50 Years of Miracles: and Adventures

On his nineteenth birthday, Raymond Youdath, a farm boy from Painesville, Ohio, is placed into an iron lung and falls into a deep coma. He wakes up several weeks later to find polio’s unmerciful carnage has changed his six-foot-six, two-hundred-pound body into a ninety-eight-pound quadriplegic. Six months later he escapes his iron mistress and is sent to Warm Springs, Georgia. Unable to help him, except to accustom him to a wheelchair, they send him home suggesting he never marries or has children. Raymond uses his faith, imagination, and optimism to sustain his sanity. Three years later he goes to a rehabilitation center in California. A determined therapist brings him from complete dependence to a level of independence he never dreamed possible. A homosexual alcoholic aid puts him through mental hell for eight months. His years in hospitals experiencing love, life, death, suffering, and joy taught him compassion and understanding. After eighteen months he returns home and marries. Over the next fifty years he and his wonderful wife Marilyn have three children and nine grandchildren. They experience more of life than one can imagine—last rights eight times, several critical operations, attempted suicide, great friends and relatives, joy, humor, and an extraordinary love story.