My Random Life | Elbrecht's Corpuscle

Veritas

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Elbrecht

During a heated text message exchange back in March, a college roommate of mine took umbrage with me cheering on Harvard in a basketball game. But this wasn’t just any other basketball game. It was the 2nd round of the NCAA tournament known as March Madness. The Ivy League champions, having defeated a more well-respected and well-known opponent in the 1st round, were in the midst of a furious comeback against a perennial title contender, the Spartans of Michigan State.

Alas, the brains of Harvard succumbed to the muscle of MSU in a game for the ages. The Harvard Crimson, a band of super intellectual b-ballers made a name for themselves with that showing, along with their back-to-back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances. Veritas.

Veritas is Latin for “Truth” and appears on Harvard’s coat of arms. Thus, I typically refer to Harvard as simply, Veritas. And I think I’m allowed to refer to Harvard as Veritas. After all, I went to school there.

No, seriously. I did. I went to Veritas. Not in a Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting” attends MIT type of way; I wasn’t cleaning the bathrooms and scribbling unintelligible theorems on blackboards.

I actually attended Harvard. Excuse me, Veritas.

From 2006 to 2008 I attended Veritas as a part-time student in order to complete my pre-medicine requirements.

My association with the most world-renowned academic institution is a bit convoluted thought… I must clarify that I attended the University, not “The College.”

The University includes “The College”, the medical school, the law school, the divinity school, the Kennedy school of government, and various other entities that do not fall under the umbrella of the undergraduate education.

I attended the Extension School, an entity designed for working stiffs who want to take Harvard-level courses in a variety of academic areas. The courses meet in the evenings and on weekends so students can torture themselves at work all day and then try to pass Organic Chemistry by attending lectures two times a week for 4 hours apiece. I get heart palpitations and a migraine simply recalling those days.

[Note: the Coat of Arms for the Extension School displays two bushels of wheat and a burning lamp. The two bushels of wheat represent the original cost of attendance of the Extension School’s precursor, the Lowell Institute. The burning lamp signified the “learning by night” philosophy of the School. Let me tell you, I paid by credit card due to my inability to harvest wheat and I studied by overhead lamp; as you may know, fire codes have been updated since the early 20th century.]

While I completed my coursework at Veritas, I mingled with many undergraduates in the Science Center and around campus. During those instances, I never heard anyone refer to themselves as a student of “The College.” I even dated a graduate of “The College” while I was living in nYc. She never once referred to it as “The College”, only as Harvard.

Yet, during my return visits to Boston and Cambridge over the past several years, my attendance at Veritas has arisen in casual conversation. On these occasions, I have been asked if I attended “The College” or the University.

It seems that the undergraduates at Harvard have become even more snooty in the past half-decade.

One such incident occurred while I was volunteering overnight at a homeless shelter in Cambridge. This particular shelter was run by Veritas undergrad students, which in and of itself, I thought was pretty cool.

Before our shift started, we went around in a circle and discussed how we came to be volunteering that night. Each of the undergrads pointed out that they attended “The College” when introducing themselves. I made sure to indicate I had gone to the Extension School.

Obviously, I wouldn’t want them to think I’d scored a 1600 on my SAT’s… Oh, it’s out of 2400 now? Thank you for informing me dearest student of “The College.” Go to hell.

Though I wasn’t trying to impress any of these scions of intelligence, I made sure to slip in the fact that I was about to begin my third year of medical school. It didn’t faze them.

Oh, you aren’t impressed because you go to “The College” and will be starting your own NGO in Zamibia when you graduate? Have fun! Watch out for Malaria!

During the aforementioned text exchange, my former roommate made sure to point out that I had graduated from Miami University, commonly referred to as “The Harvard of the Midwest“, not the actual Harvard University. It was for this reason that he insisted I could not claim allegiance to Veritas.

[Note: The administration at Miami liked pushing the idea of “The Harvard of the Midwest” during my undergraduate years. They often cited the ivy-laden brick buildings on campus and the focus on undergraduate education as a reason to make such a comparison. Let me set the record straight: Miami is no Veritas. It would be accurate to say there are super intelligent people at Miami who are on par with students attending Harvard. However, the sheer number of people on Harvard’s campus of incredible intelligence transforms it into a verifiable cesspool of academic excellence. Miami could never match the transformative properties inherent in such a place. Though, I must say, Love and Honor.]

Other than his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Miami, this roommate also received his MBA from Boston College, so he tried rebuffing my intense interest in the basketball game by reminding me he actually has a degree from a Boston-based university. I quickly pointed out that Boston College didn’t make the NCAA tournament and has been slaughtered by Veritas the last two times they played. In. Your. Face.

