The Miracle Man

To be at one with the universe was Morris Goodman’s aim 30 months ago when after careful preflight check, he taxied into position and began his takeoff roll. As his Cessna 172 climbed free from the day’s concerns, he leveled off and headed for the Chesapeake Bay and the beloved scenery of creeks, marshes and backwaters – a land so beautiful that God’s signature graced each wild and unspoiled scene.

“Someday,” Morris mused, “I will build a home overlooking this paradise, a refuge for reflecting on my life’s work.”

That work, into which Morris poured himself every day, constituted a financial success in selling that most only dream about. His thoughts drifted now, while the azure sky and iridescent bay formed the perfect backdrop to re-playing the past and plotting the future.

His estate and tax planning business was thriving – he had worked hard for his six figure income. Prospects for the future looked excellent. Selling, like flying, was in his bloodstream, each new deal giving him a taste of being airborne on earth. What a thrill they both were.

His thoughts turned, as he looked at lush pastures below, to his wife and family. He glowed in his feeling of love for them all. Morris, far above the changing scene, remembered days of hunting and fishing with so many friends. “Yes,” he told himself, “I am blessed, Divinely Blessed.”

Dropping his craft down to 25 feet, he scanned the coastal chain of barrier islands for game birds and wildlife. Sunlight glistened like diamonds on the water encasing each unspoiled island in a sparkling aurora. It was time to start home. Near Fisherman’s Island, so aptly named, he climbed to 800 feet, marking on his mental calendar the next trip to this pristine wonderland.

Five minutes later he prepared to land, decreasing speed to 75 MPH, checked wind and added 20 degrees of flaps. A slow approach was mandatory as there were only 1,300 feet of runway requiring let down over telephone and electric lines.

Turning final, he added full flaps, and held at 2,200 RPM’s, then slowed to 65 or 70 MPH – an ideal setup for the final approach. With no warning, the engine lost power. The RPM’s fell to 800 and the power lines loomed fast at the windshield. Morris Goodman, a soaring shore bird ten minutes before, hurtled now like a rock inside a tin can, toward his destiny. With no panic, he added full power while reaching to retract the flaps. The engine refused to respond and Morris, cursing like a Marine and strapped inside his Cessna 172, crashed to earth ripping telephone and power lines, flipping the plan belly up. Then total darkness flooded his world.

On the ground, horrified friends gaped helplessly, screaming instructions that would never be heard. It was a nightmare framed by the setting sun.

Enveloped in a tangled mass of telephone and power lines, the crushed cabin of the plane, with Morris inside, lay upside down. Sparks of electricity skittered up and down the airframe and wings where two full tanks of gas remained unruptured. Severed power lines had ignited the grass around the plane and fire crept toward the wreck.

A fire extinguisher was put into use, the rescue squad called and Morris’ friends lifted his limp and shattered body through the windshield. One of these friends, a paramedic, realized that Morris’ breathing had stopped and immediately began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Five to seven agonizing minutes lapsed before a weak and feeble breath passed Morris’ own lips. He had been medically dead during all that time, but the miracle had just begun.

In the ambulance, he was given oxygen and within 22 minutes his bloody, battered body was wheeled into the emergency room of the small hospital in Nassawadox on the shore.

As Goodman hovered near death, clinging by a frail and elusive will to live, he underwent a strange and dream-like experience, which he believes took him to an eerie place somewhere between life and death.

“I was traveling through a pitch black tunnel. I could see a small ray of intense white light in the distance. But I noticed something most strange. Although I was traveling at a rapid pace, the light never appeared to get closer. And yet it did not appear to move farther away.

“As I moved through this dark tunnel, both sides were covered with pictures of my entire life. They seemed to glow in the dark and there must have been a million of them. It seemed as if I was reliving my entire life again, the good as well as the bad.

“Suddenly, I began gaining on the light. What before had merely been a pinpoint of light now loomed larger and larger and it seemed that I would finally reach the end of the tunnel. Just as I was about to end my journey through this dark tunnel, I regained consciousness. I was in the ambulance headed to the hospital.

