lisa's inspiring conversation with Dr. Marc Siegel, author of The Miracles Among Us. Dr. Siegel shares real-life stories of miraculous recoveries, the role of prayer and spirituality in medicine, and how emotional resilience can influence medical outcomes. He discusses insights from healthcare professionals, the will to live in life-or-death moments, and the narrative nonfiction approach that makes these stories so compelling. The Truth with Lisa Boothe is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Thursday.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth, where we get
to the heart of the issues that matter to you. Today,
we've got my friend and colleague Fox News medical analyst,
doctor Mark Siegel. He's also a physician and an NYU
Langone professor, but he's going to talk to us about
his brand new book, The Miracles among Us. It's perfect
heading into the holidays as well. But he tells stories
(00:20):
like the jaw dropping case of fourteen year old John Smith,
who had no pulse for nearly an hour after drowning
in a Missouri lake until his mother's prayer and the
trauma room and his heart suddenly restarted. Doctors called it
a bona fide miracle. There's stories just like that cross
the country, and doctor Mark Siegel tells their stories. So
what makes someone survive something like that? What do we
(00:43):
need to know about miracles and medicine. It's a really
interesting story. It is a really heartwarming book. I think
you're really going to love this interview. Stay tuned for
my friend and colleague, doctor Mark Siegel. Well, doctor Siegel,
it's great to have you on the show. I always
enjoy when we get a co host together. So I'm
(01:04):
looking forward to talking about your book and really appreciate
you making.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The time great to be on with you.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
So you've got this new book, The Miracles among Us.
I've got to tell you a funny story. So one
of the stories that you highlight John Smith, this miraculous recovery,
this teen no pulse for you, know, after drowning in
cold water, and I want to have you tell the
story in just a moment. But so there's a movie,
The Breakthrough, about this case, doctor Siegel, and I was
(01:32):
on a flight at Cross Country Flight and I watched
this movie and I was sobbing so hard. I had
to like get up and go to the bathroom on
the flight, and the flight attendant was worried about me
because the movie just like touched me so much. But
talk about this story a little bit and why you
decided to feature it in your new book.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
So the book has different chapters and each is a
different universe. It's narrative nonfiction, which is a first for me.
I've written nonfiction books, I've written novels, but this is
a lot of fun because it's actual stories. It reads
like a novel, but everything's true. And what I decided
to do as a technique was to take a lot
of different angles. And the executive producer of Breakthrough is
(02:13):
named Sam Rodriguez. He is a pastor and he's incredible,
and he started me off and told me his overview
of it. And he's got a lot of miracles in
his life as a pastor, including his sister, his daughter
rather surviving COVID in the ICU at a time when
we didn't even know how to treat it. And he
(02:34):
said he was in another room praying, and at the
exact time he prayed, she felt angels coming into the
room and she actually ended up getting better and got
off of the ventilator and went home. And that's the
kind of story he tells. So I got his perspective,
but he helped me interview everyone involved, because one of
the things you wonder about with a story like this
(02:54):
is can anyone verify this and listen to this Lisa.
First of all, John Smith and his two buddies go
out on the ice and it's cold in Missouri. But
the next day one of the boy's sisters says, oh,
come on, you didn't include me. So they go back
to the lake, only this time it's in the is
(03:14):
outside and all three boys fall into the water. And
I say to Michael Bodden, I didn't put this in
the chapter. I say to Michael Bodden, the fame pathologist,
what are the chances that somebody under the ice would
suffer from hypothermia which would keep their heart going for
a lot longer. And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
(03:35):
probably the real story. Because Michael is not a big believer.
He's a believer in a spiritual reality, as you can
tell in a later chapter in the book, but he's
not a big believer in you know. He always wants
the science first. And so then I said to him, yeah,
but it's in the He says, okay. If it's in
the then the protective effect of being under the water
lasts about ten minutes. Okay, And keep that in mind
(03:58):
when I tell you the rest of this. So the
emergency responder comes there, finds the other two boys, pulls
them out, can't find John, and all of a sudden,
there's a voice from the shore says, go fifteen feet
to the right. He goes fifteen feet to the right,
and there's John. He looks back at the shore. There's
no one there. Lisa, I interviewed the guy whose voice
(04:21):
it was, who assures me he was in an office
back in town and he's not a ventriloquist. So that was,
you know, an other worldly voice that said fifteen feet
to the right. Then they pulled John out. He has
no pulse. They bring him into the hospital and he's
pulseless for forty five to fifty five minutes. I interviewed
(04:42):
the doctor in the er. I interviewed the doctor that
ran the recovery, and I said, what are the chances
of somebody living that long with no pulse even with CPR?
Have you ever seen that? Because I trained at Bellevue
Hospital in New York, I've never seen that. They all go,
We've never seen that. But the mother wouldn't let us
(05:03):
call off the code. She wouldn't let us, so she
insisted on arriving before we called it off. And we've
never seen this in our career. Then I said, if
someone like that did wake up, what are the chances
they would have a meaningful recovery. That's a neurological term,
a meaningful recovery. Interesting and they said zero. I said,
(05:23):
so what happened? The mother came to the emergency room
and starts to pray. The moment she starts to pray,
his pulse comes back. I interviewed her. I interviewed all
the doctors, the nurses. Then they pull them out of
the cardiac arrest, and a day or so later he
wakes up. I interview John Smith. He's completely intact, no
neurological deficits. Years later. There's just no other explanation for
(05:47):
this story than divine intervention. Which is not to say
that all the stories of my book are like that,
that they're not all either or you can't fathom this
story without bringing God it well.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
And that's what I loved about the story too, is
just the mom's refusal to give up on her son,
you know, as you mentioned, just praying out loud loud
in the trauma room, even the doctor in the case
of the atmosphere in the room, you know, literally changed.
