I tried writing this post a month ago. I know my scattered history of writing over the past year would lead this to be believed to be a lie. I really did, though. And when I did, naturally I suffered a low end mental breakdown in my attempt. Not even writers block. I couldn’t even pretend the ability wasn’t there. My brain, best known for sabotaging me numerous times in the past, was triggering a shutdown of my abilities to function as a human being. I suppose that makes sense. I was trying to write about how I nearly died earlier this year. I was breaking down because I realized I’d learned nothing from it.
Let’s rewind it back to the end of January. Now, I know i’ve never been seen as the picture of health. I’m more of a human Operation game of a person. Waking up in pain is nothing new to me. I have a bad knee, two bad ankles, a bad hip, a perpetually gout inflicted elbow, various dental maladies, OH, and I started randomly feeling like I was going to pass out this winter.
That is all just kind of my day to day stuff. You know how some people’s thing is coffee or working hard or thinking Joe Rogan’s podcast is “intelligent conversation?” Well my thing is waking up in pain followed by trying to exist for an entire day, then going to bed in pain, leading to me not sleeping well, and then waking up and doing it all over again.
That’s just my existence, though. I got sick much more stupidly. Peanuts nearly killed me, and not in that trendy allergy way, either.
I started feeling it on a Thursday. It felt like i’d been stabbed through my stomach. Probably just that pesky hernia I’d ignored for **checks notes** four years.
So I went to work. And it got worse. And it got WORSE. Around five hours into my work shift, I told my boss that I thought I needed to go to the hospital, but he didn’t really respond to it. As it turns out, my clerk had gone home sick already, and there was nobody to run the department. Deterred by the process of trying to get out to seek medial help, I instead did the logical thing and worked the final seven hours of my shift.
Then I did the even more logical thing of ignoring my instincts and going home rather than the hospital. I got home at 5am on Friday morning. I didn’t get out of bed until 5pm on Saturday. Between trying to lay still and reflexively finding myself curled into the fetal position, I spent 36 hours festering in my own pain.
When I got up, it was due to social responsibilities, rather than my own creeping need to seek medical attention. By that point, I was convinced it was my hernia and I was just going to have to suck it up. So I went to a family party of my wife’s and tried to to function through the agony. I knew if I could get through this, i’d be able to relax.
I’m sorry, relax was the wrong word. What I was attempting to say is “Get balls to the wall drunk with my friends.”
They say the people that have known you the longest can tell when something is wrong, even before you can tell something is wrong. My sister could tell. My friends could tell. There was something wrong. I wasn’t trying to be particularly active, but there was definitely something wrong. My resting heart rate was 130. My body felt like it was slowly starting to cease functionality.
As it turns out, that’s exactly what happenend.
After being implored to go to the emergency room, I went home and looked my wife in the face. I could see the pain on my face, because I could see the pain on her face. So 60 hours after I had started to become sick, I went to the ER.
What happened next was a series of chaotic events.
The ER took an ultrasound of my stomach. They cat scanned my insides.
They gave me an anti nausea medication which caused me to violently and uncontrollably vomit throughout my room.
A doctor came in and said I had two choices: either I go to a real hospital right now via my wife driving me, or I go to a real hospital right now via an ambulance.
When I told the doctor i’d like to go home and collect my things, he said no, that I needed to get to the hospital immediately.
Of course, I made my wife drive me home first so I could grab a phone chargerand pet my dogs really quick.
At this point, the only definitive thing that i’ve been told by a doctor is that there was a hole in my colon and I needed better medical attention for it. There was no talk of how serious it was, but there was an urgency to his voice and the need to get me out of the ER and to a real hospital. It wasn’t until I got there that the seriousness of the situation set in.
As it turns out, I had been living with a malady known as Diverticulosis, which is essentially little booby traps in my colon waiting for food to get stuck in them, and then stay in them. And then get infected. Then blast a hole directly into my insides. Or as doctors call it, Diverticulitis.
While I do enjoy portraying one whenever convenient, i’m not a doctor, and didn’t realize the secondary effects of having an active hole in my colon. The secondary problem was that the hole was causing waste to go into my blood stream. The problem with that is, my kidneys had been working overtime to combat this and had begun to shut down. I’d later find out that I was going into toxic shock and was under 24 hours away from dying from it.
It’s crazy how life can sometimes be defined by decisions that seem so simple in hindsight but carry so much (fake) weight in the moment. It would have been so much easier in the moment to have tried to go to bed instead of going to the hospital. I could have tried to sleep it off. Or drink it off. Or take some pills to ease the pain and try to relax. And I could have been dead by Monday for it.
