by William Cobbs

Created on: May 06, 2009   Last Updated: May 08, 2009

I am one of those strange persons who have continually received gifts from the Outer Space for my entire life. When I sift through all of these gifts, literally thousands of them, I suppose the ones that continued or re-started my own "gift of life" or existence are the most important. There have been myriad of those. But I shall pick the one I think the most poignant.

It was some time ago that I, penniless, but hopeful, got married in Paris, France to the United States most beautiful model visiting there,(she being also penniless!) and we moved into a $15 a month tiny apartment and she immediately became pregnant. I, receiving a small stipend from the U.S. Government for the GI Bill, also had a $100 a month job as secretary to a British lord, soon to go back to England as Prime Minister.

When my wife's pregnancy became close to term, she woke one morning to find me unresponsive in the bed. I was deeply unconscious. She didn't hesitate, but dragging her unaccustomed bulk into clothes, got the concierge to pull me down to the sidewalk, and hailed a taxi to take me to the American Hospital in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris. That hospital at that time was in bad reputation, had little staff, and three floors in a drafty building. The main physician was deeply into alcoholism, and was the only physician available...he looked at me, dismissed my wife to home, and put me in a bed in an empty ward on the third floor.

No medicine or care or anything else was given me. Later that afternoon, a bedraggled art student , American, Jewish, and penniless, was operated on by the only other physician, this one more able than the morning drunk. The young operatee was placed in my big ward but at the other end. I, now in the 24th hour of coma with no treatment, was heated by high temperatures to the point that the young man, coming out of his anesthetic, felt the heat wave from my far-away bed and body. He forced his sore and disabled self to go to my bed, and feeling my forehead and body, he rapidly realized that I was extremely close to death.

This from a poor artist, painting daubs in a hallway, getting food where he could! He worked his way into the corridor...there were no ways of communication, no elevators! With great pain, he arrived at the ground floor and found the surgeon who had operated upon him, on the point of leaving. He persuaded him(the only doctor in the hospital!) to come back upstairs and I was immediately injected with the best of the time, and sulfa

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