Have I got a story to tell you…

On December 5, 2023 my heart stopped beating

I wasn’t breathing, I had no pulse.  

I was dead.  Then I wasn’t.

That day I was at work chaperoning the two students I was assigned to get to and from lunch at school (new job, yay me!),dropped them off in the classroom and headed to check in with my teacher to tell her I was taking lunch and the next thing I remember was being loaded into the back of an ambulance headed to the hospital.

As I was being loaded into that ambulance I remembered a firefighter or a paramedic looking in my face and saying “HEY WELCOME BACK BUDDY!  YOU WERE IN CARDIAC ARREST AND YOUR COWORKERS BROUGHT YOU BACK!”.

Uhhh…say what now?

With all of my systems coming back online…hearing, breathing and whatnot…things were a bit fuzzy but did he just say I was in cardiac arrest?

I tried raising my head, which turned out to be a bad idea first because I was wearing a C-collar and second the instant my head came off my chin the world started spinning.  

He really said CARDIAC @&$!-ing ARREST, right?  

Holy crap.

55 years, two months and 16 days.  Had my coworkers not jumped to the task and employed the training we receive that would have been my complete run.  From Columbia Hospital in Pittsburgh PA to the hallway of the Union 6/7 Center.

It’s hard for the mind to wrap around all this.  Having lived a half century plus and starting to turn the corn, so to speak into my “golden years“, after something like that I’ve realized that I’m not finished with the shit I have to do.

Luckily, so did Someone Else.

It’s been very surreal to say the very least. Now you’ve ridden a few times through entries where I’ve talked about my trips to the hospital for my leg and for my foot and other parts of the body, but the heart is only really crept into the picture of the last couple of years.   

My father died of congestive heart failure in 2002, and that unfortunately, puts me in the genetic club of likelihood of what would happen to me.

And it did.

But I still thought I had more time. Am I the best at managing my own health?  You would think probably not given what happened, but the type of heart failure that I have is a very sketchy one, because the heart is extremely weak. When I have heart glitches, it typically doesn’t hurt. I just can’t breathe.

My cardiologist are planning all kinds of different options to hopefully correct this, and that will start taking place in the next year.  It involves travel and really putting my brand new medical insurance through work to a test.

So now, the big question:  What was it like?

I mean, for a very brief moment, I was dead So was there a bright light that I was being encouraged to walk to?

No.  If you’re a fan of The Princess Bride, I think that though I was clinically dead to the lay person, I was in fact, “mostly dead”. I was brought back because there was enough activity in the body that got everything restarted once CPR was effectively applied.

So I’m thanking God for that. 

Two teachers, whom I’ve never spoken to in the two months that I’ve been employed at school were my heroines.  Yes, they were female teachers.  They did the chest compressions, they did the rescue breathing, and they hooked up the AED and applied the shock.

The best result of which is that I am here above ground, breathing, and relating the story.

What you don’t hear about is the fact that CPR is a physical agitation of the heart, which involves depressing the chest plate a couple of inches into the body.  So the result of which, if you survive, it is very much like what would happen if you received A rib bruise, or even a fracture of the rib.

The long and short of it is that these ladies kicked the crap out of me to bring me back from the edge.

Believe it or not even though it hurts. I’m glad to be here to feel it hurting.  

They saved my life, and the gratitude that I have for Shawna Hight and Audra Kahne cannot be measured.

There is my testimony. I don’t know how many people this blog reaches anymore, I don’t even know if blogger is something that even pops up on the radar on Google and it’s a Google product but to everybody who reads this I employ you in the strongest possible words: LEARN CPR. YOU COULD SAVE A LIFE.

I’m living proof.

Social media as therapy: a bad idea…

As much as I hate to admit it, I live quite a bit of my life aboard social media.

I’m a member of Facebook, X, and Tiktok.  The current big three of social media. On Facebook I’ve been there for almost 20 years and have about 1200 friends or as they say in the current vernacular “followers”. Facebook separates France and followers but suffice it to say I’ve got quite a few.