And I think that's why, like it made me so
emotional when I watched the movie, and like with your
chapter in the book, is just a mother's refusal to
(06:21):
you know, no, my son's it's not you know, it's
not his time yet, and you know, and and and him,
you know, making a miraculous recovery. You know, as a doctor,
how do you reconcile some of these things because as
you mentioned, I mean, you know, not every doctor out
there is going to be religious, and you know you
see these these miracles that you outline in your book,
(06:42):
so you know, how do you reconcile those things beyond
just you know, divine intervention?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
As you mentioned, fantastic question before I answered, I want
to tell you, hey, you're going to be a great
mom one day. Be thank you. I just saw my
wife running down the street. She didn't know I was there, running, running, running, running,
and I said, Luda, what's going on? She says, I'm
meeting this is our youngest child. I'm meeting him for
an appointment for shoe inserts. And I thought I would
(07:09):
never get that kind of attention or focus. But anyway,
back to your question, The issue is that doctors tend
to separate this out in their minds, and that's really
wrong because most doctors are religious seventy percent, and most
believe in miracles, and they don't understand that by not
(07:29):
giving up and by acknowledging what they learned in medical
school that we all have a spiritual reality, you can't
look inside the body, or look at physiology or anatomy
without believing that it's divine. I mean, it's so incredibly sophisticated,
just living one day, and doctors know that. Most doctors
know that, but they don't want to integrate it. And
(07:50):
they should because otherwise they end up playing ridiculous godlike
roles like physician assisted suicide or I mean, I believe
we go to palliative care too soon. Look, this is
this is a big political debate because there's a lot
of money spent on this side, and I know that
hospice is actually cheaper than but I think we have
to in all of our interventions as physicians, keep in
(08:12):
mind God's will and God's presence because it makes us
humbler and it makes us cherish life more so, I
believe in putting these things together.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
How did you decide, you know, which stories to include
or not? What what sort of led you to including some?
And you know, how'd you kind of make those decisions?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Another great question. That's done, and that's done in two ways.
One was, as I started to write the chapters, I
started to see if they went somewhere where, And this
is where me and the me and the publisher, who's
a freaking genius, we tend to disagree on the following thing.
She wanted me to identify the prevailing miracle in each chapter.
(08:53):
My view was if the chapter told enough in terms
of an accumulation of miracles, then it stayed. And so
I followed the story and tried to figure out whether
whether there was enough twins, twists and turns in the road.
And this is my editor. Eric was great at this.
He said, we don't really want to know what the
miracle is when we start reading the chapter. We want
(09:14):
to kind of know what it is as it evolves.
And so I started to see this as an accumulation.
So that's how I started to figure out it may
if it make the cutting and floor. There's a neurosurgeon
who I won't name that my researcher liked because she
had done her interview with him, I think for maybe
Fox Digital or something years ago, and I interviewed him
(09:35):
and he told this story about outer body experiences. And
my wife was in the other room and she's a neurologist,
and she's like, afterwards, Mark, I don't believe this guy
at all. So then I started reading about him and
he's in a lot, he's gotten in a lot of trouble,
and he doesn't look reputable. So I said to my researcher,
we either get an interview with his doctor who verifies
(09:57):
all of this. And all we could get from his
doctor was like kind of a validation that what he
said was true. Wasn't enough for me, so I didn't
use that chapter.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I've got to take a quick commercial break. More with
doctor Mark Siegel on the other side, you know, not
quite a miracle, but more just my grandfather who's now deceased, stubbornness.
But he had gotten He was a builder, and he
had a boulder fall in his head and never did
anything about it. And then he got no car accident
closer to before he passed, and they almost did surgery
(10:26):
on his neck because he had a broken neck. And
it turns out that he had broke it like a
decade earlier and just never.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Did anything about it.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
So I guess, you know, more of a testament to stubbornness.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
But the way that speaks to Bonden's line. Bonden has
this famous line. He told me that people die from
different things, and that what you find on the autopsy
table is that people had stuff that you can't even
believe they were living with. That's like him.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
It goes to show like the strength of you know,
both the human spirit as well, but you also decide
to share some personal stories from your own life as well,
like your your son's recovery from deafness. Was that tough
to kind of tell some of your own stories and
to get a little bit vulnerable with that.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I think I had to do that, But I think
the harder part was to figure out where to draw
the line on that. Like I have another story that
I've been telling on TV lately about my older son
and about how when he was born, I was lost.
When your first child is born, the father usually gets lost,
Like what's my role now? I mean, and you're trying
(11:24):
to figure it out? I was lost and I ran
across a guy sitting on the street on a Saturday
who handed me a prayer book and said, you have
a new son, pray for his health. And I said,
who are you?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Well?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
What do you mean? How do you know I have
a new son? Like I don't to this day, I
don't know who this man was and how he knew
that I had a new son. Handing me a prayer book.
I didn't put that in the book, not because it
would have made me vulnerable, but because I was trying
to make the book more about the stories of other people.
