One of the next books I’ll be releasing is called, The Friend at the End, which tells the story of the major stroke that I suffered in 2011. The first part of it culminates with a few major realizations I had when I understood that I very well might have been dying. Once I was released from the hospital, these understandings played a profound role in my personal growth.
Over the next few episodes, I am going to relate the events that led up to these realizations. Take your time, let the background story unfold and see if it stimulates any insights in your personal awareness. There’s a good chance that it will.
By way of to a quick overview, even though we all do our best to plan for the future, we all know that you can never really know what’s coming around the next corner. Usually, our lives are filled with a set of normal, everyday routines. But every once in a while, something hits you out of the blue and everything gets turned upside down. Suddenly, you find yourself living in a different world.
Like most of us, I’ve had my fair share of these unexpected lightning bolts. But the one that hit me in 2011 wasn’t just about my world being turned upside down. It was about it actually coming to an end.
This story is a memoir of those ground shattering days, but it’s not what you might expect. While it does deal with death and impermanence, it’s not a dark or depressing story at all. In fact, you may find it to be quite the opposite.
There are a lot of layers to it as well. For one thing, it all began with a profound near-death experience. This is now quite a timely topic, but mine was a little different from most described in popular culture. It didn’t have a lot of cosmic bells and whistles to it. It was much more down to earth. Still, it was deeply metaphysical, and its impact on me continues to grow to this day.
I survived the ordeal literally by the skin of my teeth. A huge blood clot had been released into my system. By the time I got to the hospital, it was too late for me to be helped by any medical interventions, so my fate was entirely dependent on where the enormous clot finally landed. All anyone could do was wait, watch, and pray, so it was simply Russian Roulette, medical style.
For about thirty-six hours, I lingered in the twilight zone of a semi-coma, drifting precariously between life and death. Eventually, the clot came to rest in an ideal location, my life was spared, and suddenly, all was well.
I remained in intensive care for ten days, and my doctors and nurses kept telling me how close I had come to death and how much I had to be grateful for. After all, no human hand had anything to do with the merciful outcome I had received, and the chances of it happening had been less than one in a thousand.
As you can imagine, it was an extraordinary journey, but it all began in a most ordinary way. Saturday, May 28, 2011, was a normal day, much like any other. Nothing special. Just another day in the life.
Actually, on a happy note, it was the start of Memorial Day Weekend, which is always one of my favorite times of the year. In America, it marks the beginning of the beginning of summer, when everything slowly starts to slow down. Even the pursuit of happiness isn’t that much of a chore anymore.
I was 62 years old. More precisely, it was day 22,718 of my life. It began as a beautiful, sunny morning in late Spring. But by nightfall, I would be at death’s door, lying nearly comatose in an intensive care unit, with a kindly neurosurgeon telling my badly shaken wife to hold my hand and keep talking to me. “Just – just don’t let him slip away,” he cautioned her, somberly. “We might lose him tonight.” The outlook was bleak, and if it hadn’t been for an incredible stroke of luck, or the merciful Grace of God, or both, day 22,718 might very well have been my very last.
But let’s go back to that morning. You can relax, by the way. This is far from a sad story. It’s not even that intense.
For the most part, I was happy and healthy. And it had been a positive period for me financially as well, which was always welcomed because trying to make a living as a writer can be a daunting task, as every storyteller knows.
You work in a world of constant feast or famine, trying to navigate your way through a complicated network of interconnected challenges. To start with, you take a mixture of whatever knowledge, skill, and insight you can muster, and shape it into a framework that makes some kind of sense. After that, whether you’re inspired or nuts (often both), you try to turn it into a creative work of art. Weaving your magic carpet made out of words, you go through an endless round of rewrites and revisions. Then, after enduring this miniature version of infinity, complete with its ongoing ping-pong match between heaven and hell, with you as the ball, you finally try to get the thing off the ground.
Meanwhile, you have to constantly maintain your cash flow. It’s a little like a tight-rope act and your path is as narrow as a razor’s edge. While it’s often filled with tremendous high points of majestic inspiration, you’re always aware that you’re working without a net, and you can never lose your balance. It takes laser focus, and if you want to stay with it, you quickly learn two reliable tricks of the trade - you don’t look back and you never look down.
Luckily for me, about a year earlier, I had gotten involved with an innovative solar energy company as a side-job and had run into some financial sunshine. There were favorable government incentives in place and plenty of money was flowing. The outlook for the future was strong and a secure sense of optimism fueled the industry. I was in pretty good shape.
So, on this particular morning, with summer over the next horizon, I was ready to just let go and have a good time. According to the news, we were heading into a run of bright, sunny days and everything seemed lined up for a perfect holiday weekend.
