Two miracles in the same year (from mom)

This is mom’s version of the two miracles that happened in the same year – God, once again, showed up just at the right time and stepped in to take disaster and destruction and turn it into thanksgiving and praise.  He is good!
                                                                                                         
From Mom:  During the summer of 2006, the tractor that I usually used to rake the hay was mechanically down for some reason.  We had another tractor exactly like the one I used that had a side-mounted mower on it and Roy left it on all the time because it was so hard to get off and on.  It was the mower he liked to use to mow pasture fields.  I told him it would be fine.  We could hook the rake to the rear and the mower wouldn’t bother me at all.  Roy told me I would have to be careful when I went around the fence that the sickle bar that was about six feet long and stood straight up in the air didn’t catch in the trees. 

As I made my first pass around the fence, I went real slow and was very careful not to get the sickle bar caught in anything.  To make a double windrow, you had to turn around and rake the next row into the first row that you had just raked.  This time the mower was on the other side of the windrow and I didn’t think there was anything that would be in the way in an open field.  I was just riding along at a faster speed than the first round when I was suddenly jolted like I had hit something really big.  Within seconds I was trapped under a very heavy weight. 

The sickle bar had hit an overhanging limb from a tree and had broken off and fell on me.  Where the bar broke, it was about ¾ inch steel and weighed several hundred pounds.  I had lost control of the tractor but was able to shut the key off.  When I assessed the situation, the bar had broken and fell right down my back.  It missed hitting me in the head by inches.  I don’t know how, but somehow I was able to get out from under the bar and off the tractor before Roy,  who was following me with the baler, found me.  Other than a few scrapes down my back, I wasn’t hurt at all.  I was really shaken up because just the year before my brother-in-law, Joe Vannest, was seriously injured in a tractor accident where he hit his head against the roll bar on his tractor and fractured his skull and was in the hospital for weeks with severe brain injury.  I knew what a serious injury that I had just escaped.  Thankfully, Joe has made a remarkable recovery from his accident as well.
 
In the fall of 2006, we were redoing a rental house that had sat empty for a year because it needed some major repairs.  Because of not having any heat in it, there was some mildew on some of the walls.  I was spraying a mixture of bleach and water on the walls with a Windex spray bottle and Roy told me it would be so much easier if I used an electric paint sprayer.  I thought that sounded pretty good.  What I didn’t realize was the paint sprayer nozzle was designed for a much thicker liquid than water, so when I sprayed part went on the walls and some leaked out running down my arm.  I was standing on an aluminum ladder and all of a sudden I got a jolt that went clear through my body.  I screamed and tried to throw the sprayer down, but I couldn’t let go of it.  I don’t know how long it lasted before I was able to release the sprayer.  Roy came running from another part of the house. 

​By then I was off the ladder and shaking all over.  He wanted to take me to the emergency room, but I insisted that I was okay.  I just needed to rest for a few minutes.  We had our camper parked in the yard of the house so we could use it when we needed and sometimes spent the night instead of going back and forth every day.  I went out to the camper and lay down on the couch.  Roy was sitting beside me.  After some time had passed, I was still not able to quit shaking and my speech was slowed and slurred and Roy said we were going to the hospital.  I didn’t have the energy to refuse. 
At the emergency room they observed me until I could get my thoughts and movements back to normal and then released me.  Other than being fatigued for a day or so, I had no other side effects from the episode.
 
Back to Teresa:  And this last miracle is another one that she didn’t even TELL US until like two days later!  “Oh, it was no big deal, just that my arm didn’t stop shaking for a couple days!”  We all say “when mom got electrocuted,” but my husband keeps telling me that to get electrocuted, you have to be dead.  We think mom deserves the use of the word “electrocuted” because she lived to tell about it