Motorcycle Accident Breaks Bones All Over Man’s Body

“I couldn’t swerve one way or the other. I couldn’t get out of the way. The only thing that I could do was drop the motorcycle,” says Michael Pruett.

He was a struggling real estate agent in Jackson Hole Wyoming. He was newly married to Dawn but was overwhelmed with family issues and mixed up priorities. He says,  “My daughters and I were just—it was pretty tense in our house. I was trying to control my own life. I was trying to control the outcomes. The things that gave me self-confidence were material things: money, success, getting a sale, things like that.”

In the summer of 2012 he was on his way home from showing a house when a truck pulled out in front of Michael’s motorcycle. Michael wasn’t wearing a helmet. “We had a head on collision. I was knocked unconscious. I was –I ended up underneath the truck and was drug for quite awhile,” says Michael.

Members of the fire department witnessed the accident from a nearby restaurant and sprang into action. EMT Tyler Dunn was on the scene moments later. He says, “We walked up and we saw a patient lying in a pool of blood with half of his scalp missing. It was a gruesome scene. You know, there was a lot of blood, we had a suspicion that there might be a spine injury the best thing we could do for him was get him to a higher level of care.”  

Michael was rushed to the hospital. Back at their home, his wife Dawn could hear the sirens. Dawn says, “You hear sirens every day. And then I heard another one. And then I heard another one and then it escalated to the point that I knew something very serious was going on. And I just instantly knew that it was Michael. I started trying to text him. And I remember pacing, just pacing up here back and forth thinking, you know, saying out loud, ‘okay, answer the text, answer the text.’”

Just then, the hospital called telling Dawn what she already knew. She drove to the hospital and says she was overwhelmed when she saw Michael’s condition. “It was terrifying. You know, it was–it was a terrifying moment and I felt so helpless. There was nothing I could do. Nothing, then, you know, what—one thing you can do is you can pray. And you need to call people that can come and pray with you.”

Half an hour later, the E.R. was filled with friends praying for his healing. Christina Feuz, a friend of Dawn and Michael’s recalls the situation. “So when Dan and I arrived to the hospital we laid hands on Michael to pray for the power of God’s healing. It was that simple. He needed desperate healing from Christ. And so the way we know how to do that is to lay hands and pray. That’s the power that we have as Christians and as believers that God has given us.”

An MRI showed he had shattered parts of his spinal column and his spinal cord was nearly severed.
Dawn remembers, “When the doctor came in that last time and looked at me and said we need—I could tell by the look in his face that he thought that this was going to have a very grim outcome.”

Michael needed care beyond what the local hospital could provide. As he was prepped for a life flight to a hospital in Salt Lake City, his wife and friends got in the way.

Dan Feuz remembers the moment, “They were finally ready, we felt led that we needed to lay hands on him one more time before they actually rolled him out to the chopper and we held him up.

Dawn says, “The medical people thought we were insane. They were irritated because we were, you know, blocking their medical care. And we didn’t care. You know, that that’s what we were going to do, we were going to pray.”

In Salt Lake City, spinal surgeon Meic Schmidt prepped for a high-risk surgery
“It was a very difficult spine fracture he had sustained,” says Meic, “This injury is really very dangerous and we see almost nobody that is not paralyzed that comes in with that kind of injury. And the second thought was it is going to be very risky to fix this problem, the treatment that he has to have might make him actually worse.”

Dawn says she continued to pray. “I knew in my soul that this would take a spiritual healing for Michael to be fully restored. Like I definitively—definitively knew that.”

Michael’s sister joined Dawn in prayer with a kind of power Dawn had not known since becoming a Christian just a few years earlier. Dawn says, “She was inviting the Holy Spirit to come in there and to administer all of the restoration and peace and grace and healing that God promises us every day. She just grabbed a hold of it and brought it into that room for her brother.”

After several tense hours, Dawn was told the surgery was successful. As Michael began his recovery dawn says her faith began to change. “It fundamentally changed the way that I walk in my relationship with Jesus. I guess it’s like the God of the Bible that you read about and that you know is true and that you believe in and that, you know, you’ve surrendered your life to and you rely on for salvation became real. He can do all things if you just have faith and you ask and you believe and you surrender.” She says.

When he awoke, Michael says a relationship with God became a priority like never before. “I pressed in to Him from the minute I knew what had happened to me,” says Michael, “I knew this was a miraculous situation. The result of it for me is, it’s brought me so much closer in my relationship with God. I’ve gotten off the throne of my life and put Jesus Christ on the throne of my life.”   

Over the next several weeks his physical healing went beyond what many thought possible. “It’s significant that he’s completely healed today simply by the fact that he could have been paralyzed by us trying to fix him and I find it remarkable how well he’s recovered,” says Meic Schmidt

“It truly is a miracle,” says Tyler Dunn the EMT, “I don’t know how or why he’s walking, he’s fully functional, has no brain damage. Has no loss of motor function whatsoever.”

In his book The Hard Road Michael says God used the accident and his recovery to bring order and peace to his entire life and family. “God can make great things out of very difficult times if we press into Him,” says Michael, “If we lean on Him and if we bring Him into our situations. The more I looked at everything surrounding this and everything that happened, the more I saw God’s fingerprint all over this. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He has not changed. And He is still present in our lives and still loves and cares for us.”