“Every time I tried to close my eyes and rest, those memories of a lifetime kept flashing across the screen of my mind and sleep would not come.”

In the emergency room, a team of specialists and technicians went to work on Goodman’s mangled body, assessing the damage to determine what – if anything – could be done for him.

At Nassawadox, x-rays of Goodman’s body were taken while doctors prepared to do what they could for him. But, when they realized the extent and severity of his injuries, they arranged for his transfer by ambulance to Norfolk General Hospital, a major medical complex about 45 miles away.

Goodman was unable to move or speak, but the excruciating pain he was suffering registered on his face each time the ambulance hit a bump. To lessen the impact of jolts, the squadsmen tried to maintain a moderate speed.

But suddenly Goodman’s blood pressure dropped to 40 over 20 and his heart rate plummeted. He recalls hearing someone say, “You’d better speed up, he’s not going to make it.” Disregarding Goodman’s pain, the squad accelerated to nearly 100 miles per hour and an emergency radio call was sent out requesting a police escort.

In Norfolk, the doctors were incredulous that he had survived the trip. More diagnostic work was performed to locate his exact injuries. Once they learned the nature of these, the doctors held no hope at all for Morris’ survival. The cluster of relatives and friends keeping vigil at the hospital was told to prepare for the worst.

Goodman had been hooked to a respirator because he wasn’t able to breathe on his own. Nerves which stimulate movement in the diaphragm, the muscle which contracts to force air out of the lungs and relaxes to pull air in, had been destroyed. Although the intercostal muscles between the ribs assist in the breathing process, it is the diaphragm which makes the lungs function.

A crushed larynx and windpipe and destruction of neck muscles and ligaments rendered Goodman speechless, unable to swallow, and without an open passage for air. His jaw was shattered, every bone in his face fractured. Bladder and bowels as well as both as kidneys had ceased to function.

As if all this weren’t more than any human being could sustain, the Norfolk doctors realized his broken neck had previously been overlooked. The crash had fractured the first and second cervical vertebrae, an injury which – all by itself – should logically have killed him, particularly considering how much he had been moved.

The spinal cord, normally protected inside the vertebral column, had also been damaged, but was crushed rather than severed.

The initial emergency treatment of Goodman was touch and go. He was conscious, and although he could neither move nor utter a sound, an acute sense of pain racked his entire body and was almost more than he could stand.

Later, he would recall that from the beginning of the tragedy, he somehow forced himself “to hang on” – to survive with an incredible positive power.

“How easy it would have been to have given in and slipped into the peaceful, painless eternal sleep that we call death,” he said. “I could easily have bought that escape. The price would have been cheap. But – I’m not a buyer, I’m a seller . . . . To hang in there and make a battle of it would require a tremendous amount of guts and courage. Without any hesitation, I made up my mind that this was the choice I would make.”

Goodman’s struggle to survive, to summon all his inner strength and resources for the interminable, painful and exasperating road to recovery had begun. It was a road no one thought him able to travel.

The prognosis – more than dismal – was heartbreaking. If Goodman lived, the doctors told his wife and sister, he would be little more than a vegetable for the rest of his life. He would never be able to communicate beyond blinking his eyes, they said. And, at best, he would be confined to a wheelchair and would require the kind of constant care and attention only a nursing home could provide.

But Goodman knew he was armed for the fight.

“As I lay in that dark room,” he recalled, “I was thankful that I had spent the past 15 years of my life preparing myself for a situation such as the one I was now facing. The hundreds of hours I had spent studying positive thinking and speaking on the subject all over the world had been my apprenticeship. All the talks I had given to uplift and motivate others would come back to me a hundredfold. I had cast my bread upon the waters for a long time and now it was coming back in loaves.”

Although he applied many motivational principles during those difficult months, at the heart of Goodman’s philosophy was one deceptively simple idea: Man has at his disposal an unlimited power source. He rarely uses it efficiently – yet the power of the mind for positive thought and action is always at work waiting to be tapped.

“There is an enormous source of power in all of us,” he explained. “We need to find a way to release this power. When you cut on a light switch you do not create electrical power, you simply release power that is there all the time.