I have more on TikTok, the one TikTok, it’s a lot more nondescript if anything good can be said about Facebook is that you can search out your individual friends based on your life and how you’ve encountered those people. You don’t have that luxury onTiktok.  On that platform I have over 10,000 followers.

You learn a lesson very quickly when you engage on social media. Basically you’re in control of what information the rest of the planet gets to see.  You can say as much or as little as you want to.  

What you DO say, belongs to the rest of the world once you post it, and fairly or unfairly, you are judged upon what you say.

Or to borrow a sentence from the Miranda warning “what you say, there can be used against you“.  For some it takes a while for that to sink in.  

It can be very therapeutic and its way, I suppose. Journaling is an art form is on life-support. I won’t call it dead, but seeing that blogging, like I’m doing now, is a lot more immediate and requires a whole lot less effort. It can be said that it is dying.

But as I said, above, a lot can be determined about you through what you post online. It is not in any way, shape or form, fair.  

I can attribute at least one of the jobs that I’ve lost over my career to me, saying a few too many evil words on social media, and I’ve heard tell of many a relationship, and even the marriage, or to end based upon social media activity.

Recently, here in Tulsa, there has been evidence of potential violent threats based on social media posts so you have to be careful about what you post online.  It can be perfectly innocent to you, but it can be easily misconstrued, and people can miss use it to their hearts content.

So why am I seeing all of this?  I think that we should come back off of our computers and talk to each other about things.  Face-to-face.  Don’t just throw it up on a social media site and let the world debate it.  Everybody is different, I realize, and may be in the transaction you feel better, but I think it will do people a whole lot more good just to talk about it.

Anyway, that’s a random thought and also a preface.

You’ll come to that here soon enough.

Back to the hospital…

They should offer a frequent flyer program at St. Francis Hospital.  Last week I did 7 days in the heart hospital for a relapse of dizzy spells and shortness of breath much like I did earlier this year.

Now I’m told I need a pacemaker/defibrillator which will be placed next month.  So while this isn’t “open heart surgery” per se, it’s close enough to the ticker that it has me sufficiently spooked.

This experience is paralleling what happened to my dad in the last six years of his life, starting in November 1994 with his first heart attack.  He endured three altogether, surviving two of them.  To my knowledge he did not have any procedures in hospital to treat the heart attacks other than treatment medically so what I’ll be going through is uncharted territory.

Circling back to heart attacks, apparently I’ve had one.  My cardiology team has been reluctant to call it that for reasons unknown, but as of last week the cardiologist who spoke to me said that I did, in fact, suffer a heart attack as my condition at diagnosis over a year ago…two of three major vessels blocked…met the criteria. 

Funny enough, I take no comfort in knowing that I’m a heart attack survivor.

You’ve read about my mental state in the past few entries.  This piles onto a rather large heap of shit I’ve been dealing with since 2021 completely on my own.  In order, the heart attack and it’s aftermath, toe amputation surgery and six months of recovery and the departure of my only child to another state, and now two cardiac episodes within four months and upcoming surgery.

It’s a lot to deal with by yourself.  

It has me spooked, but not frightened to the point that I’m thinking about not having it. I made that decision when I was in the hospital and I intend to honor it, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking about it all the time.

It makes me really really think about where my life’s trajectories had to beyond all this.  There’s very little risk in the procedure itself as it is fairly common, but this will be the first time that something other than an appendage is being operated on, and that’s the sort of thing that gets up inside of my head.

There will be more entries on this, as I organize my thoughts.

What’s wrong with me? Well, I’ll tell you…

It’s no secret that my life has taken a significant downturn in the last 12-24 months.

A lot of that was at my own hands, but if I were to put a definitive starting point to how my life has been slowly sinking, it has to start on September 19, 1999. That was the day that the marriage that I hope would last the rest of my life came to a very abrupt halt. 

I am a person who dwells in the past. History is very important to me, and my personal history really doesn’t look very good.  in fact, it sucks. I can point to one day some 23 years ago when the ball really started tipping over the peak of the hill.

That was the day that my wife left me.

