The Starter's Pistol

I wasn't supposed to regain consciousness, but I did. I was foggy, to be sure, but conscious. And I knew somehow that I was in a helicopter, and I knew that something very bad had happened. I remember becoming aware that there was a tube down my throat, and I reached to pull it out, but my arm didn't move. My hand didn't move either. With mounting horror I realized I could not even wiggle my fingers. I was paralyzed.

There is a song that came out years back that was billed as Kurt Vonnegut's commencement speech to M.I.T. It's called don't forget the sunscreen, and Kurt had nothing to do with it, but the song still contains some worthy pearls of wisdom. One of them is not to worry about the future, because the things that would really knock you for a loop were never the ones you worried about, they were the things that blindsided you at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon. So true, so true.

March 6, 2008, it's Tuesday, and about 2pm. I was working as a waiter at a local chain steak house (yes, I had totally collapsed at this point) and I was in the break time between a split shift. One of my coworkers had come back to my house and we were watching tv and drinking fortys (just one a piece). Having finished our meager supply of beer with hours left before we had to be back at work, we decided to make a beer run. We left my third floor apartment, and as I locked the door he got a bit of a head start. The stairs between floors 2 and 3 were half flights and changed direction, the first flight of stairs was the only full flight. When I reached the top of this last flight of stairs Shane was already down, about 4 stairs from the bottom, maybe. Not far. So he lifted his butt onto the handrailing and slid down the four stairs. He looked back up at me and said, "Come on, I wanna see you slide the whole rail." He didn't mean it, he wasn't daring me. In fact, he didn't even look to see if I did it but just proceeded out the front door.

I tried to do it, and I have no idea why. I was 12-15 feet up, far enough that the potential danger should have been apparent. The handrail was just one of those cheap black metal apartment building rails, maybe 3 inches wide, certainly not a large bannister in an old Victorian home. Sliding down that thing would have been a circus worthy feat, and I could see that, and yet.... People tend to blame beer, I had been drinking, clouded my judgment. I would love to believe that, I really would, because that makes the mistake drinking, not the subsequent action. Unfortunately, I am an alcoholic, and one forty of beer just doesn't affect me much.Whatever the ridiculous reason, I tried to slide down that railing, all the way from the top. I backed into the rail, grabbed it with my hands, and hopped up on it. Over it, actually, I guess.

Shane didn't see it, but he heard the crunch of my body hitting what amounted to a cement floor with a thin piece of stairway carpet on top. Backwards over the railing, and since my hands were grasping the railing it was headfirst, not hands or arms first. 12-15 feet, headfirst to the point that when I hit the impact burst vertebrae in my spine. Shane later told me he would never forget that moment, seeing my laying there with blood pouring out of my ear. He was sure I was dead, that is until he got right down to me and heard me babbling incoherently (I would like to point out, if that impact didn't knock me out how much could a forty of beer have done to me?) Obviously, he needed to call 911, but this presented a challenge. Shane's phone was out of minutes, and he didn't know exactly where to look on me for mine and didn't want to move me. As a matter of fact, he was having considerable trouble keeping me still. I kept telling him I just needed to get back upstairs to my apartment, and I would try to get up. He would get me back still and start off to try and knock on people's doors to get help, and I would try to get up again. Eventually, someone called 911 for him, at least that's what I assume as I made it to the hospital.

I was living in Southern Illinois at this time (don't ask, story for a different day) in a town of 16,000. It had a nice hospital, two of them in fact, but neither were staffed to deal with me. The idea was to stabilize me for a helicopter trip to Saint Louis University Medical Center. The initial survey of the damage amounted to one burst vertebrae, and one with a compression fracture (they found more later), as well as two brain bleeds, subdermal hematomas, I think, but brain bleeds in any event and my skull was cracked almost all the way around. The staff at the hospital made a back brace to try and prevent me from moving and doing further damage, made sure my vitals were up to the trip, and then they intubated me and gave me a paralytic. They also gave me something to insure I didn't regain consciousness en route, but that one failed slightly. I don't want this to seem like I'm bitter at the doctors who worked to save my life because I woke up for twenty seconds, far from it, I am so incredibly grateful to them and the staff at SLU.