But I did include some of my patients, and I
(11:56):
did include some of my personal stories. It was a balance.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
You know, you've interviewed a lot of patients and families
for this book. Have you noticed any like patterns, lifestyle,
spiritual community that seemed to show up more often in
some of these people who beat impossible odds?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yes, family and faith. I think that whether it's caustive
or not, and I think it is. You know, like
Brett and Amy, Brettbear are our own. Brett Bear is
a phenomenal guy and his wife, but they're great, and
they formed an amazing team for their son, Paul, who
survived five heart operation and the team was there and
each time and they prayed. And I felt the same
(12:41):
thing with the guy who the rabbi. The rebbie was saying,
get a heart operation, and the doctors were refusing, Who's
this rabbi telling us to operate? They ended up saving
the kid's life. That father was amazing and the love
he had for his son, and you told that already
at the beginning, like the idea of UH with breakthrough.
(13:02):
So there's a commonality of when parents are involved in
this book, they're involved with an undying love and a
great faith and belief in the spirituality of their children.
It's so refreshing to see that these days.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
You know, how much does a will to live matter too?
Because you know, I don't know why I was watching
this like weird show for a while. It's called like
I Was Prey and it's all these people who like
survived Animal I think it's on like Animal Plan. I
don't even know how I started watching it one day,
but what really stood out to me was that everyone
who survived like they had something to look forward to,
you know, like it's like a daughter's wedding or you know,
(13:37):
they were getting married or you know, and and so
they're like, I just you know, and the doctors were
like shocked that these individuals survived, but they just like
they had something that they were fighting for and that
they didn't want to give up on life. How much
does that matter in life? Of just you know, just
that that the will to survive, will to will to
continue living.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I could be very clinical about that and say that
if you don't have that, your succumbed the depression and
anxiety and metabolic dysfunction. That's a purely scientific view, but
I also think it's connected to spiritual overriding. Why is
it that one a couple's been married a really long time.
I mean, I'll tell you right now, my father's one
(14:14):
hundred and two of my mother's one hundred, and they're
not going to last that much longer. But I practice,
I predict they're both going to be gone within the
same six month period. Well they're over one hundred, so
that's a pretty good, pretty good odd to that. But
a lot of times that happens where your will to
live is the predominant issue of how long you survive.
(14:36):
It's connected to prayer, it's connected to faith, it's connected
to being uplifted. You know. One of the things that
the book emphasizes is that God has a greater reality
that we're supposed to be afraid of, not like all
this in the trenches stuff where we fight among each other.
That's why I was so upset to see the statistic
this morning that seventy two percent of people are not
(15:00):
having Thanksgiving with people that they agree with. Politically, used
to be the opposite sen at the table with someone
you disagree with. I mean, now it's like what weapon
are they bringing to dinner?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Well, and you know that is really sad that people
can't see beyond that these days, you know, politics has
divided a lot of families around the country. You had
mentioned Sir brettan Amy Bear's son story about Paul, who's
underwent undergone multiple, you know, life threatening heart surgeries. You've
also talked you know, Shannon Briham is featured in the
book as well, so you tell the stories of some
(15:33):
of her colleagues and you know some of the people
that the folks who are listening, you know, watch on
TV as well.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Well. Shannon told me last week when I went down
to do Fox News Sunday that I could tell this
She wrote the ford, right, Shannon wrote the ford. I said,
why did you leave out the fact that what you
were suffering from that caused you to be depressed was
dry eye syndrome? She said, you can say that, I'm
not not saying that. It's just that she wont wanted
(16:00):
the book to be about me. She you know, I
mean about my story she didn't want to distract from it.
Detract from it. She's an amazing human being, but that's
what she had. She went. I knew her then too.
She was going through like severe dry eyes until they
figured it out. She was very depressed, and then miraculously
she got cured. The bread situation was It's kind of
(16:21):
what I call the by the way diagnosis, where an
intuitive physician who's connected spiritually to the world and to
their patients comes upon things that you might that might
not be in the cookbook. Like they diagnosed the son
initially because the doctor just happened to be walking by
the hospital. He wasn't even on duty at just the
(16:43):
right time, and he walks in and he sees Paul,
and Paul's just a tiny baby, and he says, you know,
he doesn't look quite right now. I'm not even on call,
but I want an echo cardigram. So they do an
echo cardiogram and they find the issue. And he had
several problems with his heart. I went over all of
them in the book. He had several valvular issues and
congenital issues and started him on a series of operations
(17:07):
because what they put in he ended up out growing
and they'd have to replace it. But they you know,
Amy's a very very very loving mom and Brett too.
But Brett was all about figuring out next steps, like
he is on the air, the same thing, like what
are the next steps? What's coming up? What do I do?
How do I prepare? And then the last operation he
(17:29):
wasn't supposed to be having anymore. He was sixteen and
he just had what he thought was a cold and
he went in to see his interns to who he had
just started with, and the guy said, you're fine, there's
nothing here, but you know, maybe i'll do an X
ray just to be sure. She does an X ray.
It looks normal, but it's just slightly bigger. He says, well,
maybe the heart's a little bigger because of what you've
(17:50):
been through, but you know, just to be sure, I'll
have a cardiologist see it, you know, so that kind
of stuff. And the cardiology saw it and said, you know,
there's an aneurysm here that's about to burst. So he
doesn't so that he has another operation. And the day
before the operation, he's out playing golf with Brett and
he beats Brett. That is part of what you're talking about. Lisa.
(18:13):
The fortitude and the courage to overcome huge part of
the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
On also just goes to show that, look, we all
have things going on in our lives, you know, because
if you watched Brett on air every day and Shannon,
you would have never had any idea that, you know,
anyone's struggling with any of these personal things. So just
goes to show that, you know, we've all got things
that we're dealing with in our lives. You know, she'll
shew a little bit of kindness to everyone as well.
