An Occurrence Of Gratitude
Dear Insight Timers: A personal tale, written and read by yours truly. This Occurrence of Gratitude was presented by members of the Rep of St Louis on Nov 17, 2024 as one of the "Your Story" series of performances. It is my journey, but likely a little down your roads too. Thanks!
Transcript
An Occurrence of Gratitude by Richard LaChalle Prologue After thirty-three years of a blissful marriage preceded by two years of passionate courting and cohabitating,
My dear bride-wife succumbed to an extremely aggressive rapid onset and very rare form of cancer.
She died within forty days of her first symptoms,
All between Thanksgiving,
Christmas,
New Year's,
And the Epiphany celebrations.
Needless to say,
For those of us with dirt on our hands from laying down a loved one,
The calendar can be cruel.
Fast forward three years from my bride's cremation.
My eyes flutter open slowly,
Almost as if stuck together.
My first awake thought is,
Huh?
Pink eye?
When did that happen?
My eyes focus to a red-beaded man in a white coat looking at me with a slight slant of the head.
Awareness of my surroundings come back to me.
I'm not in my bed,
And there's none of my familiar art to greet my awakening this time.
Confusion blends with some alarm.
I ask the red-beaded,
White-coated fellow in a raspy,
Dry whisper and using no uncertain Brooklyn street vocabulary,
Who the F are you?
He sits up straight,
Smiles slightly,
And replies,
Sorry,
But the real question of the moment is who the F are you?
Okay,
I'll play.
I tell him my name,
Including my Catholic confirmation name and my middle name,
And then repeat my original question.
All right,
Your turn.
Who the F are you?
He told me he was an assistant cardiologist working with a team that calls itself the Cardiac Cowboys.
I asked where am I,
And the Cardiac Cowboys said in a cardio-intensive care ward.
I asked why.
He said I had just awakened from a 31-day coma,
That I had suffered a massive heart attack,
Had flatlined two times,
Was flailing and had to be restrained,
Developed pneumonia,
And the Cowboys gave me a 1% chance of survival without cognitive damage and only 5% with.
I turned my head on my pillow and tried to process this heavy recent personal history of which I had no recall at all.
I asked Redbeard,
So am I going to live?
He said,
You're one tough man,
Yes,
You're going to live.
With that,
As if a living switch was activated,
I felt my body,
That didn't feel like the body I remembered and didn't respond to my efforts to move,
My limbs,
I felt my limbs,
Sure,
But they didn't seem to be in any mood to move.
I did a 180-degree visual of the hospital room.
I mused to Redbeard in my whispery rasp,
I'm going to live,
Oh,
What should I do now?
Redbeard moved his head close to mine and whispered,
Whatever the F you want,
Whatever the F you want,
Mister,
And he repeated my full baptized and confirmed name.
I asked him for some ice cream.
He disappeared,
Only to return in moments with a crushed ice in a paper cup.
He had to feed me,
My arms were,
I realized,
Indeed,
Restrained.
So,
I know my name,
That's good.
I went inside my brain,
Shining a cerebral flashlight from wall to wall of my memory and consciousness.
I could recall my earliest known memories to my pulling a real glass pint of milk,
Or was it a cream,
Onto my three-year-old head back in the Brooklyn kitchen that my maternal grandpa built when he came to America after the influenza of 1914 ravaged Europe.
I could remember everything up to going to work one day and kissing my daughter,
Who worked at front reception area of my company,
And telling her in response to her,
Saying that,
Gee,
Dad,
You look tired.
I said,
I'm okay,
Must have slept funny,
My left shoulder's kind of sore.
After that,
I remember nothing until the conversation I just had with the Redbeard cardiac cowboy.
So,
Wiggling my restrained left-hand fingers,
I felt the clumsy buzzer device that hospitals plant in patients' beds for call button stuff.
I pressed and pressed,
And when a burly fellow in a green outfit and a heavy Cyrillic accent came in,
Surprised,
I don't think that he knew that I was quote-unquote back,
I asked,
Where's my family?
My daughter?
Is there anyone out there for me?
Yes,
There was likely some panic in my voice.