Once I got to SLU medical center a spinal thoracic surgeon looked at the damage to my back, and had an idea on how to repair it, but the surgery would have to wait. My brain was still bleeding, and if it didn't stop soon brain surgery would have to come first. I would have to wait, knotted up worrying that I would need brain surgery, or my back surgery wouldn't work and I'd be permanently disabled.

Well, not exactly. I was on huge amounts of morphine and oxy contin, and I didn't have a care in the world. I was driving the nurses nuts because I kept getting out of bed to walk around. I didn't seem to understand that with the damage already done to my back one bad step and I could be paralyzed, or further disabled, or who knows, but there was serious disaster potential. I needed to understand that it was a total miracle that I could still walk and I really should not do it. I think it took the very real threat of restraints to get me to stay in bed. Or maybe I bartered with them for more painkillers, likely, or maybe I kept doing it and just got lucky. The point is that I was doing all I could to hurt my chances for a full recovery, or at least as full as possible at that point in time. I would continue to do this throughout my recovery, seemingly at every opportunity.

After 4 days my brain stopped bleeding, hooray! Couldn't hear real well out of my left ear, and have a bit of hearing loss to this day in my right, but given the circumstances, almost no cerebral damage. With my brain ok it was time for my back surgery. The night before my surgeon came by to explain the risks, using terms like "if this works", and "we will see how well you can walk", or "hard to tell how much pain you will have to live with." I wasn't concerned. Know what I was thinking about? Win, lose, or draw with the surgery, I was going to have some serious painkiller scripts. How fucked up is that.

When he opened me up the next day he found another vertebrae with severe damage (it was mentioned that I might have caused this moving around so much, and that's why the initial x-rays didn't show it). Fortunately, Dr. Howard Place is a resourceful man, and brilliant as well. Using two 12" titanium rods and a dozen titanium screws, about 2" long each, he linked my back back together, and then took bone grafts from the top of my butt to cover some of the work. On the topic of the bone grafts, he mentioned that they might not take, my body might reject them, or whatever happens. The risk was relatively small, but smoking made a huge difference. I think 20% more likely to fail was the number. I of course did not quit smoking.

Out of surgery and in the recovery room I awoke to the knowledge that the surgery had gone well, and I also learned I had a fentnyl pump or epideral or something planted in my back. That was pleasant, but the recovery nurse said that that amount of opiates would make it almost impossible for me to pee (I pretended to not already know this) so I would have to have a catheter inserted. Never a fun experience, I had had an incident earlier in life with these things and I resisted. She said ok, but if I couldn't pee then the pain meds would have to go. She must have led the debate team in high school, she won that one in a hurry. My heart goes out to her for having to do the insertion. Surgical anesthesia and huge amounts of painkillers have a similar effect to a cold pool, times 20. I couldn't even find the thing, gave up looking. She pulled it off though. Well, she didn't "pull it off" what I meant was.....yeah.

Couple days later I was out of the hospital. What was going to come in the next 5 months, or maybe even every day since then, made the surgery and even the accident seem trivial. I got into body building and running following a surgery whose recovery limited me to not lifting more than just a few pounds. A year after the surgery I was in much better shape than I ever had been before, much better. I experience basically no pain from all that metal, far less than the average person deals with in their "all natural" back. However, before these good things came to be many, many bad things happened first.

That accident was a catalyst, it initiated a series of events, and those events led to other events, and so on. The accident itself, however, is almost irrelevant now. Other than a wild x-ray to post to facebook and a big scar on my back. The accident was like the starter's pistol at the beginning of a race. It's loud, for a second it has everyone's attention, and it gets action underway. But it's completely forgotten about 10 seconds after it happens. The race is what matters then.