No warning, no indication that anything was wrong. She was just gone.  She didn’t even have the courage to tell me, she chose to call my parents and tell them.  Her excuse: I was at work and she didn’t want to drop the bomb on me plus, she thought I was suicidal.

Our marriage wasn’t exactly perfeet.  It seem to have all of the ups and downs that every other married couple go through, especially early on, but apparently it was supposed to be perfect from day one.

At least on her side. What was worse, was the fact that her family really did not like me. I had several strikes against me when I was dating her, and even though they “allowed“ her to marry me, they were ready to evacuate her out of the situation at a moments notice. 

And they did.

She was pregnant with our son at the time, giving her further ammunition to make the case that I was being “abusive” and unfit to be a family man which was something her overbearing meddling mother pounced on, feeding on it, like a shark feeds on a bleeding fish in the sea.

A two year separation was followed by a divorce and over 20 years of being forced to pay back child support that was disingenuously forced upon me after paying money to her throughout the separation.

Both of my parents passed, and her mother passed in since time. She is remarried, and I am single and alone, and another man has 24/7 access to my one and only child, who is now a man.

Thanks to my ex-wife I missed out on my son’s entire childhood.  I didn’t get to do the “dad” stuff with him, with her family holding him hostage for months after he was born, forcing my family to be treated like criminals with a draconian “supervision” situation by the aforementioned holier than thou mother in law. 

When he was five, he was diagnosed on the autism spectrum. He needed me more than ever, but still, control had to be at the top, and she and her mother had it.

Now, my son is a man.  His mother once said that my son’s role model was not his father, but his grandfather.. She literally said the quiet part out loud right in front of me and I can never forgive her that. 

It was thoughtless, very cruel, and a huge slap in the face.

These are the little thoughts that are becoming big thoughts in my head. This is what torment me day and night, and really makes the case that I am developing a serious mental problem.

It is possibly the closest thing to hell on earth as you can possibly imagine because this whole ordeal has taken my confidence 10 rounds with Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, and Clubber Lang.

Every day I get up, try to pull things together, and put on the brave face for the rest of the world but inside, the world is on fire in my mind, and in my body, and it’s starting to affect me in my general health.  

Heart problems have resulted from this, and all the other health problems that come along with getting older make this experience almost unbearable. Since 2020, I’ve been in the hospital four times once for major surgery, and three times for heart problems.

There are times that this tears me up so much that I wonder when I’m going to reach over to this telephone, dial 911, and head to the hospital possibly for the last time.  I’ve never been one to live inside my head and listen to the voices, but they’re getting louder as I get older.

I know that a blog is a horrible place to try and parse out your feelings, but I have to have some kind of an outlet. I know that I am not completely blameless in the failures of my life, but even people like me deserve a break every now and then.

The sad part about it is that nobody wants to hear me bellyache. Nobody wants to hear about this because for some reason I’m not worth listening to. I’ll listen to everyone else and their problems, but no one wants to hear what’s going on with me.

There you go, World, welcome to my head. Welcome to what’s wrong.

Family Matters V: Last Wishes…

I came up with the concept of this blog with a great deal of reservation.

If it is discovered in passing through the means, that one would discover it on social media one might construe it as a “suicide note”. I can assure you that I have no intention of self harm or of doing my self in.

But I’ve come to the realization that with no family around me in Tulsa or indeed, Oklahoma, barring the weird and crazy, lightning strike that might see me remarried. Before I die, I had better put it down somewhere what I would like upon my expiration.

I wish to be cremated. I would like my remains to be in Floral Haven cemetery in Broken Arrow Oklahoma.  That is where my parents are buried, and that is where my daughter is buried. Now you know where I would like to be placed, or what remains of me be placed.

When my mother died, and we planned her funeral, one of the things that they offered to me and my was certain things that her ashes could’ve been placed in and given as keepsakes. My memory fails me, but I do remember that they came in the form of a locket that one could wear the neck, or a keychain. Something like that.

I will leave it to the discretion of whoever finds this or whoever takes the mantle of responsibility to get my final wishes taken care of, but it would be cool for that to be done with me and my son Sean get one of those keepsakes. Probably the keychain.