You know, one big story that we all remember, Jamar Hamlin.
(18:39):
He's playing for the Buffalo Bills when he suffered cardiac
arrest on the field. I think it was, you know,
January twenty twenty three, big game against the Bengals at
the time. What details did you learn and sort of
investigating the story, what might surprise people?
Speaker 2 (18:53):
What did you learn that de mor Hamlin's story I
love because it shows that the book is not about
out rip and reading headlines. It's about finding undercurrents to
the story that you didn't know existed. And that's how
I ended up deciding whether a chapter is included. I
didn't use Damar because it's Tomar. I used Deamar because
(19:15):
I found out a story that I didn't know that
no one in the public knows. I'm trying to break
not to break news, but break ground. Here here's how
that happened. Bill Hemmer knows the Cincinnati Bengals really well.
So I said, Bill, can you connect me with the
team physician of the Cincinnati Bengals? That he does? Bill Hemmer,
our anchor of America's newsroom, dear friend of mine, a
(19:37):
huge fan of yours, Lisa. Oh, he's awesome, so he is,
so Bill. So I talked to the Cincinnati team doctor
who gives me a background on tomorrow. He says, by
the way, I wasn't in charge. I said, how could
you not be in charge? It's your field. He says, yeah,
but you don't know this. But in the NFL it's
the visiting team's physician who's in charge. And I said, well,
(19:59):
that's easy. I went to med school at Buffalo. I
never went to Orchard Park. It was too cold. I
was kind of a Bills fan, you know, because they
were pretty good in my day too. But I called
up the head of orthopedics at Buffalo. I'm in an
alumni and he'll call me back right away. And he said, yeah,
(20:20):
I was in charge that day, and he I talked
to him at length. I got some briefer stuff and
statements from DeMar, but I talked to Bison at length,
and he told me something that's absolutely a miracle. He said,
back in two here's how miracles work, so they're not
always directly connected. Back in two thousand and seven, skater
who had recently left the Buffalo Sabers and went to
(20:42):
the Florida Panthers was skating up in Buffalo and Leslie
Bisson was also the team doctor for the Sabers. And
the guy had to skate to his carotid artery and
started to bleed out on the ice, and Bisson came
and applied tourniquet and stopped the bleeding and they got
(21:02):
to that guy to the hospital and he needed like
ten units of blood and he barely survived. And Bisson said, Okay,
that's it. From now on, I rehearsed cardiac arrests and
emergencies on the field on the court on all of
my teams. Once a month, we go into full attack
mode and we get ready and in the NFL. Everybody said, Bisson,
(21:26):
you're crazy. No, there hasn't been a cardiac arrest on
the field since nineteen fifty five. He says, we're rehearsing it,
and as time went on, he started having a premonition
that he was going to need to use it. When
the damar situation happened, they recognized right away that the
helmet had hit in mid cycle of his heartbeat, which
(21:46):
is called Komosho cordis, which almost never occurs at anybody
that old. Not that he's old, but old in terms
of you know, football, I mean old in terms of
sportsperson that this happens to. It doesn't usually happen with
shoulder pads like this, and it doesn't usually happen with
some of this big but it happened. But because of
(22:07):
that protocol, they zoomed over there in one minute, got
the defibrillator on him, got the shoulder pads off them,
they cut him off, got the CPR started, and got
his heart rate back within one minute. And we like
to say time is brain. So they saved him and
then he woke up slowly. It wasn't like they told
it in the news reports. Again getting under the story
(22:28):
and getting to the real thing. He woke up slowly,
and they didn't know if he would fully wake up.
No one thought he would ever be able to get
back and play, but he has quick break.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
If you like what you're hearing, please you're on social
media or maybe send it to your family and friends. Doctor,
before we go, this must have been pretty cool for you, obviously,
your doctor, your Fox News medical contributor, and you you're
also an NYU Langon professor. This must have been pretty
cool to sort of like do something a little bit different,
(22:58):
right and to sort of, you know, learn about these stories,
write about these stories. So before we go, what was
writing this book like for you?
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I'm actually a writer by trade. I mean, I'm Fox's
senior medical analyst now and I've done a lot of reporting.
The thing I like the most about being on TV
is actually reporting because I'm a writer by trade. I
trained in graduate writing back many years ago at Brown
and I published a novel and I've published several books
and written a lot of articles and op eds over
the years, and I really enjoy that. And one of
(23:29):
the ways I do TV is I try to write
an article, get deeper into it and then presented on TV.
I did that last week with somebody named Christopher Smith
who had a miracle where he was shot in the
head and survive, and like, I like that angle. This
was very different for me because I've written fiction and
I've written nonfiction, but I've never written what's called narrative nonfiction,
(23:52):
where it's a book of stories. And I so enjoyed
that that by interviewing different people and getting different angles
and bring a story to life, and it's something simple
like this. Lisa Eric Nelson, the editor of the book,
says to me, the actual event that you're focusing on,
I want that in the present tense. I said, really,
(24:12):
I never thought of that. He says, yeah, put the
event in the present tense, and then the build up
to the event or the after the event goes back
in the past tense. And it gives an immediacy of
the stories that really help a lot well.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
And it's also a great book for people to get
heading into the holidays as well.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
There's a prayer section too in the book where you
can there are healing prayers, a section of healing prayers
in there. Love it.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Doctor Mark Siegel, author of the new book The miracles
among us, but not a new author as you put
it out, but author of this new book, doctor Mark Siegel.