Having now summed up my situation,
Restrained,
Confined,
Weak,
Soft,
Numb yet hurting,
Smelly,
Cracked lips,
Gosh knows what else,
I wanted out.
My daughter came in,
Looking lovely and loving and happy with tears,
Bedraggled hair,
And kissed my forehead while touching my hair.
She smelled of freedom and flowers after a light rain.
I asked her for ice cream too,
Any flavor,
But all I got was more spoon-fed crushed ice chips.
I told her I want to go home.
She smiled.
Soon,
There's work to do first,
Dad.
I asked,
What the hell's happened to me?
She said,
Well,
We were in a planning meeting at the company on email security training.
I owned an IT training company,
And we were with 3 Air Mobility Command Brass from Scott Air Force Base when you started snoring,
Dad.
We all thought you just fell asleep,
But then your head rolled back,
And all we could see is the whites of your eyes,
And your mouth hung slack,
And the snoring stopped.
She continued,
I started to dial 911,
But one of the three airmen said to me,
Make that call and turn on the radio to some music,
And let's get to work on this guy.
She told me that they took turns CPRing me in rhythm to the Madonna playlist that she grabbed on her phone.
They worked that way,
Each with 5 breaths,
Rotating for power and rest in between,
And they worked on me for almost a half hour before the EMTs arrived and gurneyed me away.
She told me the Scott Air Force Base folks were all trained in field triage,
And it was their skill and their presence that gave my sick heart and weary brain the oxygen needed to minimize cognitive damage.
I was ashamed.
After all,
I'm a Phi Beta Kappa,
Successful entrepreneur,
Proud man,
Realizing for the first time that my trauma was my daughter's trauma too.
She witnessed her dad dropping dead at work.
I told her I don't remember any of that at all.
She said the docs gave me some memory-affecting drug that blots short-term memory out so I don't ever relive that trauma again,
And that I could have been at a red light or on the road or alone in bed or alone anywhere,
And I would be dead already.
Now,
My illness was not because of some pandemic or rare germs.
No one assaulted me.
I wasn't bit by a venomous insect.
No,
I made myself sick.
After my wife died,
I went into a sullen grief spiral.
Yes,
It's true.
You can die of a broken heart.
I made bad food choices,
Worked too hard,
Exercised not at all,
Withdrew socially,
And tried to hide all my insides from all the outside.
My recovery is forever,
Of course,
And it took me from that cardio bed to a wheelchair to a walker to double canes to single cane to slow walking.
I was 400 pounds when I fell down sick.
I was 275 pounds when my wife died.
I was 360 when I got into my wheelchair.
It took me two years to be able to climb a stair again.
I asked one of my mentors recently,
Why are there so many people on the planet these days?
The answer,
Because we all need each other.
We just have to find out why and how.
The Dalai Lama,
During a Canadian symposium,
Was asked by a middle-aged Londoner coping with a nasty cancer,
Your Holiness,
What should my frame of mind be as I suffer and try to survive my illness?
The Dalai Lama replied,
There are people right now suffering from similar illnesses who have no doctor to go to,
No family to hold them up,
Not even awareness that they are sick.
And so for you,
Practice a mindset of gratitude.
Gratitude you have awareness of your condition.
Gratitude you have access to professional care and resources to help you fight to survive.
Gratitude for the friends and families who are close to you.
No matter what your situation,
Someone always has it worse than you.
Now I have five stents,
A pacemaker,
A defibrillator imprint,
And now I weigh 240 pounds.
I'm blessed with a second life.
And for however long the universe keeps me in this world,
I will be nice.
I see things now at the cellular level.
My near-death experience has changed me.
As the Beatles sang,
I am looking through you.
I have heightened sensitivity to both my own and other people's conditions and circumstances.
As Dylan Thomas suggested,
We all do.
I now sing in my chains like the sea.
When anyone asks me if I believe in miracles,
I say,
Yep.
The only thing is I don't know how many miracles have happened to me.
I bet there are scores of them I never even noticed.
Have you ever considered that this world is a miraculous place?
That my earthly journey and yours and all of our earthly journeys are nothing but occurrences of gratitude?
Well,
I am here to tell you that it is so.
When we change the way we look at things,
The things we look at change.
Thank you.
