Sometimes things happen that just cannot be explained. The only possible source could be an act from God or something else extraordinary. In the medical field, we call these occurrences medical miracles. They are actually much more common than we think, which shows that either we don’t know as much about the human body as we think we do, or they simply are miraculous.

People are told they are never going to walk again, but they do. People are in a coma for decades, and they awaken. People are given days or weeks to live, but they survive months or even years. Hearts stop beating in people’s chests for minutes, but they come back to life.

In late July of this year, a three-year-old girl was swimming in a pool at a pool party in Cape Girardeau, Mo., when her foot got caught in a tube. According to People Magazine, when lightning forced all of the children out of the pool, a distraught mother found her daughter stuck under the water. When the girl was rescued, she was blue and without a heartbeat. A medical professional at the party performed CPR for 12 minutes until an ambulance arrived.

According to Medline Plus, “Permanent brain damage begins after only four minutes without oxygen, and death can occur as soon as four to six minutes later.” This girl should have died or suffered severe brain damage at the least.

After a few days of being on a respirator, the girl was back to normal. People Magazine quoted her mother as saying, “How amazing, how awesome is our God.”

It is known that the longer CPR is performed, the greater the chances of survival. However, this does not account for the girl’s brain activity.

Another medical miracle occurred in July of 2013, when a 12 year old girl’s brain was infected with a brain eating amoeba while in a water park in Arkansas. According to Readers Digest, “The creature then traveled along her olfactory nerve and into her brain, where it began feasting on her brain tissue—a condition called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis.” Doctors described the disease as 99% fatal with only two survivors in North America.

Doctors quickly brought her temperature to 93 degrees and put her in a medically induced coma to decrease brain swelling. She was also put on a ventilator for her breathing and a dialysis machine for her kidney function. Doctors then pumped antifungals and antibiotics into her bloodstream as well as a rare, unapproved German drug received from the CDC. They monitored and adjusted blood pressure levels for two weeks, as high blood pressure can increase brain swelling, before she made a miraculous recovery.

Some credit the German drug for her positive outcome, but the same drug was used on a 12-year-old boy in Florida in the same week with the same bacteria in his brain, who did not survive. According to Reader’s Digest, her doctor said, “Number one, it was God’s grace. Other than that, it was countless little things that went her way, countless little miracles that happened every day and made the difference between life and death.”

These are just two of the hundreds of medical miracles that happen each year worldwide. We learn new things in the medical field every day, but science cannot explain many recoveries. We need to believe that something or someone else is out there. We need to believe that miracles happen every day, because they do.