Always great to see you or hear you, hear you
on this but looking forward to seeing you soon zor.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Great to be on with you, Lisa. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
That was doctor Mark Siegel. Appreciate him for making the
time every Tuesday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout
the week. Also want to thank my producer John Casio
for putting the show together. That sign
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth, where we get
to the heart of the issues that matter to you. Today,
we've got my friend and colleague Fox News medical analyst,
doctor Mark Siegel. He's also a physician and an NYU
Langone professor, but he's going to talk to us about
his brand new book, The Miracles among Us. It's perfect
heading into the holidays as well. But he tells stories
(00:20):
like the jaw dropping case of fourteen year old John Smith,
who had no pulse for nearly an hour after drowning
in a Missouri lake until his mother's prayer and the
trauma room and his heart suddenly restarted. Doctors called it
a bona fide miracle. There's stories just like that cross
the country, and doctor Mark Siegel tells their stories. So
what makes someone survive something like that? What do we
(00:43):
need to know about miracles and medicine. It's a really
interesting story. It is a really heartwarming book. I think
you're really going to love this interview. Stay tuned for
my friend and colleague, doctor Mark Siegel. Well, doctor Siegel,
it's great to have you on the show. I always
enjoy when we get a co host together. So I'm
(01:04):
looking forward to talking about your book and really appreciate
you making.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The time great to be on with you.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
So you've got this new book, The Miracles among Us.
I've got to tell you a funny story. So one
of the stories that you highlight John Smith, this miraculous recovery,
this teen no pulse for you, know, after drowning in
cold water, and I want to have you tell the
story in just a moment. But so there's a movie,
The Breakthrough, about this case, doctor Siegel, and I was
(01:32):
on a flight at Cross Country Flight and I watched
this movie and I was sobbing so hard. I had
to like get up and go to the bathroom on
the flight, and the flight attendant was worried about me
because the movie just like touched me so much. But
talk about this story a little bit and why you
decided to feature it in your new book.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
So the book has different chapters and each is a
different universe. It's narrative nonfiction, which is a first for me.
I've written nonfiction books, I've written novels, but this is
a lot of fun because it's actual stories. It reads
like a novel, but everything's true. And what I decided
to do as a technique was to take a lot
of different angles. And the executive producer of Breakthrough is
(02:13):
named Sam Rodriguez. He is a pastor and he's incredible,
and he started me off and told me his overview
of it. And he's got a lot of miracles in
his life as a pastor, including his sister, his daughter
rather surviving COVID in the ICU at a time when
we didn't even know how to treat it. And he
(02:34):
said he was in another room praying, and at the
exact time he prayed, she felt angels coming into the
room and she actually ended up getting better and got
off of the ventilator and went home. And that's the
kind of story he tells. So I got his perspective,
but he helped me interview everyone involved, because one of
the things you wonder about with a story like this
(02:54):
is can anyone verify this and listen to this Lisa.
First of all, John Smith and his two buddies go
out on the ice and it's cold in Missouri. But
the next day one of the boy's sisters says, oh,
come on, you didn't include me. So they go back
to the lake, only this time it's in the is
(03:14):
outside and all three boys fall into the water. And
I say to Michael Bodden, I didn't put this in
the chapter. I say to Michael Bodden, the fame pathologist,
what are the chances that somebody under the ice would
suffer from hypothermia which would keep their heart going for
a lot longer. And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
(03:35):
probably the real story. Because Michael is not a big believer.
He's a believer in a spiritual reality, as you can
tell in a later chapter in the book, but he's
not a big believer in you know. He always wants
the science first. And so then I said to him, yeah,
but it's in the He says, okay. If it's in
the then the protective effect of being under the water
lasts about ten minutes. Okay, And keep that in mind
(03:58):
when I tell you the rest of this. So the
emergency responder comes there, finds the other two boys, pulls
them out, can't find John, and all of a sudden,
there's a voice from the shore says, go fifteen feet
to the right. He goes fifteen feet to the right,
and there's John. He looks back at the shore. There's
no one there. Lisa, I interviewed the guy whose voice
(04:21):
it was, who assures me he was in an office
back in town and he's not a ventriloquist. So that was,
you know, an other worldly voice that said fifteen feet
to the right. Then they pulled John out. He has
no pulse. They bring him into the hospital and he's
pulseless for forty five to fifty five minutes. I interviewed
(04:42):
the doctor in the er. I interviewed the doctor that
ran the recovery, and I said, what are the chances
of somebody living that long with no pulse even with CPR?
Have you ever seen that? Because I trained at Bellevue
Hospital in New York, I've never seen that. They all go,
We've never seen that. But the mother wouldn't let us
(05:03):
call off the code. She wouldn't let us, so she
insisted on arriving before we called it off. And we've
never seen this in our career. Then I said, if
someone like that did wake up, what are the chances
they would have a meaningful recovery. That's a neurological term,
a meaningful recovery. Interesting and they said zero. I said,
(05:23):
so what happened? The mother came to the emergency room
and starts to pray. The moment she starts to pray,
his pulse comes back. I interviewed her. I interviewed all
the doctors, the nurses. Then they pull them out of
the cardiac arrest, and a day or so later he
wakes up. I interview John Smith. He's completely intact, no
neurological deficits. Years later. There's just no other explanation for
(05:47):
this story than divine intervention. Which is not to say
that all the stories of my book are like that,
that they're not all either or you can't fathom this
story without bringing God it well.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
And that's what I loved about the story too, is
just the mom's refusal to give up on her son,
you know, as you mentioned, just praying out loud loud
in the trauma room, even the doctor in the case
of the atmosphere in the room, you know, literally changed.
