People on 34th Street in Everett will tell you miracles don’t just happen in the movies.
In real life, miracles happen all the time. Most go unrecognized.
One end of Everett’s 34th Street is an industrial area near the river. It crosses railroad tracks, cuts across busy streets and apartments, dead ends at a greenbelt and starts again. It winds up on a quiet hill with nice homes and the city’s most spectacular views.
The 11/2-mile stretch is peppered with people who believe in Miracles on 34th Street.
“A gift from God”
Kris Wright runs Washington Trucking Inc., a large construction materials hauler, at 2810 34th Street.
This year, he helped his wife and two children decorate their Christmas tree.
That’s a precious gift, considering he was desperately ill last year. Wright twice was kept alive on life-support.
After rounds of radiation and chemotherapy treatment for throat cancer, his body was weak. It became hard for him to eat.
The tall man, trim to begin with, lost 70 pounds, developed pneumonia and collapsed in his front yard one day. He spent the next three months in the hospital, where friends stayed constantly by his side.
He developed an infection and had half of his right lung removed on Halloween 2006.
By Thanksgiving of that year, his condition was worse. Doctors said he could die. He was put back on a respirator.
“I was at the mercy of whatever was going on around me,” Wright said.
His wife, Robin, and their pastor were summoned to his bedside.
“You anticipate going into a setting, thinking we’ll spend some time with him before he passes away,” said the Rev. John Fehlen of Stanwood Foursquare Church.
Fehlen took Wright’s hand and prayed.
“We know you can hear us,” Fehlen said. “You don’t need to strain yourself to talk. You know where eternity lies.”
Wright gripped back.
“I could see the fight in his eye,” Robin said. “I knew something was there.”
Wright’s health improved gradually, and by Christmas, he was home again.
Still, routine tasks such as taking a shower or climbing the stairs at the Wrights’ Camano Island home remained an exhausting physical challenge.
The 6-foot, 3-inch man’s frame had withered to 145 pounds. “The first time I saw myself I said the mirror was lying,” Wright said.
Robin made it a habit to cover the bathroom mirror so her husband didn’t have to confront his skeletal image. She also helped nurse him back to health injecting him with antibiotics twice a day.
By the end of January, though, Wright was strong enough to ditch his cane. A month later, his appetite picked up again.
“I really feel it was a gift from God,” Robin Wright said. “It was nothing short of a miracle.”
The Wrights now make an effort to sit together for meals and have weekly movie nights. The experience has brought them closer, she said.
This summer, Wright, now 48, piled into his crew cab Ford with his wife, daughter, Natalie, 14, son Tanner, 12, and their two dogs. The family hauled a trailer and spent a few glorious weeks exploring Yellowstone National Park.
His checkup in September showed no signs of cancer.
Wright said the experience has helped him understand that every day is a gift. He said he has cut back on some business travel in order to spend more time with his wife and kids.
If you ask his advice he’ll tell you: “Live every day like it’s your last. Pay attention to things that are really important like your family.”
“I never stopped loving them”
Patti Arnold lives in a snug, cheerfully decorated ground-floor apartment on the corner of 34th Street and Rucker Avenue.
Two wreaths hang on her door. An angel light and Santa with his reindeer are perched amid the garlands on her windowsill.
This year, Arnold, 45, said she felt old wounds were healed when she reached out to the daughters whom she lost custody of 19 years ago.
After the single mom made a series of bad decisions, the state deemed Arnold an unfit parent.
Arnold, who said she was physically and sexually abused as a child, admits that she hit one of the girls in a moment of rage. She said she was concerned it could happen again. The state thought so too.
“I didn’t want them to go through the abuse that I went through as a kid,” Arnold said.
Earlier this year, Arnold, who has severe arthritis and uses a wheelchair to get around, said she had a chance encounter in Everett with the girls’ adoptive mother. The pair sat down and talked about what Arnold had missed since she last saw the girls when they were 2 and 31/2.
Before parting, Arnold asked if it would be OK to send her eldest daughter a birthday card. It was a few days before her 22nd birthday.
The woman who raised and supported Arnold’s children into adulthood said it was OK, and she left her an address.
Arnold sent birthday cards and Christmas cards this year. The opportunity has been therapeutic, she said.
“I went through every day thinking about how they were doing,” said Arnold, 45. “I wanted them to know that I love them and I never stopped loving them.”
“I got the monkey off my back”
Cheryl Schilling is a writer and antiques dealer who lives in a two-story duplex on 34th Street near downtown.
This year, Schilling, 63, who has type-2 diabetes, was able to lower dangerously high blood sugar levels through a combination of diet and exercise.
She was diagnosed in 2003. Schilling started taking medication and later attended nutrition classes.
