One year. To the day. One year since I died.
While the title might seem self-serving and a tad bit hyperbolic, it is nonetheless true. And it only seems right that I write this entry to commemorate the single most tumultuous year in my short 60 years here.
To recap (shortly) on December 23, 2023 at about 3PM in the afternoon I literally died for 8 minutes during what was supposed to be a routine biopsy of my left kidney. That biopsy started at 8:30am and by 4PM, my life was irrevocably changed. I went in with troubled kidneys, and due to the life-saving measures that were needed to revive me, my kidneys were pretty much gone. (Full contrast CT's are very hard on your kidneys)
To say that I've gone through a lot would be the understatement of the year. 54 days in the hospital, 4 chest tubes, a thoracentesis, a VAT surgery, CVC implantation, a cardiocentesis (without anesthesia), a nicked nerve in my right leg that make it impossible to walk, countless hours of PT, 2 different types of dialysis and some truly scary moments due to continued hypoxia and low hemoglobin are but a few of the things I've encountered in the past 12 months. I've also had a pacemaker installed and one ablation done due to atrial flutter. (not a-fib) I am now 100% disabled and unable to hold a job.
All of that sounds bad (and it is) but I actually have a couple things to be thankful for. First off, I know that I have a wife who loves me and has shown herself to be a first-rate caregiver, in spite of my continued lunacy. It's never been a rose garden to live with me in the first place, but she has tripled down on her love and support of me, and I can't thank her enough for that. And, if I ever get upset with her, it all disappears every time I see her lug 2 6000ml bags of dextrose upstairs for my nightly dialysis. Talk about a trooper......I do not deserve her.
Second off, I discovered that I have a brother-from-another-mother in EJ Erickson, who lived with us for 9 months and took fabulous care of me while my wife continued working. I can't say enough about him and the help he gave us. We wouldn't have made it without him.
But, after that it becomes a bit of sour-grapes from me again. Gigging is really hard. It's hard because I have to time things well and do some pretty creative things if the gig is late in the evenings- like hang a bag of dialysis solution somewhere and fill my perineum with fluid and then be able to play comfortably with an extended belly. I'm getting used to it, but it kinda sucks. This means I have to miss a real treatment, and by the end of the next day, I feel like utter shit. Then there's the problem with my leg that makes it very difficult to walk, so moving my gear around while moving on a cane is a pretty difficult task.
I also have a condition known a myclonus, which is really fun. What happens is that I get twitches in my hands, arms and legs that can (and have) turn into almost muscular seizures. While not painful, it is truly alarming to see your right arm just take off on its own and jerk around all by itself. It gets bad when it's in my legs and I'm trying to get somewhere, and I suddenly find myself on the ground. There is no cure for this, unless.....
I get a transplant.
Yep. A transplant fixes all of this. I can go back to being normal (as normal as I ever could claim to be) and be out late at night, travel, etc. That won't bring my leg back to working order, but it would solve a lot of issues. I'm currently working with 2 transplant centers, but they have mandated some things I must take care of. which I am in the process of doing. One of the things that the transplant centers have mandated was the aforementioned pacemaker, which is why I had that done. Once we summit the things they want me to do for the transplant, then I'll start pimping people to literally give me a part of their body- something I'm not looking forward to, as it's such a huge thing to ask.
So, all of the recap and thanks and such are great, but I haven't answered the question I keep getting asked: How do you feel?
That's such a hard question to answer. I guess the quick answer is, "it depends". Even though I am in constant pain (thank the Maker for gabepentin) I would say that my physical health is ok, given the circumstances. I probably shouldn't complain about that, given where I've been. So, we'll just leave that there.
Mentally is a completely other story. I'm not gonna lie here - the anniversary of this event brings about some powerful memories, and they are all bad. All of them. I remember the pain; the death experience; the waking up 2 days later in ICU- all of that and much more. That's bad enough, but what it's done to me, psyche-wise is nothing short of profound. Not only has redefined my relationship with God, but my relationship with people. The casual observer will say, "well, that's a good thing, right" and my answer will most likely shock them. No, it isn't necessarily a good thing.
Before my death, I was in the midst of a minor deconstruction from my faith. I say "minor" as I wasn't sure how far or where it was heading. Boy, Oh, Boy did I get my answer- or should I say I didn't. In my death experience, God was nowhere to be found. In fact, I had the realization that God (as He had been explained to me) was never there in the first place. To say that I was angry and depressed by this would be another understatement, and to this very day I still feel abandoned by Him. Every day I try to find Him, and every day I feel Him slip away from me a little more. I have an earnest regret for spending a good portion of my life preaching to others about something that doesn't exist in the fashion that I was preaching Him, and that gives me a tremendous feeling of guilt that the people who listened to me are gonna find out that I lied to them.
