By Allison Norgren
For The Visitor
John and Christy Gregory received a call from Mississippi last Dec. 7 that left the future very uncertain.
“We basically brought an empty duffel bag,” John said. “We just started heading to the airport.”
John and Christy, residents of Padua and members of Our Lady of the Angels in Sauk Centre, learned their 18-year-old son, Dominic, had been in a serious car accident on his way to work. He was ejected from the vehicle near Chunky, Mississippi, where he and his wife, Lexi, were living and working. Two police officers were nearby and witnessed the accident.
“That saved about a half-hour, they figure, because they called for the helicopter right away,” John said.
For John and Christy, this is where they believe the first of many divine interventions began.
Dominic, hanging on by a thread, was airlifted from the scene and flown to Jackson, Mississippi.
“We received the call at 7 a.m. and we were very shaken,” Christy recalled. Friends drove the couple to the airport and helped them find a flight, which was scheduled to arrive in Jackson at 10 p.m.
“We didn’t know if he was going to be alive when we got there,” Christy said.
The first leg of the trip was from Minneapolis to the airport in Atlanta. When the couple arrived in Minneapolis they learned a pilot had become ill so a different flight to Atlanta had been delayed an hour, leaving just enough time to catch that flight.
“This meant we could get to Jackson at 5 p.m., instead of 10 p.m.,” John said.
“Walking through the airport in Minneapolis, I saw a Catholic priest walking toward us; he was wearing a huge gold crucifix,” Christy said. “We stopped him and he prayed for Dominic right there in the airport.”
John and Christy were visibly in distress on the first flight, knowing that Dominic had a ruptured spleen, bruised lungs, a fractured skull and swelling on his brain.
“The man sitting next to us on the first flight didn’t talk the whole flight until the end,” John said. “He showed us on his computer exactly where we needed to go to catch our next flight in Atlanta.”
The Atlanta airport is the busiest airport in the United States.
“We literally needed to run through the airport because we only had 20 minutes to catch that flight,” Christy said.
“He also told us that his daughter had been in a bad accident and had a brain injury seven years earlier,” John said. “She made a full recovery.”
On the flight from Atlanta to Jackson, there was another Catholic priest, who also took time to pray for Dominic.
“The guy sitting next to us said, ‘My wife is the biggest pray-er I’ve ever met. She will pray for Dominic and tell all her friends to pray for him, too,’” John said.
John and Christy even had the taxi driver who brought them to the hospital praying for them.
They sent out the prayer call to everyone they knew. Those people, in turn, called people they knew, and so on. The couple also had the support of parishioners back home. Christy estimates the number of people praying for Dominic in those crucial first days was in the thousands. From rosaries to novenas to Masses being celebrated, Dominic had many prayers.
“Arriving in Jackson, it was like what you see in a movie,” Christy said. “As we walked in the hospital they were wheeling Dominic down the hall and he was just full of tubes. It was very hard to see.”
The couple’s daughter arrived that same evening. She is a radiologist and her fiance is a neurologist.
Because of the extensive brain injury Dominic sustained, he was kept in a medically induced coma for 10 days. Normal brain pressure is seven to 15 mmHG (millimeters of mercury): Dominic’s was above 20 and peaked at 38.
“On Monday they started asking us who would be making the end of life decisions,” John said.
An electroencephalogram (EEG) was performed to test Dominic’s brain function several days after the accident.
After the test was over, John and Lexi saw Dominic kick his leg, a good indicator of brain activity. The neurologist said, “I wish he would have done that when I was doing the test.” He told John that during the test he didn’t see much activity.
John and Christy knew Dominic’s situation was dire but they continued to pray.
“I’ve never prayed so hard in my life,” said Christy. “We had nothing else to do so all we could do was pray. I told anyone back home who would call just to pray.
There’s nothing else you need to do for us.”
The couple got to know many other families in similar situations, and everyone with whom they came into contact would pray with them.
“Most of the people there are Baptist,” John said. “It took a few days to get a Catholic priest there to administer anointing of the sick.”
After the anointing, Dominic’s situation started to improve.
“After he was anointed, his brain pressure stayed at five,” John said. “A few days later and they were able to take the drain out.”
“We came to trust that everyday is a gift,” Christy said. “We just knew everyday Dominic was still alive was a gift.
“One of the security guards told me, ‘Nothing is impossible for God. Don’t tell God that he can’t do it,” Christy added.
John would wake up each night on his own a few minutes before 3 a.m.
“I couldn’t fall back to sleep until I went to Dominic’s bed and got on my knees and prayed,” John said.
When Dominic’s ventilator was finally removed, he started singing. The nurses couldn’t believe it, as it usually takes a few days for a person in that situation to even talk.
“He was signing everything from ‘Jingle Bells’ to ‘Frozen,’” said Christy. “Every time we asked for something from God, it came into place.”
By Dec. 27, just 20 days after the accident, Dominic and Lexi were on a flight back to St. Cloud through Grace on Wings, a nonprofit that provides charity air ambulance services across the United States for situations similar to Dominic’s. The Gregorys were responsible only for the cost of fuel for the flight.
Dominic soon started his rehabilitation at the St. Cloud Hospital. On Jan. 10, just over one month since the accident, he went home.
“All of the doctors and nurses in Mississippi said it was a miracle that I was even alive and doing so well,” Dominic said. “They said they were going to miss me and my singing.”
Suffering a traumatic brain injury, Dominic still has some healing to do and it could be over a year until he experiences full recovery. He is currently undergoing physical, speech and occupational therapy.
John, Lexi and Christy are thankful for all the people who have blessed them during this journey. From the woman at the hospital, who would take their laundry home and wash it to the neurology intern who offered his home to the Gregorys on Christmas Eve. And they are grateful for the people in Sauk Centre who continued to pray and help their other three children at home, Shannon, 15, Cody, 17, and John, 20.
“People made sure they had food, kept them busy and entertained and celebrated Christmas with them,” Christy said. “Father Greg [Paffel] invited them for supper at his house one night.”
“I learned through all this that by praying and listening, everything came together,” Christy said.