She still suffered symptoms of thirst and fatigue. Schilling acknowledges that she wasn’t as disciplined with her diet as she should have been and ate too much candy and other sweets.
This spring, doctors said her blood sugar levels had spiked. She was at serious risk of blindness, kidney failure or death. She was told pills weren’t enough and she would have to take insulin shots in order to stay alive.
“It was do or die,” she said. “I had to do this for real.”
Schilling reduced the amount of sugary foods, candy and drinks that she loved and began drinking more water and sugar-free drinks.
She got out of the house more often by visiting yard sales, sometimes for hours a day. Her blood sugar levels went back down, but she still has more work ahead.
“The bottom line is I got the monkey off of my back,” Schilling said. “But I’m not out of the woods yet.”
“I’m very fortunate”
Bill O’Neil lives in a brick house in the 900 block of 34th Street with huge picture windows overlooking Port Gardner Bay and Mount Baker.
His miracle is he’s had a great life.
Eighty years ago, he fell out of a second-story window at his grandparent’s home, the Fratt Mansion on Grand Avenue.
He and his older brother were tossing playing cards out the window when O’Neil lost his balance and fell to the garden below.
Fortune shined on him. He somehow managed to walk away with little more than a scar over his left eye.
Instead of being seriously injured, or killed, he became an active athlete at Everett High School, lettering in football, basketball, baseball and track and field. He was an All-American hurdler at Notre Dame and was captain of the track team.
He went on to have seven children with his wife, Nina, and seven grandchildren.
O’Neil worked as a sales manager at Weyerhauser, selling logs and lumber. “I helped grow the company,” he said, often selling 1 million board feet of lumber a day, enough to fill 30 railroad cars. He left when his boss retired, then got into the stocks and bonds business with RBC Dain Rauscher in Everett.
There, he helped people invest.
“I see people on the street now and who then say ‘Thanks Bill for what you did for me,’ ” he said. “I bought and held. One family came to me, they had about $1 million. When they retired they had $24 million. It was all good long-term investments, sometimes I never even sold it. It’s been very enjoyable to know people have enough money to retire.”
Three years ago, he wrote President Bush urging him to pursue the idea of letting people have private accounts for their Social Security contributions. “I used Growth Funds of America. I invested $2,000 per year for 30 years and that made $60,000 invested. That was the actual investment. That person now would have $1.33 million. I could pay that person $80,000 per year off the investment.”
President Bush wrote back, thanking him.
O’Neil retired a few years ago, when he was 75. Today, at 82 – his birthday was Saturday – he continues to golf and downhill ski. He and Nina celebrated their 53rd anniversary in July.
“I’m very fortunate,” O’Neil said.
“It happened so fast”
Kristine Rohlinger lives in a large 1928-vintage Rucker Hill house at 600 block of 34th Street.
A scar running across her head and behind her right ear is a constant reminder of how lucky she is.
In the summer of 2001, she had emergency brain surgery, which likely saved her life.
Rohlinger’s neurosurgeon neighbor, Dr. Sanford Wright, performed the surgery.
In just one week, she went from being a healthy mother with two young kids to being partially paralyzed in a hospital bed with her priest administering last rites.
She knew her husband was strong enough to raise their daughter, Nicole, who was going into the second grade, and their son Scott, who was 4.
She also knew her kids needed a mom.
“It happened so fast, I really didn’t know what had hit me and where I was going,” said Rohlinger, now 44.
Looking back, Rohlinger said the sudden illness has given her a greater appreciation for life and family.
It started when her left hand went numb while steering a bumper boat ride during a weekend getaway in Canada.
The next day her hand began intermittent fits of shaking.
Her mother stopped by her house to visit in the morning when Rohlinger felt the shaking coming on again.
“Hey, I’ve had this strange shaking in my hand.” That’s the last thing she remembers saying before losing consciousness and suffering a grand mal seizure.
She had a computer tomography scan, which showed a spot on her brain. Her spot was in the same place where her late father developed cancer.
Even so, not much could be determined. She scheduled an appointment a few weeks later with the neurological specialist.
She was placed on anti-seizure medication. Her condition deteriorated.
Her left arm became weak and her left foot dragged a bit when she walked. She knew it was serious.
That’s when her uncle Lon Welly, a chiropractor who also lives on 34th Street, did some strength testing and determined that she needed immediate attention.
Welly called Wright and set up an emergency appointment. Then she had a second major seizure, which this time left her paralyzed on her left side.
Wright determined that she was suffering from a bleeding brain and within hours had her on the surgery table.
Rohlinger recovered from her injuries and today lives happily with her family.
“When we are living through a miracle, we don’t always see it or appreciate it until afterward,” she said. “When I look back, I’m very thankful and I’ve been very blessed, no doubt, and lucky.”
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