FORT WRIGHT - It was the Sunday she didn't have a prayer. No chance, the doctors said. A stroke had left a blood clot lodged on her brain stem.
They rushed her into the operating room for surgery that few undergo and even fewer survive. When they wheeled her back out again, the clot was gone - but so was two-thirds of her brain stem.
Oh, the things Betty Mallory should have missed: Richard Jewell and Oksana Baiul, her beloved Wildcats bringing home a national championship, the wind against the windows on an April night.
But who can account for miracles?
The long road back
There's no other explanation for something like this, her son believes. Even Ms. Mallory's doctors call her the miracle lady.
Nobody is quite sure how she survived, first of all. How she was able to resume a relatively normal life is almost as remarkable.
But there she is: Betty Mallory, 61, of Fort Wright, sitting, standing, walking and talking, as a night she never should have seen falls around her house on Redwood Drive.
Tap, tap, tap.
Someone's at the window.
It's the next-door neighbor, come for Ms. Mallory's reusable plastic grocery bags.
OK, so Ms. Mallory can't do everything for herself. Her neighbor drives to the store for her now. Ms. Mallory doesn't trust herself behind the wheel anymore. But the long road back from the brink, well - she's navigated that quite nicely.
Six months to live
Like any good story, of course, this one starts long ago: back in the late 1980s, when Ms. Mallory was just beginning the slide into ill health that, for all intents and purposes, should have claimed her life that winter day in 1994.
It was in 1989 that Ms. Mallory's lungs first mutinied after decades of smoking. The emphysema seized her full force as she worked one day, and she called her son Jim Stone to come pick her up.
When they got to St. Elizabeth South, the doctor said she had six months to live.
Ms. Mallory was in the hospital on and off for the next four years, tethered for much of that time to an oxygen machine. In 1990, declining health forced her to retire.
When she finally asked about a lung transplant, the situation had grown desperate. Her weight had dropped from 112 pounds to 88. When she went to the University of Kentucky Hospital for tests designed to determine whether she would be a good candidate for a transplant, she was so weak she couldn't stand up on the treadmill.
That was in September 1993. She was approved for a transplant and moved in with her sister in Lexington so she would be near the hospital when a donor lung came available.
At Christmas she was so sick, she wouldn't remember any of her presents.
The phone call came at 9:30 p.m., as Ms. Mallory was getting out of the bathtub at her sister's. A heavy snow was falling on Lexington. ''We have a lung for you,'' UK's lung-transplant coordinator said.
Ms. Mallory got dressed and was at the hospital within the hour.
Back from the dead
The surgery lasted six hours. Three days later she was riding a stationary bike. Her doctors were amazed.
They hadn't seen anything, yet.
On a Sunday in early February 1994, a blood vessel on Ms. Mallory's brain burst. A clot lodged near the base of her brain. She's nuked her center of balance, doctors told the family. The odds weren't good.
Most people who suffer such a stroke never make it to the hospital. Time is of the essence, the clock ticks like a bomb. Victims of such trauma have only a few minutes before death visits.
Fortunately, Ms. Mallory already was at the hospital. But the chances of coming through that kind of operation are even slimmer than those of having it done.
When she had the stroke, Ms. Mallory had been preparing to go home the next day. Instead, she would stay in the hospital another three months after the emergency surgery. Three times during that span doctors responding to a Code Blue would bring her back from the dead.
Finally, she was discharged. And after another couple months rehabilitating in Bowling Green, Ky., Ms. Mallory returned home to Fort Wright for the July 4 wedding of her son, Mike Stone. They waited until she could make it and gave her a standing ovation when she walked down the aisle.
In the photo of the wedding party hanging in her home, her hair still is short from the brain surgery. And son Jim is clutching her arm.
What happens when you nuke your balance center is this: You're so unsteady you fall out of your chair at dinner.
A well-balanced woman
Ms. Mallory is getting much better now. Her surgeon at UK is amazed. ''He says I'm a living miracle,'' Ms. Mallory says, smiling.
She still doesn't drive. And she can't run the vacuum cleaner. ''One little thing can throw me off balance,'' she says.
But she spends 15 minutes a day on the treadmill in her living room and five to 10 minutes on the stationary bike.
Ms. Mallory just marked the third anniversary of the day she cheated death. Without her new lungs, of course, she never would have responded to measures taken to resuscitate her in the weeks after her stroke. And if she hadn't already been in the hospital when that blood vessel in her brain ruptured, she probably wouldn't have had the life-saving surgery, either.
Sometimes miracles are just being in the right place at the right time. You roll with the punches.
''Just my luck,'' Ms. Mallory said recently when doctors gave her the latest bad news: a diagnosis of an acute glaucoma attack, a rare condition that often causes permanent blindness.
Then she chuckled.
It was the laugh of a well-balanced woman.
Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.