It’s a kind of magic:
My name is Miriam Said and I’m just a little bit strange.
I should not exist, but I do.
Now, that seems like a very strange statement and I suppose it is to most people.
The only problem is, is that, I am not most people.
I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in magik.
There’s another strange statement, with the spelling of magic in the old style.
The magic I point to is not the everyday, sleight of hand used today, by magicians, although I do enjoy their entertaining routines and trying to work out how they performed their illusions and sleight of hand routine.
The magic I speak of could be termed as “real” magic.
“Nutter” I hear you say…..I accept your view and I am not offended by it.
Let me explain:
I was born nearly 2 months early, groggy, bruised and tiny.
I weighed just over a bag of sugar and was concussed.
Shortly after being born, I died, for approximately 4 minutes and was then revived back to life.
Then they told my Mother I had Down’s Syndrome, because I was floppy and I had the tell tale “slanted” eyes and that I probably wouldn’t reach 20.
This diagnosis was retracted 2 days later when they realised that I was of mixed parentage.
I’m half Malaysian, (Father) and half British, (Mother).
So I had already gone through, violence, premature birth, death and now discrimination.
I was in the special care baby unity for over 3 months. After the 2nd month my Mother never came to visit me, nor did any one else in my family.
The earliest memories I have are from when I was in the special care baby unit.
I had pads on my eyes, was tube fed via a tube that went into my nostril and down into my stomach, and was in an incubator for about 2 months.
After I was well enough to be removed from the incubator, I remember feeling cold and crying, I remember the nurses unsure about whether I’d be able to bottle feed and were concerned that neither my Mother, nor Father had turned up when they had notified them that I was getting stronger and was out of the incubator. It wasn’t until the next day that I would have my first ever bottle feed.
The nurses were stroking my cheek, and I wanted to let them know I knew, so I tried to eat the nurses hand…As a baby will. I could hear them talking about me. One said it was just a reflex. The other nurse disagreed and stuck her little finger in my mouth and I sucked on it.
That nurse squeaked with joy and promptly put a bottle teat in my mouth and I finished off a full 4 ounce bottle of milk so they gave me another one and I did another half a bottle.
After being fed I had the first and best burp of my life, then slept. I still had pads on my eyes and couldn’t see.
It was a little while after this that the doctor came to look at my eyes. He took the pads off and looked and decided another 2 weeks of covered eyes and he’d check again, so it was back into darkness after experiencing the pain of sight and light.
The next thing I remember was waking up and smelling something I had never smelled before…It smelled sweet and dangerous and amazing. The window near me was open and it was warm and it was raining.
That sweet earthy smell and the smell of the room I was in were so different.
Skip forward a few years:
At the age of 2 I was in hospital, a result of my Father’s violence, and I had a very strange experience. An experience which I cannot explain and I don’t wish to try.
I do, however, accept that experience because similar experiences to this initial one have happened frequently throughout my life.
It was also whilst I was in hospital that I had a most peculiar diagnosis. I was classed as an exceptional child. Gifted and offered the opportunity to attend a boarding school for gifted children where child prodigies were coddled. They were surprised to find a 2 year old reading at the level of a 15-year-old and possibly at an older reading age than that.
A specialist tested my abilities and my parents were summoned, (I had seen them once in 6 months prior to this). My parents declined the offer. If I had have been able to go to that fabled school for gifted children, my life would have definitely been completely different from the one I have had so far.
An opportunity was lost and out of my control. I begged in my childish way to be made a ward of court and to be sent to theat school for gifted children, but, alas, I was only a child with no power.
Skip forward a few abuse filled years, of which I shall not burden you with here, as I don’t want to make you cry or feel pity for me at this point, other than to say that I had tried to commit suicide 13 times before I reached the ripe old age of 10.
It was during this time, that something else magical happened.
I was seriously bitten by a stray dog. My right hand had a hole in it right through the middle. I’d lost a lot of blood and there was a strike on in the health care sector and only certain hospitals were taking in patients.
They took me to Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary, a teaching hospital.
I was in the accident and emergency unit and was seen by a relatively young doctor.
He was amazed to find that he was able to put a whole pencil right through my hand and called colleagues over to look at my injuries. Ii was treated by 3 doctors. They cleaned my hand and patched me up as good as they could at the time, then sent me home for 6 weeks with instructions to return after then to have the stitches taken out.
