Today is my first kid’s 31st birthday.

Today is my first kid’s 31st birthday. Sonny is a miracle. He was born around 5 weeks premature, and his lungs weren’t fully developed. He was on a jet ventilator and was flown to Duke University to be placed on ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) - a heart/lung machine.

Here’s the gist of what the doctor who met us at Duke told us: “When your son left Pitt Memorial (Greenville, NC), his doctors there gave him 50/50 odds. When the helicopter arrived here, we had a team ready: surgeon, respiratory therapist, you name it. We checked him. We checked him again. We checked him a third time. He was perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with him. We’ll keep him a few days to make sure we haven’t missed anything, then you can go home.”

31 years later, and he’s still doing his own thing and practically never doing the expected.