My wife and I lived in a condominium that faces an enormous park, on the edge of Philadelphia. Our daughter grew up with us there, but she was down the shore, celebrating the completion of her freshman year of college. The building has a large oval swimming pool at the edge of a beautiful, emerald-green forest. That morning, as I stood on our balcony and gazed out at the lush panorama of verdant trees swaying gently in the flowing breeze, I felt like I didn’t have a care in the world.
I went down to the pool and checked in. It was still fairly early and there was hardly anyone there. The woods, bathed in the splendor of nature, were a chirping bird land, echoing the cheerful songs of its winged residents, all singing in tune with the glorious weather report.
As the sweet fragrances of the forest filled my lungs, I sat down on a comfortable lounge chair, laid back, and took it all in. I was in the prime of my life, safe, contented, and secure. All was well and I was ready to enjoy the next stretch of whatever. What a perfect way to start the summer!
But these feelings of serenity didn’t last all that long. After just a few moments, something within me seemed to change. It was subtle, but I had the uneasy feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I soon realized that I felt a little queasy. I wasn’t downright sick or anything, just slightly nauseous.
My first thought was that it might be some kind of delayed indigestion or maybe even food poisoning. The night before, we had eaten dinner at a new falafel place in town. The sandwich was good, but there was a weird spice in it that I didn’t really like. Still, it wasn’t all that bad and I decided to finish it anyway. Then I capped it off with a big, ultra-sweet dessert.
I figured that my stomach distress was probably just a delayed reaction to the meal. “It’ll just go away by itself,” I thought, not too concerned. Worst case scenario, there was a men’s room nearby and I could always go in there and throw up if I had to. No big deal. I was sure I’d feel better soon.
But I didn’t, although it didn’t get much worse either. It was just kind of a steady, slightly sick feeling. Then something weird happened. As I was lying there, I noticed that there was a little more light than usual, coming from my left side, just outside of my peripheral vision. It was like someone had switched on a bright lamp over there.
I thought it might be the sun, so I turned to my left to see what it was. But there was nothing there, just the trees in the forest. Everything was normal. But the bright light was still on my upper left, just outside of my peripheral vision. I tried moving my head around, but no matter what I did, the light always stayed in the same position.
I decided to close my eyes and see what happened. Even with them closed, the light stayed on, and I quickly understood that it wasn’t coming from anywhere on the outside. I realized that the light was actually within me and it was deeply unsettling. Suddenly, my nervous system went on high alert and my thoughts quickened. Any idea that this was indigestion went right out the window.
I needed to calm myself down and make a serious assessment of what was happening to me. First of all, how bad was I actually feeling? I definitely didn’t feel well, but it wasn’t all that bad. It had gotten a little worse, but that was probably just from fear. The nausea was still only mild and wasn’t particularly troubling. But this light thing was a whole different story. It had come out of nowhere, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and it certainly didn’t seem to be going away. If anything, it had gotten a little brighter.
My next thought was that I’d better check my heart. We have a bad history of heart disease in my family. My father had dropped dead of a sudden heart attack at the age of 52. My uncle, his brother, had also died of heart disease in his mid-60s, and my brother needed bypass surgery in his mid-50s, which saved his life in the nick of time. I had recently had some problems of my own, but they were fairly minor. A few months earlier I had been diagnosed with mild Atrial Fibrillation, but I was asymptomatic and was on medication that seemed to be working fine.
I was pretty familiar with the standard symptoms of a heart attack and I ran through them quickly in my mind. My heart seemed to be beating normally. It wasn’t racing or missing beats. I had no pains in my chest or either arm. I wasn’t lightheaded or dizzy. I wasn’t sweaty and my breathing was fine. Even though I still had some mild nausea, it certainly didn’t seem like I was in the throes of a heart attack. No, I was pretty sure that my heart was okay.
What about a stroke? Although I didn’t know as much about it as I did with heart attack symptoms, I did know a few things because a serious stroke had marked the beginning of the end of my mother’s young life. So, I did a quick check.
I got up and moved around a little. I stood on one leg and then the other. My balance was fine. I checked for numbness and had none anywhere. I moved my facial muscles all around, making different expressions, and everything was normal. So were both arms and legs, hands, and feet. I checked my ability to think. I knew the day, month, and year. I counted to twenty forwards, then backward. Then I cataloged every solar deal I was working on and knew the details of each one down to the penny. My mind was sharp.
Next, I checked my ability to talk. I quietly spoke some random words out loud and then recited the first half of the Gettysburg Address. No problem. No slurred speech or anything like that. I finally ruled out a stroke. All in all, everything seemed okay. If it wasn’t for that damned light…