3 weeks after that something else very strange happened to me and my eldest sister. She has no recollection of what happened, but I do, and I know that there is an independent witness that was there at the time. Again, I cannot explain what happened, nor do I wish to try, but the result of that occurrence were amazing.
A week after the strange event, my injured right hand began to smell really awful. The stench was like rotten meat. My mother took me back to the RVI as she thought I had a serious infection in my wounds and that I was at risk of blood poisoning or something worse.
By sheer coincidence, I saw the same doctor who had patched me up initially. He covered my hand in iodine, unsure as to what was wrong. The skin on my entire right hand was tinged a green colour and the flesh was indeed rotting, but it was a mystery as to why this was happening. Once again 3 doctors came to look at me and 1 of them proclaimed he knew what had happened and became extremely excited.
They huddled in a pack and discussed my case, with the words, impossible and that couldn’t happen, being overheard by me. Finally the excited doctor came at me with a wickedly sharp scalpel, turned my right hand over and went to slash my wrist. I, of course, reacted by swiftly jerking my hand away from him and asking why he was going to cut my wrist. He asked me the strangest question a doctor has ever asked me….
“Do you believe in magic?”
To which I replied “yes”, and he asked me to trust him. He started to cut my wrist and no blood spewed forth. I watched in gruesome detail and fascination and awe as he proceeded to peel the skin from my right hand like it was an organic rubber glove, only having to cut around where the stitches were.
When he had finished his careful ministrations, there was the skin of my entire right hand with holes where my stitches had been. By this time there were about 10 doctors gathered around us with gasps of amazement doing the rounds.
One of them exclaimed that this was impossible and that it should not have happened. The doctor holding the hand glove aloft really ramped up his excitement and literally danced while he asked me if they could keep it.
I agreed and they sort of ran around, frantically looking for a jar big enough and some formaldehyde. I watched in amusement as 4 doctors all returned at the same time with the required equipment. One of them put the jar on the floor, than a lady doctor poured in the formaldehyde, then another doctor wrote a label out whilst the doctor who had removed the hand glove, lowered it gently into the jar of chemicals for its preservation. They topped up the formaldehyde, put a lid on it and then labelled the jar.
My hand skin glove looked very strange floating in that jar. The doctors collective excitement was filling the room and they had forgotten about me for the moment, until I coughed and told them it was weird but cool.
They gazed at the hand skin glove in the jar of formaldehyde for a few moments longer in a sort of amazed rapture and then the spell broke and they treated me.
The new skin covering my right hand was kind of opaque and in places raw looking. They pondered how to treat it for a little while, and discussed it amongst themselves and eventually agreed to treat the hand as a burn.
They covered my hand in iodine, then put a cold gel on it, covering it, then they ran around and found a plastic bag to put over my hand with instructions not to remove the plastic bag for at least 2 weeks and not to get my hand wet at all, and to return in 2 weeks time. I watched them put the jar with my hand skin glove inside, on a high shelf and they asked me if they could write about it in a special paper and I said yes. They got my Mum to sign some release papers for my hand skin glove and we left. My Mum thought it was all very strange too.
We went back 2 weeks later and saw the same doctor. My hand had healed and he took the stitches out, saying that he had never seen anyone heal so quickly and he thought it must have been some kind of magic.
After this I stopped trying to commit suicide and realised that I believed in “real” magik and that I was awesome.
In the years that followed, I have encountered many more strange things, and I still can’t explain them, although I must say that I have freaked out one physics teacher in high school and at least three boyfriends.
Strange things continue to happen around me, but they have all been positive events, with positive results and are often very beneficial.
In this post, I’ve only told you about the events that have been documented and my accounts can be mainly corroborated with these, but there are many unexplainable events that cannot be corroborated and would only be anecdotal to those who were not directly involved or to those who did not directly witness those events.
As always, I tell the truth, as I see absolutely no value in doing otherwise.
So somewhere in a hospital in a jar of formaldehyde, there exists a small part of me complete with my fingerprints to prove it.
I have died and come back to life and I should probably have died many times over throughout the years, but considering that I’m still here, you can understand why I believe in “real magik”.
Thank you for reading and I welcome any views you may have, both negative and positive ones…after all, we’re only human…..right?
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