I spent the next three days confined uncomfortably to a bed in a hospital room. I wasn’t able to eat anything but ice chips for two days. When I was allowed to eat, it was heavily restricted what I could actually ingest. It was like being on a diet, in that both were absolute slogs for a noted food eating enthusiast such as myself. My grandma once introduced me as a foody. But that was at Larrys Diner, and the waitress seemed to either be not amused by the word, or not know what it means. Foodies were never a big revenue stream for Larrys. My other job as a partying drunk, on the other hand, was a HUGE revenue stream for them.
The first 24 hours in the hospital were the scariest. It was during that time I found out how close to death I was. I found out that if they couldn’t use medication to close up my colon, i’d need surgery. If I needed surgery, i’d need a colosotomy bag tethered to my side. We weren’t sure if my kidneys would regain full function. Was I going to have a poop bag strapped to me while I was getting dialysis treatment for the rest of my life?
Over the next two days, my body started to recover. It always does, somehow. No matter how badly I treat my body, it’s basically like play doh. It just takes whatever form I force it into. Pay Doh is coincidentally the best way to decsribe my body type. Just stacks of old Play Doh sitting awkwarfdly on top of eachother.
I got released from the hospital and was told take time off and to relax for awhile. Instead, I was back to work just a couple days later. In fact, I got out of the hospital on a Tuesday. If I hadn’t had to go back to the ER on Wednesday because of a potential complication, i’d have been back at work that day. I’m that kind of stupid. I show loyalty to a monolith company who doesn’t know I exist.
That’s the American Way. Work yourself to the bone for the privilege of not falling completely on your ass when you cease to be useful.
I never really processed how close I came to dying. I never gave myself a chance to. I started working on myself and taking care of myself. I started losing weight. I started feeling better. I was starting to feel normal. I wasn’t snoring as much. I took an extended time off of drinking.
It is both a blessing and a curse to get clean. All of your friends and family go out of your way to tell you how great you are doing. They remark how good you look and how nice you are to be around. It feels good to realize that your presence is felt in a positive way.
Then you remember that they wouldn’t have to say this about you if you weren’t a complete substance monster, a kind of alcohol tornado.
And inevitably, nothing gold stays.
I went six weeks without drinking. Then I started drinking casually, just once in a while. Then I started drinking like I used to, which is to say i’m not an alcoholic or anything. I don’t come home and drown my sorrows day in and day out. I drink socially on the weekends. I never really drink alone because, why would I want to drink with my worst enemy?
I quit paying attention to the food I was eating. With a cleanish bill of health coming back to me in early May, I fell back into the delicious, fatty foods that had so aided in my rotund physique. My dad, no stranger to the expanding waist game, warned me against eating when you work the night shift. I am generally at work from 4:30 PM until 4:30 in the morning. My eating habits are terrible on this shift. By the time I’m getting home at 5am, i’m starving. The only thing open is Mcdonalds and gas station foods. I’m no stranger to the awkward looks of the overnight clerk at the Speedway when they see me wandering up with two hot dogs and an Arizona Iced Tea.
After four months, I was back to being me.
I’m not stupid enough to not be self aware of what I was doing.
I’m just stupid enough to not change.
It was around this time that I tried to write this story the first time. All eight people who were going to read this would have been so excited to know that I was back on the horse, writing about the mundane stupidity that is my daily existence. And as I started writing, I started to come to terms with what i’d done. How close i’d come to dying. How much of my life i’d frittered away for no good reason. How many divergent paths existed to allow me to be my best self. My self destructive nature. It all crushed down on me like a pallet of bricks.
Here I sit now, a month later. I’m feeling better again. At least mentally.
Physically, it’s always destined to be a crapshoot. My health backslide actually started due to a gout flareup in my left elbow. The pain stuck around for a week, and everything just kind of felt like it fell apart from there. Working nights leaves me mentally and physically exhausted, with no desire to spend a waking moment at the gym. The Peloton would be nothing more than an avid collector of dust if my wife didn’t get such good use of it.
I’m doing okay though.
But it still sticks in the back of my head. Why did I survive? Imposters Syndroms for breathing, I suppose. It sticks with me that i’m the same person I was before I got sick. How do people see me now, fading back into the ether that was me for so long, after a merely brief interlude of sanity.
I might never completely figure it out. Maybe i’n not meant to. Maybe i’ve over achieved already with a beautiful wife who I love, a house, and a family and friends that accept me.
In the quiet moments I let it gnaw at the back of my head, though.. What if I was the person that could be seen in those brief flashes. And what is keeping me from staying that person. What if i’d simply gone straight to college after high school? Moved away, far away and lived a life on my own. What if i’d taken that scholarship with Disney 20 years ago? What if I hadn’t gotten into the car accident that leaves me in the pain i’m in every day.
What if I never learn anything from any of this?
I guess the better question is: Why can’t I left the past go?
Fancy Boys Club 