Wow! A lot has happened in the last nine days. I currently sit at a desk in my hotel room at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. A cool little perk that having a Human Resources manager for a wife brings! I’m spending my time resting, re-connecting with my wife, and establishing and building a new website that will soon be the new home for my blog, organ donation awareness efforts, and other future endeavors.
It’s nice to get away and have time to focus a little, but I do have to admit that I am awfully excited about Sunday evening. Sunday evening I am going to go and see Vanessa Carlton live at the Crocodile Café in Seattle, Washington! This has been a dream of mine ever since I came back from Germany.
Most of you who are close to me already know the story of how Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" pulled me from the depths of hell, and helped guide me towards my current life's mission. But for those of you who don't know, here’s how the story goes...
In May of 2004 I was on annual training in Germany with my National Guard unit. I became ill and was transported to Krakenhuas Eschenbach, a local German hospital. They diagnosed me with a 'bad' gall bladder and arrangements were made to remove it the next day. I called my girlfriend (now my wife) and told her the news. The surgery was completed the next day and I began the process of recovery, hoping that I might be released in time to return home with my unit a few days later.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go as hoped or planned. Unbeknownst to me, the doctors were monitoring my hematocrit levels. The hematocrit (Ht or HCT) or packed cell volume (PCV) are measures of the proportion of blood volume that is occupied by red blood cells. It is normally 45 ± 7 (38-52%) for males and 42 ± 5 (37-47%) for females. I know, I know… to technical. Let me break it down this way. My normal hematocrit level should be around 45, the doctors were worried because mine was at 17 and falling. This is a symptom of hemorrhaging; or in my case, internal bleeding.
I was sent for an ultrasound and the nurse told me that I had ‘fluid’ pooling in my lower abdomen. When I asked the doctors to give it to me straight, and in the best English they could muster, they then told me I had uncontrolled internal bleeding and that they were going to have to open me up, see what was wrong, and fix it. I wholeheartedly agreed! A second surgery was scheduled for the next day and the unit was informed that I would be staying behind.
My approach to the next surgery was rather relaxed; hell it was the second one in three days. As I counted back from ten the anesthesia took control of my consciousness I could not comprehend how different my life would be in just ten days.
I slowly arose from the depths of my coma ten days later to the faces of doctors, nurses, my parents, and my girlfriend. I am not entirely sure of the timeliness of the events, the participants, or even my actions. I couldn’t even comprehend just how wrong things had gone and how lucky I was to be alive. It took awhile to even realize that I was in a totally different hospital, nearly 50 miles away from where I had the surgeries done. I have spent many hours over the last 3+ years piecing together the events of those ten days. The one thing pertinent to this conversation are the actions of my girlfriend, Jennifer.
When I met Jennifer in college she was studying to become a psychologist. She was learning parts of the human brain that I can’t today even spell, what they did, and how our thoughts are formed and influenced. I truly believe that it was her knowledge of how the brain works, and what she did because of it, which saved my life.
There is a whole long story of what happened between my parents and Jennifer. All I really know is that when I came out of the coma, they couldn’t be in the same room together. I have heard both sides and understand each point of view. I bring this up because it played a large role the circumstances of my recovery. For whatever reasons, my parents ended up on the ‘day shift’ and Jen resorted to ‘sneaking in’ to be with me during the nights. After my parents arrived in Germany they found themselves in a daily meeting where the question was not ‘is he (me) getting any better?’, but more actually ‘is he getting any worse?’ My condition was dire, but stable. I was not getting any worse thus allowing the decision to have me remain on life support another day.
Jennifer would sit with me during the evenings and having the knowledge that she has of how the brain works set out to play music to me. Her attempts to get my laptop with my music on it were without success. She then decided to take a trip to a Czechoslovakian market place with our friend Russell who had come along with her. They poured over the booths looking for pirated CD’s with song on them she knew I liked. Later that night as she sat next to my bed she played the CD’s on Russell’s laptop. Song after song played and she diligently swapped out each CD for the next one when it finished, believing in her heart that this was the right thing to do.
All of the sudden alarms on the medical equipment started going off and the doctors and nurses started to rush in wondering what she had done. When asked she said she was only playing the music when the alarms went off and then questioned the doctors as to what was happening. One of the doctors looked at her and said that there was stimulated relational brain activity, something I had not shown for almost a week. She then turned her attention to calming me down so that no long term damage was done. This would become the point at which I began to get better. It started a process that took almost a year of rehab to get back to being healthy again and led to the diagnosis of my disease, leaving an indelible stamp on my future.
You ask what song it was?
A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment