It is a true blessing to live with absolute certainty about what you believe in. In life, we are all driven by something—wealth, fame, career, family or religion. But how many of us can truly say that we have made the right choice or that we are on the right track? Dr Sean George—who works as consultant physician and head of department of general medicine at Kalgoorlie Hospital in Western Australia—is absolute sure about what (or who) he has put his faith in. He believes in God the way the rest of us believe in electricity—we don’t doubt it because we see how everything works by it.
So the miracle that happened on Friday, October 24, 2008, did not create faith in him; it confirmed it. As he drove the 400km back to Kalgoorlie with his intern after running a medical clinic in Esperance on the southern coast of Western Australia, he started to feel a minor discomfort in his chest. While passing through a small town called Kambalda, he called his wife Sherry, also a doctor. She suggested he drive straight back to Kalgoorlie, but he got a deep conviction that he should get to the medical clinic in Kambalda. As the GP at the Kambalda Health Centre was at lunch, he asked the nurses to perform an ECG on him. Reading it, he was shocked to see that he was having a heart attack. The GP, the intern and the nurses started treating him with drugs and pain killers, but his pain got worse. He looked at the monitor and found that his blood pressure and pulse rate were going up. That is the last thing he remembers seeing.
Meanwhile, Sean’s colleague, Dr Pravin Sulya Shetty, consultant physician and head of medicine at Flinders Medical Centre, got a call from Kambalda telling him that Sean had gone into cardiac arrest. They were trying to resuscitate him, but hadn’t succeeded so far. So he, Sherry and another colleague of Sean’s, Dr Benjamin Ansell, drove to Kambalda. On the way, Sherry was deeply troubled hearing the conversation between the intern and Shetty. “I told [the doctors] to keep trying,” says Shetty. “We’re on our way.” Feeling utterly helpless, she called her father in Dubai. “Sean has arrested,” she told him. “I’m going to get his body from the hospital.” He cried out loud and said, “No, that can’t happen.” Sherry asked her father what she should do. He told her, “You don’t worry. God is in control of all situations. You go there and pray.”
Dr Steve Dunjey, professor of emergency medicine, Royal Perth Hospital, had come to Kambalda from Kalgoorlie. By the time he arrived, the resuscitation had already been going on for over an hour. “I announced to the room that Sean was dead, and I said we’re going to make a last couple of attempts,” Dunjey says in Miracle Man, a new documentary by the NGO The Normal Christian Life, that captures what happened that day. “One of the junior doctors said, ‘His wife’s coming. Can we hang on until she gets here.’ I was a bit reluctant. I didn’t think there was any point in continuing.”
Then, Sherry arrived. By then, the medical team had delivered 13 electric shocks. From a state of ventricular fibrillation, Sean had progressed into a flat line. As the team felt there was no point in continuing the CPR, they had stopped it. All the doctors stood back to let her see Sean, who had been dead for an hour and 20 minutes. His body was cold. She took his hand and prayed, “God, he’s only 39. I’m 38. We have a 10-year-old boy. I need a miracle.” Suddenly, there was a gasp and the monitor started beeping. The whole room erupted into pandemonium. Everybody became very excited. She was asked to move aside. Initially, she was confused. Had Sean’s heartbeat really returned? “It was an amazing feeling to see his pulse come back,” says Shetty. “It’s hard to describe.”
Sean was transferred to Kalgoorlie Hospital and then to Royal Perth Hospital. Cardiologists operated to clear a blocked right coronary artery and put in a stent. They were still sceptical about Sean’s complete recovery without brain damage. “For patients who have been arrested for a really long period of time, the other organs in their body don’t work any more,” says Dunjey. “Very often, their gut is dead. Their brain gets more and more swollen every hour [thus] crushing itself. A person’s brain starts to die really fast.”
His kidneys and liver had failed. Dr Mark Thomas, a renal specialist at Royal Perth Hospital, says in the documentary, “Every day I’d come and see him and talk to his wife. But in my heart I thought this was an awful tragedy.” But things took a different turn when, two days after the heart attack, Sean woke up. The next day, he started moving his hands and feet and in two days, he was completely conscious, with a 100 per cent functioning brain. Two weeks later, he was discharged from hospital and within three months, he was back at his duties at Kalgoorlie Hospital. “It was absolutely amazing and I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” says Thomas.
But when something so spectacular happens to you, how do you live the rest of your life in light of it? In the case of Sean and Sherry, there was no ambiguity: they were certain they wanted to dedicate their lives to serving God and glorifying him in everything they did. In many ways, their life after was a seamless continuation of their life before, but with a heightened awareness of its preciousness. Sean had just returned from a mission trip to the Pacific island of Vanuatu when the incident happened, where they saw over 400 people give their life to Jesus Christ. The very next year, they travelled to Vanuatu again and continued to go there almost seven times in total. Then God changed the focus of their ministry to Israel, and they went there seven times to do voluntary work until the war broke out in 2023. “Every day we pray that our life would be such that people would see Jesus in us,” says Sherry.
And what is the biggest lesson that he has learnt from the incident in 2008? “I was 39 years old and doing very well in my academic career,” says Sean. “I was head of the department of general medicine and an associate professor. I was serving God and had a good relationship with him. If you had told me that day that it could be the last day of my life, I would not have believed it. But now, having gone through the experience, what I would like to say is that we should live each day as though it is our last. What someone once told me has never left my mind. Imagine that you are dead and are standing at the back of your funeral service, listening to your eulogy. What would you like to hear? How would you like to be remembered? I don’t want to be remembered as a great doctor who cured so many people. I want to be remembered as a man of God, someone with integrity who loved God and did everything I could to be salt and light. And during our daily time of prayer, there is not a day that goes by when we don’t express our gratitude to God for giving me a second chance at life.”