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On Oct. 31, 1999, I was in college and got very sick with something called bacterial meningitis. It’s a freak illness that can kill you in 24 hours, sometimes less. I felt sick that Halloween night, ended up in an ambulance, then an emergency helicopter and ultimately spent a week in a coma. When I woke up, I realized quickly that I was lucky to be alive, and that I would never be the same.
My hands and feet were destroyed, and my feet were especially bad. I eventually had the ends of both feet amputated. I spent six months in a wheelchair and had to relearn how to walk. I had to take a year off from college and try to get healthy again to return to school.
I pulled it off—sort of. I physically got healthy, but I never really wrestled with what it meant to my soul to be 21 years old, spend a week in a coma, almost die, and then have parts of my body cut off. That was the most traumatic thing I’d ever been through, and I tried to just whistle past it.
Guess how that turned out—not good! I got mixed up in painkillers and other medications, and I began abusing them pretty soon after I got sick. Looking back, I definitely just was an addict who liked the feeling of being high… but I also think I turned toward mood-altering substances because it soothed my aching soul.
Here’s the thing, though: It’s not like I couldn’t sleep every night because I was so haunted about the trauma of getting sick. I focused on the next thing in front of me and moved on. I don’t even consciously remember spending any time thinking about it, or being upset that it had happened to me. It happened and I moved on, or so I thought.
I was thinking about that a lot this Halloween. It’s been 24 years and I believe I have come a long way. But there are certain traumatic things that are just… they’re just in us. You can see a therapist, go to seven meetings a week, work the 12 steps, volunteer at a soup kitchen… and it’s still in there. I honestly don’t even know the magnitude of how much my default settings were affected by almost dying and then turning into an old man overnight once they started cutting body parts off. I have no idea. I don’t feel much when I think about it, to be honest. But that is the sneakiest kind of pain, isn’t it? The kind that hides in the corner.
It reminds me a little bit of when I went to see the movie Ghost in 1990. I was in seventh grade and I was dating an eighth-grader… I was a rock star with my friends for dating an older woman! We went to see Ghost and were making out the entire movie. It was freaking awesome.
Then she dumped me a few weeks later. I spent a month or two just listening to Unchained Melody over and over again because it had been in Ghost and I considered it to be our song. I cried and cried and cried. I couldn’t believe it was over—it had been such a beautiful four weeks! What we had was so special!
I am bringing this up because I never think about that relationship, the breakup, the movie, nothing… and then Unchained Melody comes on the radio. I don’t start crying but it crosses my mind that I should be sad. That that song means sadness. It’s kind of like if you eat a specific food and get food poisoning, it’s very hard to ever eat it again.
So that’s what I think about when it comes to trauma. That there are things wired down inside me so deep that I don’t know that they’re even there, or if it’s affecting me, or if I can do anything about it. I recently decided to go back to therapy, and that’s one of the reasons. I think there is a part of me that feels profound sadness at getting sick and getting fast-forwarded into being an old man in a young man’s body. Does it impact me every day? I don’t know. But I’d like to find out.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
It was their 20th wedding anniversary and Bob was hungover, as usual. Tired of being ignored, his wife decided to shock him into reality. She said softly, "I'm having an affair." Holding his head, Bob replied, "Are you having it catered?"
(Credit: Grapevine, by Terry B. of Albany, NY, Oct. 2009)
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