And I think that's why, like it made me so
emotional when I watched the movie, and like with your
chapter in the book, is just a mother's refusal to
(06:21):
you know, no, my son's it's not you know, it's
not his time yet, and you know, and and and him,
you know, making a miraculous recovery. You know, as a doctor,
how do you reconcile some of these things because as
you mentioned, I mean, you know, not every doctor out
there is going to be religious, and you know you
see these these miracles that you outline in your book,
(06:42):
so you know, how do you reconcile those things beyond
just you know, divine intervention?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
As you mentioned, fantastic question before I answered, I want
to tell you, hey, you're going to be a great
mom one day. Be thank you. I just saw my
wife running down the street. She didn't know I was there, running, running, running, running,
and I said, Luda, what's going on? She says, I'm
meeting this is our youngest child. I'm meeting him for
an appointment for shoe inserts. And I thought I would
(07:09):
never get that kind of attention or focus. But anyway,
back to your question, The issue is that doctors tend
to separate this out in their minds, and that's really
wrong because most doctors are religious seventy percent, and most
believe in miracles, and they don't understand that by not
(07:29):
giving up and by acknowledging what they learned in medical
school that we all have a spiritual reality, you can't
look inside the body, or look at physiology or anatomy
without believing that it's divine. I mean, it's so incredibly sophisticated,
just living one day, and doctors know that. Most doctors
know that, but they don't want to integrate it. And
(07:50):
they should because otherwise they end up playing ridiculous godlike
roles like physician assisted suicide or I mean, I believe
we go to palliative care too soon. Look, this is
this is a big political debate because there's a lot
of money spent on this side, and I know that
hospice is actually cheaper than but I think we have
to in all of our interventions as physicians, keep in
(08:12):
mind God's will and God's presence because it makes us
humbler and it makes us cherish life more so, I
believe in putting these things together.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
How did you decide, you know, which stories to include
or not? What what sort of led you to including some?
And you know, how'd you kind of make those decisions?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Another great question. That's done, and that's done in two ways.
One was, as I started to write the chapters, I
started to see if they went somewhere where, And this
is where me and the me and the publisher, who's
a freaking genius, we tend to disagree on the following thing.
She wanted me to identify the prevailing miracle in each chapter.
(08:53):
My view was if the chapter told enough in terms
of an accumulation of miracles, then it stayed. And so
I followed the story and tried to figure out whether
whether there was enough twins, twists and turns in the road.
And this is my editor. Eric was great at this.
He said, we don't really want to know what the
miracle is when we start reading the chapter. We want
(09:14):
to kind of know what it is as it evolves.
And so I started to see this as an accumulation.
So that's how I started to figure out it may
if it make the cutting and floor. There's a neurosurgeon
who I won't name that my researcher liked because she
had done her interview with him, I think for maybe
Fox Digital or something years ago, and I interviewed him
(09:35):
and he told this story about outer body experiences. And
my wife was in the other room and she's a neurologist,
and she's like, afterwards, Mark, I don't believe this guy
at all. So then I started reading about him and
he's in a lot, he's gotten in a lot of trouble,
and he doesn't look reputable. So I said to my researcher,
we either get an interview with his doctor who verifies
(09:57):
all of this. And all we could get from his
doctor was like kind of a validation that what he
said was true. Wasn't enough for me, so I didn't
use that chapter.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I've got to take a quick commercial break. More with
doctor Mark Siegel on the other side, you know, not
quite a miracle, but more just my grandfather who's now deceased, stubbornness.
But he had gotten He was a builder, and he
had a boulder fall in his head and never did
anything about it. And then he got no car accident
closer to before he passed, and they almost did surgery
(10:26):
on his neck because he had a broken neck. And
it turns out that he had broke it like a
decade earlier and just never.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Did anything about it.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
So I guess, you know, more of a testament to stubbornness.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
But the way that speaks to Bonden's line. Bonden has
this famous line. He told me that people die from
different things, and that what you find on the autopsy
table is that people had stuff that you can't even
believe they were living with. That's like him.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
It goes to show like the strength of you know,
both the human spirit as well, but you also decide
to share some personal stories from your own life as well,
like your your son's recovery from deafness. Was that tough
to kind of tell some of your own stories and
to get a little bit vulnerable with that.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I think I had to do that, But I think
the harder part was to figure out where to draw
the line on that. Like I have another story that
I've been telling on TV lately about my older son
and about how when he was born, I was lost.
When your first child is born, the father usually gets lost,
Like what's my role now? I mean, and you're trying
(11:24):
to figure it out? I was lost and I ran
across a guy sitting on the street on a Saturday
who handed me a prayer book and said, you have
a new son, pray for his health. And I said,
who are you?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Well?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
What do you mean? How do you know I have
a new son? Like I don't to this day, I
don't know who this man was and how he knew
that I had a new son. Handing me a prayer book.
I didn't put that in the book, not because it
would have made me vulnerable, but because I was trying
to make the book more about the stories of other people.
But I did include some of my patients, and I
(11:56):
did include some of my personal stories. It was a balance.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
You know, you've interviewed a lot of patients and families
for this book. Have you noticed any like patterns, lifestyle,
spiritual community that seemed to show up more often in
some of these people who beat impossible odds?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yes, family and faith. I think that whether it's caustive
or not, and I think it is. You know, like
Brett and Amy, Brettbear are our own. Brett Bear is
a phenomenal guy and his wife, but they're great, and
they formed an amazing team for their son, Paul, who
survived five heart operation and the team was there and
each time and they prayed. And I felt the same
(12:41):
thing with the guy who the rabbi. The rebbie was saying,
get a heart operation, and the doctors were refusing, Who's
this rabbi telling us to operate? They ended up saving
the kid's life. That father was amazing and the love
he had for his son, and you told that already
at the beginning, like the idea of UH with breakthrough.
(13:02):
So there's a commonality of when parents are involved in
this book, they're involved with an undying love and a
great faith and belief in the spirituality of their children.
It's so refreshing to see that these days.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
You know, how much does a will to live matter too?
Because you know, I don't know why I was watching
this like weird show for a while. It's called like
I Was Prey and it's all these people who like
survived Animal I think it's on like Animal Plan. I
don't even know how I started watching it one day,
but what really stood out to me was that everyone
who survived like they had something to look forward to,
you know, like it's like a daughter's wedding or you know,
(13:37):
they were getting married or you know, and and so
they're like, I just you know, and the doctors were
like shocked that these individuals survived, but they just like
they had something that they were fighting for and that
they didn't want to give up on life. How much
does that matter in life? Of just you know, just
that that the will to survive, will to will to
continue living.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I could be very clinical about that and say that
if you don't have that, your succumbed the depression and
anxiety and metabolic dysfunction. That's a purely scientific view, but
I also think it's connected to spiritual overriding. Why is
it that one a couple's been married a really long time.
I mean, I'll tell you right now, my father's one
(14:14):
hundred and two of my mother's one hundred, and they're
not going to last that much longer. But I practice,
I predict they're both going to be gone within the
same six month period. Well they're over one hundred, so
that's a pretty good, pretty good odd to that. But
a lot of times that happens where your will to
live is the predominant issue of how long you survive.
(14:36):
It's connected to prayer, it's connected to faith, it's connected
to being uplifted. You know. One of the things that
the book emphasizes is that God has a greater reality
that we're supposed to be afraid of, not like all
this in the trenches stuff where we fight among each other.
That's why I was so upset to see the statistic
this morning that seventy two percent of people are not
(15:00):
having Thanksgiving with people that they agree with. Politically, used
to be the opposite sen at the table with someone
you disagree with. I mean, now it's like what weapon
are they bringing to dinner?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Well, and you know that is really sad that people
can't see beyond that these days, you know, politics has
divided a lot of families around the country. You had
mentioned Sir brettan Amy Bear's son story about Paul, who's
underwent undergone multiple, you know, life threatening heart surgeries. You've
also talked you know, Shannon Briham is featured in the
book as well, so you tell the stories of some
(15:33):
of her colleagues and you know some of the people
that the folks who are listening, you know, watch on
TV as well.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Well. Shannon told me last week when I went down
to do Fox News Sunday that I could tell this
She wrote the ford, right, Shannon wrote the ford. I said,
why did you leave out the fact that what you
were suffering from that caused you to be depressed was
dry eye syndrome? She said, you can say that, I'm
not not saying that. It's just that she wont wanted
(16:00):
the book to be about me. She you know, I
mean about my story she didn't want to distract from it.
Detract from it. She's an amazing human being, but that's
what she had. She went. I knew her then too.
She was going through like severe dry eyes until they
figured it out. She was very depressed, and then miraculously
she got cured. The bread situation was It's kind of
(16:21):
what I call the by the way diagnosis, where an
intuitive physician who's connected spiritually to the world and to
their patients comes upon things that you might that might
not be in the cookbook. Like they diagnosed the son
initially because the doctor just happened to be walking by
the hospital. He wasn't even on duty at just the
(16:43):
right time, and he walks in and he sees Paul,
and Paul's just a tiny baby, and he says, you know,
he doesn't look quite right now. I'm not even on call,
but I want an echo cardigram. So they do an
echo cardiogram and they find the issue. And he had
several problems with his heart. I went over all of
them in the book. He had several valvular issues and
congenital issues and started him on a series of operations
(17:07):
because what they put in he ended up out growing
and they'd have to replace it. But they you know,
Amy's a very very very loving mom and Brett too.
But Brett was all about figuring out next steps, like
he is on the air, the same thing, like what
are the next steps? What's coming up? What do I do?
How do I prepare? And then the last operation he
(17:29):
wasn't supposed to be having anymore. He was sixteen and
he just had what he thought was a cold and
he went in to see his interns to who he had
just started with, and the guy said, you're fine, there's
nothing here, but you know, maybe i'll do an X
ray just to be sure. She does an X ray.
It looks normal, but it's just slightly bigger. He says, well,
maybe the heart's a little bigger because of what you've
(17:50):
been through, but you know, just to be sure, I'll
have a cardiologist see it, you know, so that kind
of stuff. And the cardiology saw it and said, you know,
there's an aneurysm here that's about to burst. So he
doesn't so that he has another operation. And the day
before the operation, he's out playing golf with Brett and
he beats Brett. That is part of what you're talking about. Lisa.
(18:13):
The fortitude and the courage to overcome huge part of
the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
On also just goes to show that, look, we all
have things going on in our lives, you know, because
if you watched Brett on air every day and Shannon,
you would have never had any idea that, you know,
anyone's struggling with any of these personal things. So just
goes to show that, you know, we've all got things
that we're dealing with in our lives. You know, she'll
shew a little bit of kindness to everyone as well.
You know, one big story that we all remember, Jamar Hamlin.
(18:39):
He's playing for the Buffalo Bills when he suffered cardiac
arrest on the field. I think it was, you know,
January twenty twenty three, big game against the Bengals at
the time. What details did you learn and sort of
investigating the story, what might surprise people?