Other than that, that’s basically it I don’t have any great ideas for a service, other than I do hope that I have one. Most of you know my musical taste. And you know what music I would like to hear as if I was there, so I’ll leave that alone.

I have to tell everybody that it’s extremely weird to do this, I am writing to you on Sunday, April 2, 2023, and I am 54 years old and hopefully of somewhat sound mind. In all honesty that’s probably up for debate.

Especially after this year.

Congestive Heart Failure: It’s Official.

As the headline indicates it is now official.

I am now suffering from congestive heart failure.

I always suspected that I had something like it as I have done hospital time because of blockages in my heart. I don’t know why this was not placed on any other paperwork, but it really doesn’t matter.

Genetically, I can’t really avoid this because my father succumb to it 21 years ago.  Since I’ve had body parts removed since I was 40, I thought I may have dodged the worst of it. That’s not the case obviously.

I don’t know what’s ahead.

I’m told that once you get this diagnosis, open heart, surgery is possible, but only after your heart is strong enough to take it. Apparently, mine is not. They told me that I have three blockages in the major vessels of my heart.  I’ve known that for two years now.

I don’t remember if my father had any procedures done when he was diagnosed with heart failure he had three heart attacks, two of which he survived.  My doctors cannot come to a full consensus of whether I’ve had one or not.  my heart problems have not manifested with chest pain. It’s been shortness of breath with me. 

Having taken numerous CPR classes over the years, I know what the indicators are that one is supposed to look at when making the determination they might be having a heart attack. Shortness of breath has been my only symptom. No chest pain, no sweating, no dizziness, nothing like that.

What’s bad about it is obvious medically, but it’s not helping my current situation, which is very complex at this point.  But that’s another entry.

It’s been a number of months and I haven’t updated this blog so I decided to go this direction.

I hate social media…

 I know the headline to this blog entry is ironic considering that the only way people will read this is by accessing it through social media, but bear with me.

Since the dawn of the social media age, first through.com, message boards and progressing onto MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, everybody now has a free message in order to comment on the events of the day good or bad.

We can debate whether these are “free-speech platforms” on another blog entry. That is topical especially when it comes to Twitter but that’s another entry for another time.

I write this because peoples interpretations of big events are often skewed on platforms like this. In fact, I have said more than once that I am very glad that the big events of my young life, such as the Reagan assassination attempt, the explosion of the space shuttle challenger, and to a lesser extent, 9/11 did not have a social media message board upon which people could express their thoughts and opinions…or at least one that was not easily and as readily accessible as Facebook and Twitter and others.

The big event that everybody’s talking about now (on 31 January 2023), is the brutal beating of Tyre Nichol earlier in January by five police officers that resulted in Mr. Nichols death.  The comments on social media about this horrific act are nothing short of disgraceful.

On the one hand, people are wondering…DEMANDING…that people who support law-enforcement say something about the incident. They see things like “where are all the back the blue people“ or “funny how I don’t see people who bootlick law-enforcement, saying anything about this tragedy“.

Conversely, the other side of the coin are posting leading comments of their own like “where are the riots“ or “I don’t see any burning buildings when people are protesting Nichols death“.

Having moderated message boards in my time, albeit sports type message boards, one of the things that the person who “hired“ me for that moderator position told me is that an argument… Particularly a good one… Generates clicks, and it drives traffic to the site

If you have ads on your site from a revenue standpoint, I get it…that makes sense. However, a good moderator steps in and blows the whistle when things get too crazy. Or least they did back whenever I was moderating a page with a message board.

That’s not done now. Not at all.

These days it seems like moderators just step back and let the inmates run the asylum, meaning that they do nothing until something really major happens. If that.

The unintended consequence of all of this arguing is that nothing really gets accomplished. Everyone’s worried about the win or the gotcha instead of actually making some kind of headway and some kind of sense about a particular event.

And it further divides us. Someone said in hushed tones, not long ago that it’s going to take something universally tragic like another 9/11 to bring the country back to Center to where we are all united.

Just don’t expect it to happen through Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok