Late last year, actually Nov 25, 2016, the day after Thanksgiving I fell through a trap door in my reality-
I had an accident- a medical event that took me from a comfortable visit in one of my dearest friend’s home and installed me in the ICU at UCLA SM (Santa Monica).  The journey to get there included off the chart crippling pain, ambulances, 8 hours in an emergency room and all the while enduring an internal injury that is classified 100% fatal without perfect and timely surgical protocols. I woke up the next afternoon in pieces. A nine hour surgery had transformed my world with a generous compliment of staples, rubber tubes, gauze and sensors. I had been saved by a group of individuals who were for the most part previously unknown to me. Saved my life. Pulled me out of the abyss. Had my friends not made the key decison to have me taken to an exceptional place of medical care, UCLA SM, the outcome might have turned out differently.

Less positive, perhaps.

In the three and a half weeks that followed I was fortunate enough to be cared for by a superior group of professionals at every level. Doctors, Nurses, Aides, Care Partners and Hospital Maintenance staff who at almost every turn gave me their “A” game. It made me understand clearly something that I had never experienced before, the extraordinary commitment that most people in the hands-on health care industry make.

As a patient I tried to maintain a degree of levity and collaboration in order to speed improvement, but I soon realized that I was no-picnic to care for if just because of the nature of my injuries and the extra effort required to keep me on the level path of healing.

The road back from such a trauma is typically not linear. Yes you are always trying to move in the right direction but your body has other plans. I learned the hard way like most do in this situation. Throughout the adventure though, I have felt overwhelming gratitude for those many individuals, previously known and unknown, friends and my beloved family members who were all part of the support group that saved me and have been critical in supporting all efforts in healing and restoring me.

What made this a little more difficult is the key players on my home team who would have rigorously had my back at a time like this were no longer present. My sister-who was my conscience had passed away just a few months before. My mother had passed just a few months before that and one of my closest friends, a surgeon, had died accidentally in Dec. 2013. I can only imagine how much easier it would have been with these guys on my team, addressing all the daily confusion. Helping me to separate the signal from the noise.

However at the same time, new blood picks up the slack. 

Those that stepped up I will appreciate for the rest of my life.

I’ve always believed that being of service to others is the fair ante into the poker game of life.
When I was in the hospital and in the aftermath, I’m never more aware of that concept.

My  take-aways from this adventure are profoundly rich in meaning and experience. As I read OPPs (other people’s problems) on the internet, both related to medical/surgical issues and/or just the general malaise of getting through day by day existence, I decided to share the details of my experience to help those who are unfortunately forced into traveling a similar path, or may face something like this in the future, or just know someone in similar straits and want to have a better understanding of their situation.

 

So I decided to WRITE A BOOK about it.

The sharing of knowledge, especially in how to overcome hardship, and in particular engaging with your body to overcome this kind of adversity, can clearly benefit others. This kind of sharing wherever possible has always been a core belief of my personal operating system.

As I embarked on this narrative, ostensibly a time travelogue, with pain, it occurred to me that to properly tell this story I had to include a detail or two about my life leading up to this, so maybe there is a more complete lesson to be learned. Hold up-what kind of lesson you say? Well, all life is experience and perhaps the juxtaposition of all those previous experiences, intellectual, emotional as well as the obvious, physical, may have aligned to dump me into the moment of greatest crisis, and of course, beyond.  

Sometimes it is the big story that reveals how the sum of all the smaller stories end up making the difference in what really matters in our lives.

Or perhaps this is just an OK story full of interesting and colorful anecdotes and there are those out there who are always looking for a good read.
(…keep looking?) So here's my story, as it were.

 

 "Story.Teller, how to recover from near death, major surgery and some other cool stuff"

by andrew wainrib, will be available here and amazon.com Nov 15, 2017

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