In writing my first book, “This is How it Feels to Heal,” I have increasingly seen that it has been an unacknowledged work for some time and is only now coming together. “Whose got him?” is an anecdote that will be included.
In looking back over the various blog entries, social media posts, and my journal through 2011-2019, I have found many passages that I will include in the book.
Of course, I could write it as a narrative from my perspective today. But that is precisely the reason I have not endeavored to put it in the book for so long despite being asked to do so by others. I felt as if I needed time to separate myself from the events to have a less narrow or at least impassioned view.
However, that is outdated thinking based on my training as a historian in college. Generally speaking, history takes time to write, and it is best done from a distance. But this is not a history book, and, in much the same way as I used primary sources, those being sources from the time of the event itself, I have chosen to include much of what I have already said on these issues from the time they were experienced.
Below is an example of such a passage. The words that follow were from my journal in the months immediately following the transplant. It was about the moment I left the hospital room to be taken to the operating room to receive my liver transplant.
There will be much more about this in the final manuscript, but I said I would keep you in the loop about the book’s production, and I present this as an example.
This entry was titled “Whose got him?” The scene took place on January 3, 2019. I had received a call from the VA the day before asking if I would accept an organ that had come available. Of course, I said yes, and after a whirlwind trip involving opening a closed airport in a Georgia rainstorm, being the sole passenger on a Lear Jet that landed to pick me up and subsequently land in a snowstorm in Pittsburgh, to a limo that was waiting to take me to the hospital in the early hour darkness.
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“Whose got him?” was the first thing I heard when we hit the hallway outside my room. We had just left the room I had been placed in when I arrived at the Pittsburgh Veterans Medical Center about 15 hours earlier. I was on a rolling hospital bed, noticed a clock, and it read 6:40 p.m., then I heard: “I thought you had him.”
I realized the question was about me as I started to list sideways, and my upper half crashed into a mobile nursing station in the hall. I heard gasps from the three nurses that were suddenly all around me. I recognized all of them; they had been with me the last few hours, getting me ready for my 6:00 p.m. trip to receive my gift.
Having let me go loose left them mortified. I busted out in laughter, and the nurses followed suit. I had been thinking up until that point. For seven years, I have been waiting for this moment. I have been held down by this terrible sickness that dominated my mind even on my best days for seven years. For seven years, I could do little but stand by and watch my beloved UGASports.com slip from my fingers and 14 years of building it from a hobby in my bedroom to a significant player in the world of online sports media and with it my career. I saw my home go on the market, and the one we move into does not have my name on the title. I watched as my wife grew weary of my weakened state or something, either way, we parted ways eventually. However, we lived in the same home, apart. I watched the faces of people I tried to work for as they looked at me like I was a simpleton. At times, I struggled to keep up with conversations because the Hepatic encephalopathy got in the way, and I was eventually let go.
Through it all, I never gave up. It made me very hard to the outside world, but I had no strength to wield a sword, so I turned to Spirit, and there I found comfort and durability. However, it did little to help me in the everyday world, for there you need strength to, and I would need strength to get through this operation, and it was a scary thing to consider. Would I at long last cave? Would I be able to keep the brave face I had worn for so long through the halls of the VA down to the OR, thinking of what was going to happen when I got there? There was no turning back. I was going to be cut wide open. They were going to take things out of me, some for good, and they were going to put things in me. They were going to put an IV in my jugular. Yikes.
I could not have been let go at a better time, for we laughed and laughed to the OR, and when we arrived, the doors opened, and a brilliant white light cascaded out like from some mystical realm. The temperature dropped about 15 degrees, and in we went. No problem. No need for a shield wall, only friendlies here.
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Notes: At the end, when I refer to “shield wall,” I am talking about the way Vikings would engage their enemies in combat. At the time, I was very much involved with the Spiritual aspects of dealing with “The Teacher,” aka cancer, and the “friendlies” were anything that would help me heal. Even the surgical cutlery that sparkled on the table next to me was a part of “This is how it feels to heal.” So before I went under, as I glanced next to me to the table and then up to my doctor, the last thing I said was, “Are those, my friends?” He said yes, and it was lights out for me.
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