I was steadfast in my allegiance to Veritas, despite his repeatedly insisting I have no such claim.

My allegiance goes further than burning the midnight oil at the Science Center; I watched Jeremy Lin carve a hole into the heart of the Cornell defense before anyone outside of Cambridge had ever heard of “Linsanity.” I made scathing and disparaging social media remarks when Tommy Amaker was hired to be the Veritas head coach in 2007 and summarily dismissed half of his senior class a week before school started because he didn’t think they were good enough to play for him.

And I have routinely attended their games when I return to Cambridge, cheering them on despite Amaker’s questionable recruiting. I even watched them get diced to pieces by a rabid Columbia team in nYc in the winter of 2013; Veritas would go on to win the Ivy League Championship as well as their first March Madness game, just as this year’s 2014 team did.

So I feel justified in claiming allegiance to Veritas for a myriad of reasons. I’m certainly more aligned with Veritas than any number of people who claim another university or college they never attended, but wear a hoodie, sweatshirt or baseball cap on which the schools logo is emblazoned. Though, for the record, I do own a Veritas baseball cap and crimson t-shirt with “Harvard” across the chest.

But I think I’m allowed to wear such things. I did go to Veritas. I mean, Harvard. No, I really did.

Where the Heart is

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Elbrecht

Kristi called out to me in a soft whimper, “Ean?”

I responded by peering up the stairway to the third floor, whereupon I could see her right hand grasping her left wrist. Blood was visibly seeping out between her fingers.

It was Martin Luther King Jr Day. The year was 2007. And at that point, I had been living in a group home for 2 and a half years.

I had arrived home a few moments earlier, ascended the stairs to the second floor, and set my bag down outside of the small staff office. It would remain there until I returned home from the Emergency Department by myself several hours later.

Kristi heard the front door close all the way from the third floor. Perhaps her senses were exponentially heightened due to the shock of seeing blood spray from her wrist as it was sliced by a razor. Her next instinct had been to leap from her bed and into the hallway. She could only see my shoes from her vantage point to the second floor, but even such a minute bit of information gave me away.

Kristi’s decision to end her life had coincided perfectly with my return home from a peaceful day off.

I quickly scampered up the stairs as Kristi stood outside her bedroom. I unlocked the door to my own bedroom, which was located caddy-corner to hers and grabbed a towel. Kristi was half-sobbing, half-whimpering as I pressed the dark blue hand towel on top of her right hand. Standing outside her room, I could tell that she had been seated on her bed when the razor punctured her radial artery; a fine spray of red blood was juxtaposed against the yellow wall.

She pulled her right hand from below the towel so I could apply even more direct pressure. After a moment, she made a fist and flexed at the wrist as I took a quick peek at the damage. The pressure kept more blood from squirting out, but I could tell we needed to head to the nearby Emergency Department immediately. Kristi resisted my initial suggestion to go to the hospital, but after a moment of thought, she could see the concern in my face, as well as the blood on her right hand and now the towel and agreed to go.

I knocked on one of the other staff’s bedroom door, located directly across the hall from Kristi’s, hoping she was home. Thankfully, she was. I gave her a quick synopsis of what happened and asked her to clean the wall with some bleach before Kristi’s roommate returned.

The Cambridge City Hospital was only one street over from our home, a social project developed by Harvard psychology graduate students over forty years earlier. Our close proximity meant we were in the ED only five minutes after Kristi retrieved a razor blade. Once there, Kristi was apologizing profusely every few seconds for ruining my towel; its dark blue color disguised the carnage beneath.

The ED was not particularly busy, especially for a holiday, but I didn’t like the idea of sitting in the waiting room any longer than necessary. Though the bleeding had almost completely subsided, my rudimentary medical knowledge in those days told me this was due mostly to the flexion of her wrist and the pressure it was causing.

However, I could not help but visualize Kristi extending her wrist and spraying blood on the backs of the family sitting in front of us. So I went up to the triage nurse and politely explained that my friend’s injury was self-inflicted and would she please move us to the front of the line so she could be evaluated.

Through the glass partition, the nurse looked out into the waiting room and saw Kristi sitting there, holding the towel against her flexed wrist and nodded at me. I called to Kristi and she stood up, took a few steps towards the door separating the waiting room from the triage bay, and grimaced.

Only fifteen minutes earlier, as I had been walking home from the YMCA in Central Square, Kristi had been on the phone talking to her older brother, who happened to be a physician. Despite his training as a psychiatrist, he had not sugar-coated his concerns about her mental health when he informed her that he didn’t feel safe leaving her alone with his young son during an up-coming visit. She began crying and hung up the phone.