And, speaking of guilt.......wow. The depth of the guilt I feel over what's happened to me is immeasurable. I have become a burden to my family and friends. I have literally been told by one friend over a common shared issue that I'm "out of it because you can't handle it right now". The trouble is that he is absolutely right. I can't.
My anxiety level is so high, I have to be medicated. More than that- my doctor asked me to I have "emergency medication" in case my anxiety is too high for the normal medication. A few friends know how high my anxiety has gone, and it ain't pretty.
So with all this negativity here about mental state, I will tell you one really good thing that has happened out of this, and I know deep-down that this would not have happened so quickly and completely without the fun of late 2023-2024. Ready?
I am a completely changed man as to how he accepts others. And it makes sense that this would be the change- with my rapidly vacuum-filled space where faith once kept me from engaging people, I find my acceptance of others is now easier. I see that the christian faith (de-capitalized for emphasis) that I had really was nothing more than a reason to not fully engage with people unless was had that common ground. Note that I didn't say that we believed the same things. Belief was never a part of it for me (something else I found out from death) as it was the ability to talk the same talk seemed more important. That shallowness of faith bred a similar shallowness of relationship.
Now, I just love people. I don't care what their faith is/not is - in fact, faith doesn't enter into it all for me now. This makes the christian apologist in me reel - and I don't care if it does - but I'm not so sure that the Mormons have it all wrong. Or the JW. Or muslim-islamic-messianic-jewish-christians-tralfamadorians or whatever. None of that matters. What does matter is our humanity and the fact that we all bleed the same color red. It's interesting to note, for instance, that archeologically, it's near impossible to tell where a human skeleton came from. We can tell if they were male or female, but not their locale. It's not lost on me that our skeletons are all humans foundation. Think about it. We are all the same, foundationally. And yet, we as a species, kill each other over where we think we will go when we die. How fucking stupid and wasteful is that? Or slightly less than that- we discriminate over how another meat-puppet thinks to how your own meat-puppet thinks. Or less than all of that- how one person wants to deal with/use their junk.
This has also led to a clearer view of the world. And mind you- clearer doesn't mean better. In fact, that's the part that is kind of distressing. For instance, in November, the American people learned that decency and building up the other person is a fool's game. We would rather place our leadership in the hand of a convicted felon. Over half of my countrypersons would rather take a chance on draconian governmental practices than to go with the opposite side of that thought. And no, thoughts aren't reality, but it's much easier to call that side out if they don't do it than to call the other side out when they do it.
I now find myself angry over stories like the guy who shot the CEO of United Heathcare. We've COMPLETELY lost our sense of decency here. This guy (I'll not use his name) shot a man in broad daylight over his occupation. No regard as to him being a brother, a son, a husband and a father- over his fucking job. And like the coward he is, he ran. The media and social websites are calling it a "referendum on healthcare" - uh, no. It's not. As someone who has seen the business end of the healthcare in this country, I can tell you that there are problems, and I've had them happen to me. But there is no way in hell I'm gonna go shoot somebody over it. The guy who did this is a miscreant, full stop. There is something seriously wrong with him, and he has no excuse. But the media thinks we want to know about his time in Hawaii; talk to his roommate; broadcast that, after he was arrested, he was in jail (no shit, Sherlock)- I know more about him over the last 72 hours than anything else- and the victim is ignored. I know nothing about the victim other than he had a wife and a couple of kids, but no one wants to know about his time in Hawaii or what his whereabouts are now as he travels from street to the morgue to funeral home, nor will they broadcast his funeral- but you can bet that there will be live team coverage of this asshole's trial.
Lest you think I'm hung up on one story, think again. We only care about these things because we are told to care about these things. And that is also how christianity has been doled out by a lot of the churches today. We are told that abortion is a sin, and yet it is not mentioned anywhere in scripture. (And, yes, I know the verse that they use. Weak.) We're told that masculinity is the thing the christian man should be striving for by teachers like Mark Driscoll and Jack Hibbs - again, nowhere to be found in scripture. The same is true about "making America a christian nation again" when it never was in the first place. We're told this and we're told that and no one sees any value anymore in yelling "BULLSHIT!" because that isn't the "right" thing to do. We'd rather find out what the shooter of the CEO was wearing that day.
This last part has been truly exhausting for me. Before 12/23/2023 (or more correctly 2023/12/23) I never really paid attention to this, but now. Yeesh. It's just so stark now. It's so not important and yet it's so important. It's not important because it ignores the important things. It's important, because people make no attempt to show their ire, if they have any. And they should.
Don't take this the wrong way but, no, I don't feel "lucky to be alive", although I've been told time and time again that I should. There was a simplicity in death in that everything that could or should have happened did, and that was that. Even though I didn't get to experience that feeling for very long, it was beyond satisfying to do so. There was no anxiety and no place to be and no one to answer to.
So, there you have it. I'll give myfirst bonus year of 2023-24s a C-. Definitely below average, but certainly not a failure. I'm hopeful for 2025, but..........?