“I believe that there is a switch in a human being that can also be cut on to release such power. Unfortunately, most of us do not know how to flip the switch.”

Just as he stunned the medical experts by surviving the crash, Goodman soon began surprising them by getting better – however slowly and slightly. He may have been immobile, unable to communicate, ravaged with pain, and dependent on tubes, machines and nurses to perform his bodily functions, but he had a tenacity about him that flaunted itself in the face of opposition.

One of the first and most serious obstacles to overcome was his broken neck. In a nine-hour operation that had never been performed before, the damaged ligaments in his neck would be replaced with a special plastic material, and the first four cervical vertebrae would be fused with wire.

The operation was so life-threatening the doctor “spread all the cards out on the table for me to see,” Goodman said. “He told me that my chance of surviving the operation would be slim, about one chance in 1,000. He asked me what I wanted to do.”

Just as he had not hesitated to choose to fight, Goodman did not hesitate to say yes. He blinked his eyes once for an affirmative answer. The only way he had to communicate.

“I kept telling myself that I would not die and that I would fool everyone and come through with flying colors. Nobody else was that optimistic. It seems strange, but I was not afraid. Fear was an emotion I no longer perceived.

As they wheeled Goodman into the operating room, the halls were lined with friends and relatives who never expected to see him alive again.

Nine hours later, the doctors filed out, wiping the sweat from their brows and shaking their heads in bewilderment. “I don’t know how that guy is alive after what we did to him. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”

But Goodman was alive, and he survived the highly critical 48-hour period after surgery, continuing to amaze the doctors.

He also survived three serious bouts of double pneumonia during the early months of his recovery, despite notions that if his injuries didn’t get him, the mucous and infection spreading in his lungs would.

Goodman was fully aware of the pessimistic expectations of his doctors. Although they were the experts and they assured him he would never walk again, as early as a week after the accident he began wondering why he should settle for the wheelchair existence they predicted for him. “I did not see myself as forever sitting in a wheelchair,” he proclaimed confidently. “I saw myself as a man walking tall and straight.” Down the road, he knew he’d walk again, although his right leg was the only limb he could move at the time, and its muscle contractions were more often spastic than coordinated.

His refusal to succumb to the negative expectations of others – even if they were doctors – would be an important lesson that would come in handy at many junctures during his recovery. “Our own expectations have enormous power. They should be the standards by which we operate, not the standards of others.”

Just a few weeks after the accident, he began physical therapy treatments at Norfolk to start reviving atrophied muscles and to keep the joints flexible. Nerve damage would make many tasks impossible for him to perform, but he was determined to be able to care for himself again, so he worked hard at his therapy, despite horrible pain and his body’s refusal to respond noticeably.

Even before Goodman would be able to leave his bed and sit in a wheelchair without being strapped in, he had to learn one of the most basic skills – how to sit up.

After many false starts he re-learned this in physical therapy at the University of Virginia Hospital where he had been transferred less than a month after the accident.

The first attempt to sit up on May 4, however, hit him with the cruel truth that “I was going to have to start from scratch like a baby and learn everything all over.”

Placed on a mat on the floor, he realized “this was going to be tougher than I imagined…I tried (to sit up) but each time I toppled over like Humpty Dumpty…but I knew better than to dwell on that. Worry and anxiety are energy-draining emotions. They cause a person to sit hopeless when they should be taking positive action.”

A life-saving lesson in the form of a sign in the hospital’s physical therapy room read, “No pain, no gain.” I realized how true that was. Life becomes easier when you’re tougher on yourself.” And Goodman had to be tough to keep his mind from succumbing to the agony of his body.

“I was suffering excruciating pain all over. My legs, feet, stomach, neck, head, arms, jaw, and buttocks were so sensitive that the slightest touch would cause excruciating pain frightening in its intensity…Afraid to become dependent on pain-killers, I refused to take morphine.

“I tried to look at the pain in a positive way. As long as there was pain, there was feeling. And even though I could not move my limbs at present, I knew that if feeling was returning, my body must be healing. Without pain, there would be no feeling and then I would really have something to worry about.”