Speaker 2 (18:53):
What did you learn that de mor Hamlin's story I
love because it shows that the book is not about
out rip and reading headlines. It's about finding undercurrents to
the story that you didn't know existed. And that's how
I ended up deciding whether a chapter is included. I
didn't use Damar because it's Tomar. I used Deamar because
(19:15):
I found out a story that I didn't know that
no one in the public knows. I'm trying to break
not to break news, but break ground. Here here's how
that happened. Bill Hemmer knows the Cincinnati Bengals really well.
So I said, Bill, can you connect me with the
team physician of the Cincinnati Bengals? That he does? Bill Hemmer,
our anchor of America's newsroom, dear friend of mine, a
(19:37):
huge fan of yours, Lisa. Oh, he's awesome, so he is,
so Bill. So I talked to the Cincinnati team doctor
who gives me a background on tomorrow. He says, by
the way, I wasn't in charge. I said, how could
you not be in charge? It's your field. He says, yeah,
but you don't know this. But in the NFL it's
the visiting team's physician who's in charge. And I said, well,
(19:59):
that's easy. I went to med school at Buffalo. I
never went to Orchard Park. It was too cold. I
was kind of a Bills fan, you know, because they
were pretty good in my day too. But I called
up the head of orthopedics at Buffalo. I'm in an
alumni and he'll call me back right away. And he said, yeah,
(20:20):
I was in charge that day, and he I talked
to him at length. I got some briefer stuff and
statements from DeMar, but I talked to Bison at length,
and he told me something that's absolutely a miracle. He said,
back in two here's how miracles work, so they're not
always directly connected. Back in two thousand and seven, skater
who had recently left the Buffalo Sabers and went to
(20:42):
the Florida Panthers was skating up in Buffalo and Leslie
Bisson was also the team doctor for the Sabers. And
the guy had to skate to his carotid artery and
started to bleed out on the ice, and Bisson came
and applied tourniquet and stopped the bleeding and they got
(21:02):
to that guy to the hospital and he needed like
ten units of blood and he barely survived. And Bisson said, Okay,
that's it. From now on, I rehearsed cardiac arrests and
emergencies on the field on the court on all of
my teams. Once a month, we go into full attack
mode and we get ready and in the NFL. Everybody said, Bisson,
(21:26):
you're crazy. No, there hasn't been a cardiac arrest on
the field since nineteen fifty five. He says, we're rehearsing it,
and as time went on, he started having a premonition
that he was going to need to use it. When
the damar situation happened, they recognized right away that the
helmet had hit in mid cycle of his heartbeat, which
(21:46):
is called Komosho cordis, which almost never occurs at anybody
that old. Not that he's old, but old in terms
of you know, football, I mean old in terms of
sportsperson that this happens to. It doesn't usually happen with
shoulder pads like this, and it doesn't usually happen with
some of this big but it happened. But because of
(22:07):
that protocol, they zoomed over there in one minute, got
the defibrillator on him, got the shoulder pads off them,
they cut him off, got the CPR started, and got
his heart rate back within one minute. And we like
to say time is brain. So they saved him and
then he woke up slowly. It wasn't like they told
it in the news reports. Again getting under the story
(22:28):
and getting to the real thing. He woke up slowly,
and they didn't know if he would fully wake up.
No one thought he would ever be able to get
back and play, but he has quick break.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
If you like what you're hearing, please you're on social
media or maybe send it to your family and friends. Doctor,
before we go, this must have been pretty cool for you, obviously,
your doctor, your Fox News medical contributor, and you you're
also an NYU Langon professor. This must have been pretty
cool to sort of like do something a little bit different,
(22:58):
right and to sort of, you know, learn about these stories,
write about these stories. So before we go, what was
writing this book like for you?
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I'm actually a writer by trade. I mean, I'm Fox's
senior medical analyst now and I've done a lot of reporting.
The thing I like the most about being on TV
is actually reporting because I'm a writer by trade. I
trained in graduate writing back many years ago at Brown
and I published a novel and I've published several books
and written a lot of articles and op eds over
the years, and I really enjoy that. And one of
(23:29):
the ways I do TV is I try to write
an article, get deeper into it and then presented on TV.
I did that last week with somebody named Christopher Smith
who had a miracle where he was shot in the
head and survive, and like, I like that angle. This
was very different for me because I've written fiction and
I've written nonfiction, but I've never written what's called narrative nonfiction,
(23:52):
where it's a book of stories. And I so enjoyed
that that by interviewing different people and getting different angles
and bring a story to life, and it's something simple
like this. Lisa Eric Nelson, the editor of the book,
says to me, the actual event that you're focusing on,
I want that in the present tense. I said, really,
(24:12):
I never thought of that. He says, yeah, put the
event in the present tense, and then the build up
to the event or the after the event goes back
in the past tense. And it gives an immediacy of
the stories that really help a lot well.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
And it's also a great book for people to get
heading into the holidays as well.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
There's a prayer section too in the book where you
can there are healing prayers, a section of healing prayers
in there. Love it.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Doctor Mark Siegel, author of the new book The miracles
among us, but not a new author as you put
it out, but author of this new book, doctor Mark Siegel.
Always great to see you or hear you, hear you
on this but looking forward to seeing you soon zor.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Great to be on with you, Lisa. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
That was doctor Mark Siegel. Appreciate him for making the
time every Tuesday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout
the week. Also want to thank my producer John Casio
for putting the show together. That sign
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