Read a news story about a boy in the West Midlands getting an £8 million payout who was left disabled after being deprived of oxygen at birth. He's got choreoathetoid cerebral palsy after being deprived of oxygen at birth. (Read full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7484432.stm)

As someone who was deprived of oxygen at birth I can sympathise (a bit) with what this family has gone through. My Mum would probably be a better person to write about this as she was directly there when it all happened. Essentially I was deprived of oxygen for an hour and a half without a respirator and without any cleaning etc. Just wrapped up in the greens I was born into and popped into the sliuce room. Mum shouting and insisting to see me enabled the doctors to spot their mistake and start to work on me. (It was the Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon in 1979... wonder if a FOI request would pull up the records...)

Every time I read those stories I pause and wonder at the fact that I'm by and large healthy. Ox-like healthy. Tend to get a cold once or twice a year but nothing more than that. Yeah, my ribs are indrawn a bit and my spine isn't exactly correct but my quality of life isn't impacted by the mistakes of doctors. The papers of the day trumpeted "miracle baby returns home" when I first got to go home. (About 9 months after being born..)

Elie Wiesel says (and I adore being able to quote Elie Wiesel one of the most eloquent men on the planet) "I don’t want to call it a miracle because it would mean that God performed a miracle for me alone. It means he could have performed more miracles for others who were worthier than I, probably, or at least not worse than I."

And I think that's sort of where I am. I don't want to call it a miracle as that does imply some sort of design or plan. And, yes, I believe in God but, as Wiesel says, there are "other who were worthier than I".

I don't understand what happened that Thursday in Feb when I was born and I don't know what to call it. Any suggestions?