Goodman was also determined to breathe on his own again, refusing to accept the doctor’s opinion that other muscles would not substitute for the diaphragm and force the lungs to inflate and deflate.

So even before he left Norfolk, one night he began his own self-styled breathing therapy, trying to take breaths along with the respirator.

“Each time it would take a breath, I would try to suck in a little air and expand my lungs as much as I could. Every time I did this it hurt something awful deep in my chest. Forgetting the pain, I did this 100 times and then stopped to see if my lungs would expand any deeper. But nothing happened.

For eight days and nights he stayed awake, taking 100 breaths at a time with five minute breaks. From then on, he did the exercise daily as often as he could, gradually increasing the number of breaths between breaks. His lungs never seemed to respond until April 29, 48 arduous days after the first attempt.

Waiting for the NBA playoff between Boston and Philadelphia to come on television, “I did two sets of 300 and it was the same old story. Nothing happened to give me any hope that I was on the right track. I must admit that even I was starting to have doubts. I lay there for 30 minutes and gave myself a pep talk.

“Now look here, Morris,” I said to myself, “you have never quit in the middle of something and this is no time to start.” So, with some reluctance, I again took 300 deep breaths and quit. But this time something marvelous happened. I felt my lungs expand three times. I repeated the process and once again felt my lungs expand three times. I was ecstatic…as I watched the game, I returned to my breathing exercises…finally I stopped from sheer exhaustion…the next morning the results were the same. All my stubbornness had finally paid off.”

His obstinacy would reward him in many ways over the next few months. It was neither easy, nor quick in coming, but he was eventually weaned from the respirator, his breathing exercises apparently having strengthened and enabled other muscles to do the work of the diaphragm.

He also graduated from a wheelchair to awkward, stumbling steps, finally walking on his own less than eight months after the accident. And doctors had said it would be nearly two years before he could sit alone in a wheelchair!

With determination and more hard work, Goodman learned to talk again, starting “from scratch” with simple sounds and moving to full sentences within only a few weeks.

One of the most pleasurable results of Goodman’s efforts was being able to eat “real foods” again. Because he couldn’t swallow due to nerve damage to his swallowing reflex, he was nourished first intravenously and later by a gastrostomy tube which bypassed the normal passageway and introduced food directly to his stomach.

The aroma of foods brought to other patients was a stimulating incentive and the thought of those delicious rewards eased the intense pain and strain of forcefully swallowing so as not to choke.

Goodman’s biggest relief came the day he was freed of “that awful halo,” a device with a metal circle screwed to his head in front and back. The contraption, designed to keep his neck in proper alignment, made him appear at once both pathetic and comical. Because of it, his head ached constantly.

Goodman spent five months at the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center in Fisherville, Va., a stay that seemed endless to him, but short to the medical teams who had watched him progress more rapidly that anyone ever dared dream.

When he went home for good on November 13, 1981, Goodman took with him constant pain and the knowledge that he still had a long way to go. But, as he hobbled along, he was singing in his heart. He had fought the “Angel of Death” and he had won.

Today, Goodman continues various types of therapy and treatment. He is writing a book about his ordeal, and his sights are set on being able to work again.

The accident and his subsequent inability to work resulted in his having to declare bankruptcy. He sold his home, his boat, gave up luxuries and lowered his standard of living.

Although he receives disability insurance payments sufficient to live on, he is determined not to become complacent. He has been through too much and learned too many valuable lessons to give up now.

Goodman had always believed in the power of positive thinking, but now he realizes that self-confidence and self-motivation have lifesaving qualities as well as the potential to bestow wealth and success.

He now has a new-found appreciation for the people in his life – those positive relationships and friendships played an important role in his recovery. “I have learned how necessary and wonderful it is to have friends and family you can count on to be there when you need them,” he said. “Without my wife, my sister, and everyone who was there for me, I’m not certain I’d be here today. No one who has a close friend is ever alone.”

One of the most valuable lessons Morris Goodman learned is that “You can’t control life, but you sure can influence it.”

But even more important, “In life, it doesn’t matter how many times you stumble and fall down. What matters is how many times you stumble and get up.”