Fred’s Story by Fred Sievert

God was in control from the beginning to the end of this remarkable journey and story.

It all started when we were on Cape Cod in mid-November preparing to leave for a long drive to Michigan to visit family there and in Utah for the holidays and for the birth of a grandson.

My wife Sue and I went to dinner with great friends the night before we left on the long drive and on that cold and dark night. I slammed into a curb very hard as I made a left-hand turn that resulted in a flat tire.

It was about 10pm and no people or cars were anywhere in sight at the gas station I pulled into.

I pulled in to pump gas and then considered how we would get to our hotel room that was about 3 miles away. Surprisingly, AAA could not find any of their service providers anywhere near us that could come to the site, nor could they find a repair or service shop open at that time of the night.

Suddenly there was a young man knocking at our window asking if he could help. He was the first “angel” of this story. We were thrilled but knew he would struggle getting the temporary spare tire (donut) on the car and he did struggle mightily for 30 minutes or more. When I insistently tried to give him $100 for his trouble, he refused to take any of it and said he was a believer and knew that God would reward him for doing this. He simply asked us to, “pay it forward”.

Early the next morning as we were unpacking and repacking the back of the car to make room for all the luggage and other belongings we were taking to Michigan, I backed into a large cooler, fell and hit my head hard on the driveway where we had stayed overnight. I had no symptoms of a concussion and after purchasing two new tires at the Lexus dealer in Gingham, Mass, we proceeded to drive 750 miles to Detroit (again with no symptoms).

We spent the holidays with family for over 5 weeks then flew to Utah to visit my son Zac for 1 week as he and his wife were due to deliver their 1st child. We flew back to Detroit (before the baby was born) and then drove back to New Hampshire (750 miles).

For this entire 7-week period there were absolutely no symptoms of any problem.

We decided to fly back to Utah on January 4th and we set up flights for that Saturday morning.

On January 2nd, I developed a slight limp of my right leg during a period when we had house guests prior to January 4th.

I went to see a doctor that day who said there were no signs of a concussion, but they would try to set an MRI. However, they were unable to do it on short notice, so we set it up for our return to New Hampshire on January 29th. I was comfortable doing that because the symptoms were minor.

Then I spoke to 2 “angels” named grace. One was a guest at our home and a physician’s assistant and the other was a nurse I called on January 3rd at a clinic in our town.

They both encouraged me to go to a hospital emergency room to get a CT scan which I did in the afternoon of January 3rd. I drove myself 35 miles to Concord NH expecting to be reassured that nothing was wrong and had the CT scan. The first indication that something was seriously wrong was when they insisted I go in a wheelchair to a room where they hooked me up to an IV, an EKG and a vitals monitor and then showed me the high definition CT scan.

It showed a perfectly normal right brain and a left brain swimming in blood. They admitted me to the hospital and conducted a 2-hour surgery the next morning (January 4th at 8:30am when I was supposed to be boarding a plane to Detroit). Thank God for the two “angels” named Grace because I would likely be dead today if I had taken that flight in my condition.

This was just the beginning as the surgery didn’t really resolve the problem and 2 months later, I had to undergo a much more risky and invasive surgery.

I’ll continue with more of the divine intervention aspects of the story from the period about 2 weeks before the second surgery.

My wife Sue, my daughter Dena and I met with the neurologist at the end of February who explained that he was strongly recommending I proceed to the more invasive craniotomy surgery ASAP because of the severe risk of delaying it any longer.

In that procedure they bore a hole into the skull and insert a suction device and a drain to remove as much of the blood as possible. The neurologist said the blood would look like thick and dirty motor oil and I had a lot of it in my skull. We asked the neurologist many questions for almost an hour before we agreed to proceed with the recommended surgery.

He told us the pain could be severe during the first week after surgery during which I’d be on oxycodone that could continue into week 2. He said full recovery might never occur but typically we’d see improvement in the first 6 weeks after surgery. The surgery was scheduled for March 5th at Elliott Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire.

For several weeks, hundreds of people were praying for me and Sue, Dena and I prayed together every morning as well during that period (a practice we probably will continue forever).

In the pre-op visit with another doctor, he confirmed everything the neurologist had said about the surgery. The recovery time, the pain and the oxycodone. As we left his office he said, “I will be praying for you”. When is the last time a doctor told you he or she would pray for you?

Of course I was anxious about this and was not getting the rest I needed before surgery and one night I was wide awake and was praying that God would remove this anxiety and allow me to get some sleep. At that moment, I had a vision; something I had never experienced before this injury but it happened a few times after the injury. Let me describe what that was like.

I was wide awake, not dreaming and praying with my eyes closed. For only 5 or 10 seconds, I saw a high-definition vision in full color of an image of a road map. These visions were not videos but more like the Ken Burns approach used in his TV series on The Civil War a few years ago with a zoom-in or a panoramic swing across a fixed image.

On the road map, I could read town names as the image panned across my view and what appeared in large print were the words, “Queen City”. Sue and I had no idea what that meant or where “Queen City” was but when we prayed with Dena later and I described this to her she said “Dad, that is a sign from God because Manchester, NH (where the surgery would be performed) is often referred to as Queen City”. Needless to say this gave me great assurances that the Lord was watching over me and removed all anxiety; it ended future sleepless nights.

