How I almost died.

This is funny. A friend of mine brought up my ex-wife recently about how little she cared for me and I remembered this story. I didn't think a lot of it at the time, although it wasn't too long after this happened that we separated about 2 1/2 years ago.

I had surgery to correct my deviated septum. Most of you probably know that means you can't breath very well. At the same time I also had my tonsils removed. In case you don't know, doctors are usually very reluctant to take tonsils out, for some reason. At any rate, my doctor looked at mine and said straight away they had to come out.

So my doctor uses lasers for these kind of procedures. Which is cool because it means you don't look like Joe Pesci beat you in the face with a baseball bat after the surgery. Plus you get less packing because there is less damage to the tissue. I guess. I'm not a surgeon so I wouldn't know.

Real quick so you know, for about 4 or 5 days, my wife was out of town for a convention or market for her type of work.

Okay, I roll into the hospital about 6 or so AM and they send me over to the CAT scan, which was outside the hospital in a trailer. Hey, whatever works right? I got scanned and as I was leaving I check over the technician's shoulder and saw what the inside of my head looks like. Well, my head is pretty damn crooked so I'm not surprised that I couldn't breath. Anyway, it was back into the hospital to get some kind of I.V. drip, I can't remember what it was. Probably saline solution or whatever that water stuff is they put in you when you're in the hospital. They took all my clothes and stuffed me into one of those gown things. Very fashionable.

Up next was the gurney and a ride to the basement. I guess this was some kind of staging area for pre-surgery. I can't really remember what they did down there. I think they put more needles in me. The memory is pretty foggy. More on that later. Finally, after what seemed like days, the doctor comes by, introduces my anesthesiologist and off we go to surgery. It's about 10 AM at this point, which is right on schedule.

Now here's the deal, surgery is to start around 10 AM, end a couple hours later and then I go home. So it's supposed to be around 2 or 3 PM when I leave the hospital in the care of my friend who brought me down to the hospital. Then I go home and eat popsicles for a week while doped up on painkillers. Sounds like a plan to me.

They roll me into surgery and put me under. I don't remember counting backwards.

The next thing I know, there is a woman to my right shaking me. "Chad," she says. "Chad, wake up. Wake up. We need you to wake up." I try to moan. I try to open my eyes. I can't. I feel like I'm at the bottom of an ocean and I can't find the surface. And I sink. I sink through the floor, I sink through the ground. I remember seeing grey, then black.

She's shaking me again. "Chad, your blood oxygen is very low we need you to wake up. Can you stay awake?" I try to moan again and again I sink back. I cannot find the will to swim to the top, I cannot find the strength to overcome this. I felt like somebody dropped a building on me and I simply cannot lift it. It's just too much to fight.

This is about the time I start to form thoughts in my head. I'm not wondering what is happening though. I just hear this woman telling me I have to wake up, to not go back to sleep. I did start to feel worried. She seemed so far away, like I was deep inside a mountain cave and I could just hear her voice echo down in the hole. I could make out a foggy opening of light. I knew where she was, that she was close, and I kept feeling like I could hear her voice for a moment, then I'd sink again, then nothing.

Those moments in between her shaking me are just blackness in my memory

It's at this point that my brain starts working and I'm trying to find that pure willpower to just fight my way to the top and I can't, I can't find it anywhere. It's like having an elephant sit on you, you simply cannot, will not have the strength to lift him off. And now I start thinking, I'm just going to sink. This is it. I can't do it. For the first time in my life I couldn't muster the power to say, "I can do this." Instead I said, "I can't do this anymore, I can't make it. Is this how it is? Is this how it goes, you are simply overpowered that one time and you go to the bottom?"

And for a moment I pondered my death. I could just let go right now. This is a point between life on one side and death on the other. Should I just give in? Stop my little efforts to fight. Honestly, I did start to give up. I didn't know what was happening outside my body, but I could feel the fight draining out of me... the harder I tried, the weaker I got, like hands reaching up, grabbing me and pulling me under. I said to God, "It looks like I may be coming to visit for awhile... I didn't know it would be like this."

Now, I have to say, if you've noticed, there is a trend here from blackness, to awareness, to actual thought. So you can see I was already on the upswing. That's a good thing.

Sometimes the body takes care of itself.

Eventually I open my eyes. The woman, the nurse, was still telling me to stay awake. I was starting to become a bit coherent. It was a while before I could actually speak.

You know, if you've ever had one of those dreams where you wake up paralyzed, unable to move or scream, then you have the beginnings of an idea what this was like. Imagine that, plus being sedated so you can't even work up a frenzied moan. And you're at the bottom of a pool. Unable to even open your eyes. Something like that is getting close...

As I became more able to stay awake, I learned that it was sometime after 6 PM and what was supposed to be about 2 to 3 hours turned into over 9 hours of being knocked out. I guess I bled a whole lot. She told me she couldn't give me painkillers. I guess the low blood, the anesthesia and the drugs would have... you know... I guess they would call that a cocktail of sorts.

So around 7 I think it was, they felt I was awake enough to be sent to a room to rest. I was monitored throughout the night. I had a machine on me that did stuff, I don't know what. I had an oxygen mask on. That thing hurt like hell.... because...

I had no painkillers for the next 24 hours. That's right. Maybe some of you have gone through something like that. Well, for me it was rough, but there is nothing you can do for it, so the pain becomes a part of your life. Like breathing or your heart beating, it's just there doing it's job.

About every 30 minutes a nurse would come in and draw blood. No lie. Every 30 minutes. I thought, why are you taking so much blood, when that is exactly what I need right now? Well, they were apparently running a bunch of tests to figure out what happened, why I lost so much blood. They were baffled. They never found a reason.

The I.V. made me pee every 15 minutes. I got needles every 30 minutes. The oxygen mask was smashing my nose which just had surgery.

I didn't sleep that night. It was a long night. Very strange. I was very alone.

Eventually the sun came up into my room. I got some breakfast. That was funny, considering my throat was all sliced up. I didn't eat anything. I tried to drink some water. Even that hurt.

They made me stay for awhile, I want to say until the afternoon some time. Of course they wanted to make sure I wasn't going to fall asleep and whatever. They released me, my friend picked me up, I finally got some painkillers and popsicles, and life went on as normal.

Maybe the title of this is a bit sensationalist, but it does add some excitement, no?

So the point I was making at the top about my wife? She never even called.

Also, the hospital lost one of my shoes.