Charlotte, NC

Since we’re comin’ down toward the end of the year, why not leave it with some good news for a change? Ya with me?
Great. Well, here’s the first installment:

It happened just before Christmas: Searchers had combed the brutal backcountry of rural Ontario, Canada for the housewife from the city of Hamilton, who had left her home three days earlier in the middle of a blizzard to grocery shop.

With his search-and-rescue dog Ace, Ray Lau tramped through the thick, ice-covered brush of a farmer’s field that Monday, not far from where Donna Molnar’s van had been found a day earlier.

He kept thinking: Negative-20 winds? This is a search for a body!

“Then, oh, all of a sudden, Ace bolted off,” Lau said. “He stooped and looked down at the snow and just barked, barked, barked.” Lau rushed to his Dutch shepherd’s side.

“There she was, there was Donna, her face was almost totally covered except for one eye staring back at me!” he said. “There was a thousand thoughts going through my head. It was over the top.”

With one ungloved hand near her neck, Molnar, 55, mumbled and tried to scream as Lau yelled to other rescuers. Dressed in a leather coat, sweater, slacks and winter boots, Molnar was carefully pulled from a 3-foot-deep mound of snow that had apparently helped to insulate her.

Then, rescuers got their second shock.

“She was lucid, and said, ‘Wow. I’ve been here a long time!’ and then she apologized and said, ‘I just wanted to take a walk, I’m sorry to have caused you any trouble,’ “ said Staff Sgt. Mark Cox of the Hamilton Police Department, one of the leaders in the hunt. “And we’re all thinking this is incredible, this is really something. I’ve been doing search and rescue for seven years, and this is the wildest case I’ve had in finding someone alive,” he said.

She was rushed to a hospital and immediately sedated to begin the agonizing steps of hypothermia treatment.

“I think the snow must have worked to trap her body heat, and that’s what really saved her,” Cox said. “This really speaks to what’s possible.”

David Molnar is understandably calling his wife’s survival his “Christmas miracle.” Especially …

especially when her body temp at extraction was only thirty degrees!!!

He wasn’t able to speak with her immediately after she was taken to the hospital. But while she was under sedation, he leaned over her and whispered in her ear, “Welcome back, I love you.”

“My wife, you know, doesn’t pump iron. She is strong physically and spiritually,” he said. “When people say to me how do I explain how she survived, I said I believe God reached down and cradled her until the rescuers could find her, because there’s no rational explanation.”

In addition to hypothermia, Donna Molnar is being treated for severe frostbite, and her recovery will take months.

Now … who says that visits from angels, Christ, and miracles don’t exist? (I’m referring to the infant in Presbyterian Hospital whom I wrote about a few posts ago).

GOTTA STAND FOR TV

Have you ever gotten a cool-looking LCD TV, with clear screen and great sound and set it on some kind of stand — just to have it collapse on ya? (This happened to a friend of mine this past Christmas!)
Well, you won’t have to worry about that anymore — especially if you click on the link I’m about to give you!
You see, not only do they have a fantastic assortment of stands, but also TV lifts for the foot of your bed, so you can watch in maximum comfort; they also have other lift mechanisms, cabinets and more!
They even have measurement guides, in-home delivery, great prices and a superb guarantee!
Now, with the weather gettin’ a colder and (as of now) snow or rain pelting everybody, it seems, it only makes sense to visit the folks who can provide you with the best tv stand you could ever hope for! You’ll be amazed at what you see!!

I’ll bet the cardiac unit at Presbyterian Hospital could tell ya this, but:

DIDJA KNOW that one out of every five people recovering from a heart attack is still having chest pain a year afterward?  That’s what a new US study is saying.
The Archives of Internal Medicine reported some suffered angina every day, despite bypass surgery.
A team from Colorado University quizzed nearly 2,000 patients and say that it’s linked to smoking  — even depression in some cases.

Chest pain, or angina, is a common symptom of heart disease, but doctors expect some heart attack patients to continue to have it, regardless of efforts to treat their underlying disease.

The team looked at the progress of 1,957 patients, who filled in questionnaires a year after their heart attack. All told, 19.9% of the patients said they still had angina pain one year after their attack, and although this was once a week or less for most, 1.2% of them had daily pain.

Those most likely to have chest pain were younger men who had undergone heart bypass operations, or men who smoked or had depressive symptoms. The researchers said these links might help doctors monitor “at risk” patients.
A spokesman for the British Heart Foundation, who keenly studies the findings,  said:  “Targeted services for these people - such as helping them quit smoking - may help to improve the quality of life and health of heart patients by alleviating or preventing angina”.

Needless to say, this can be of tremendous help to everyone — not just here in the Queen City, but around the world! The bottom line here:  If you need help in treating smoking habits, depression or both, just reach out to your doctor.  He (or she) will be glad to refer you to someone who can help if they can’t!

LIGHTING UP … THE BATHROOM!

Everybody spends quite a bit of time in the bathroom every day — whether for showers/baths, makeup, washing hair, getting stuff from the linen closet or … well, “other” duties.
But wouldn’t it be great if our bathroom lighting was as warm and welcome as that in other rooms of the house?  And if that lighting gave superb illumination to prevent falls or slips?

Well, there’s one place that not only offers the best and most beautiful in lighting fixtures for your loo (British for “bathroom”), but at great prices, too!  And you can select your favorite finishes, brands, styles and applications (2 bulbs? 3? 4 or more?) … and even your own price range!

On top of all that, you get secure shopping, no sales tax since you live here in Charlotte and free shipping (if your order’s over $75.00)!

By now, I know you must be interested, so why not click the link that’ll take you to the best bathroom lighting you’d ever want?
Believe me, you’ll “see” what I’m talking about when you get there!! So make your bathroom a place of beauty and click there now!