Now to the surgery.

I checked into the hospital at 7:00am for surgery at 8:30am on March 5th. At check-in, I had to sign a form that disclosed my right to appeal if I felt they wanted to release me from the ICU too early. (This is mentioned again below).

I had been told by the neurologist that the surgery would take 60-90 minutes, When I woke up in recovery I was told that the surgery was very successful, there was a very large about of blood but the procedure only lasted for 30 minutes. God was clearly in this.

Then while in the ICU I was closely monitored; every hour they took my vital signs and asked the 3 standard questions: what’s your name, date of birth and how is the pain on a scale of 0-10. I was surprised to report a pain level of 0 for the first few hours thinking it was the anesthetic or it was due to post-surgery doses of oxycodone.

About 6 hours after surgery, I asked the nurse about it and she said even she was amazed that the anesthetic effect was much reduced and they never gave me oxycodone; only Tylenol. I was praising the Lord for this, and for the remaining day and a half the score was almost always a 0 throughout the stay in the hospital. The next time my nurse asked the pain question I asked her the following question, “On a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the best, how do I rank relative to the post-operative recovery of all of the patients who go through this kind of surgery?  I was told this team typically has been performing 5 or more of these per day.  She instantly responded that their team has been amazed by my rapid and painless recovery in the hospital- she gave it a score of 10 and added that they had never seen anything like this.

There was only 1 brief exception to the 0 score and the use of oxycodone and that was when I was trying to get to sleep the night after surgery and I was having pain from a cracked rib injury I experienced a few years earlier; the Tylenol wasn’t touching it.  It was because of the way I was positioned for sleeping. They gave me a small (2 ml) infusion of liquid oxycodone. That was the only time the pain score was a “2” and it had nothing to do with my surgery. Praise God.

Also, when they discharged me they did so directly from the ICU and didn’t even send me to a regular room for a day of observation. They said this was also highly unusual.

The day of surgery I was feeling so good that I was very animated and talkative. I told the ICU staff that this was a wonderful forced vacation that I was enjoying very much. They had never heard that before. I even jokingly said to them that if they tried to discharge me too early that I would exercise my right to object as I was told I could do so on check-in.

And when they asked where I was on subsequent visits to my room, instead of answering, “Elliott Hospital, ICU room 1” I began to answer, “The Elliott Resort and Spa, the Presidential Suite”.

The nurse in charge of seeing me in the afternoon and evening on the day of surgery chatted with me a lot that day and thereby learned about my career, my time in divinity school, and the books I had written.

The next afternoon when I saw her, she told me she had visited my website and had purchased one of my books. She said everybody in the ICU area was talking about me and were referring to me as the local celebrity in the ICU. She said several of them that I hadn’t met yet asked if they could stop in and talk to me if it was OK with me.

And of course, I was eager to talk to them especially in a state that reportedly has the fewest number of worshiping Christians in the country. Only 2% claim to attend church regularly. I welcomed it as an opportunity to share my faith story. I have often said I am essentially living in the mission field (N.H.) and the Lord gave me this opportunity to express my faith and give my testimony from a hospital bed.

Three ladies I hadn’t seen before came in and we talked about my first book, God Revealed. I told a couple of stories and noticed some teary eyes as I spoke. One of the stories I told was how the Lord revealed to me a cure and relief from my history of severe migraine headaches. In my 20’s, I typically had 4 or 5 such headaches per year and haven’t had a single one in the 50 years since. Two of the three ladies said they too suffered from migraines and planned to buy the book. The Lord knew this.

I continue to express extreme gratitude to the Lord not only for the results of the surgery and the lack of pain but also for His infinite wisdom and perfect timing. Here is a list of just a few of the miracles:

1. Angel #1 who changed our tire and refused any cash, asking us to, “pay it forward.”

2. The encouragement to get a CT scan from the two angels named Grace.

3. The need to get the first surgery and not take a flight the next day (Jan 4th) to Detroit that could have been fatal.

4. Once the diagnosis was known, I felt an urgency to organize my 2024 Tax information and data and submit it to my financial and tax advisors for submission. I completed and mailed this (10 exhibits and spreadsheets) 2 days before the surgery.

5. I had been working slowly on my estate plan but again realized a sense of urgency to move much more quickly. The Wills and Trusts had been rewritten and executed in November of 2024 but much more needed to be done in January and February to centralize all documents at the home and to draft instructions to the family for how to execute and settle the estate. That 20-page document was finalized and emailed to my executors and family members in the late afternoon of March 4th; the night before surgery. In God’s perfect timing.

6. A medical doctor telling me he would pray for me.

7. The Queen City Vision

8. And of course the opportunity to affect other lives with my testimony in the ICU.

9. A resulting change in my lifestyle with a renewed commitment to faith and family.

Prayers were indeed answered in a glorious way. Praise the Lord!

Fred Sievert is an Author & Retired President of New York Life Insurance Company
Fred Sievert.com