Despite Kristi’s battle with depression in her early twenties, she had graduated from law school and begun a successful professional career. But as it does with so many individuals, depression seeped back into her life and had become all-encompassing. A suicide attempt led to a hospitalization for several weeks at one of the world renowned psychiatric hospitals in Boston.

Upon her discharge in the fall of 2006, she joined our group home after a week-long communal interview process that was required for all residents and staff. The first few months had been difficult for Kristi, due to her inability to find a steady job in the legal field again. When a reliable temp position opened up a few weeks earlier, she began to thrive.

But that call, and the message therein, drew out her self-hatred and the fury of “helplessness and hopelessness” which characterizes depression. Unbeknownst to myself and the other staff, who lived in the home with the residents, Kristi had been prepared for this desperate last act. When she returned from the Emergency Department several hours after I had departed, she asked me to remove the box of razor blades hidden in one of her drawers.

Over the course of three years, I lived in two group homes belonging to the same organization in Cambridge, MA; first as a counselor, then as the director of the home where I lived with Kristi. Focused on helping high-functioning individuals transition from in-patient hospitalization (for mental health issues) back to independent living, the opportunity to be a part of this unique program had brought me to Cambridge from Ohio in my pursuit of becoming a clinical psychologist.

But in the fall of 2004, after only a few short months of living in one of the homes and participating in the project as a counselor for its residents, my purpose in life was irrevocably transformed. I had come to get hands-on experience by living within the mental health population, learning how to best serve their health needs, but I was shocked to see how pathetic the basic medical care is within this portion of our community; a chance encounter with another young professional who was going back to school to become a physician set my wheels in motion.

The three years I spent living with over 60 incredible people, those who were trying to conquer their illness and others like myself who wanted to help, transformed my life and gave me the strength and perspective to survive my own trials and tribulations.

My experience as a medical student, my failures and successes therein, the friends I made, the colleagues I cherished, the patients I cared about and for… all of them were a direct result of my life in a group home.

Home. Truly, where the heart is.

Throw Momma from the Benz

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Elbrecht

Since I’ve been back in Lexington, I started watching episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” on Netflix. I am using my iPhone to watch because I’m staying at my mom’s place; she has no internet or TV.

It’s hard to get lost in the details of a show when the picture is so small you can hardly make out the characters’ faces, but in Season 2, Danny DeVito becomes a central character in the show. He plays Frank, the father of the brother-sister duo who make up half of the quartet of main characters.

His role in “It’s ASIP” revitalized his career and opened him up to a whole new generation of fans. A generation that may not recall one of his paramount roles, that of the denigrated son, Owen, in “Throw Momma from the Train.”

In that film, he stars opposite Billy Crystal, a true titan of comedy, but DeVito steals the movie with his laughable and pathetic role. As a son burdened by his mother’s foibles, he daydreams of offing her and an association with Crystal makes it a mutually beneficial possibility.

I’ve been in Lexington for nearly six months and I’m beginning to wish I could spoof DeVito’s brilliance with my own entry, “Throw Momma from the Benz.”

[Note: my car is a 1989 Mercedes-Benz.]

As I’ve written before, I never wished to return to Lexington, except for maybe a quick pass-through and holiday as I’ve done in the previous 15 years. The few friends I have here are entrenched in their own lives and I’m merely in a go-between period in my own.

But my momma put out her regular distress signal and I felt compelled to answer. So rather than spending my go-between somewhere like San Francisco, Houston, Boston, or DC (each where I had a free place to stay and short-term professional opportunities waiting), I drove my Benz south from Columbus, OH to Lexington.

I acquiesced to her distress call, “I’ve been taking the bus”, because I couldn’t imagine my mother surviving a winter using the bus to get around Lexington. It is not like using mass transit in the cities I have lived in during the past five years: Miami, Boston, Chicago, or nYc. A reliance on the bus system in Lexington is completely inefficient and unwieldy. It’s for people who for one reason or another can’t afford to have their own form of transportation. My mother has several reasons.

Unbeknownst to me, her leased car had been repossessed months earlier because of delinquent payments. And as it so happened, this winter was unusually long and brutal. I’m certain that without the use of my car during the day, she would have never found a full-time job, been able to make minor strides in her social life, or even get her laundry done on a regular basis. When I leave in few weeks I am unsure how any of those things will be sustained.

After six months of being in a place I never wished to be, I am almost fed up; because her distress is regular, and it is completely self-induced/inflicted. I can say this honestly because I have been dealing with it for my entire life, been fully cognizant of it for my entire adult life, and been successfully coping with it for nearly as long.

However, when speaking to friends and colleagues over the years, I have almost always covered up her behavior and left out critical details, partially because I didn’t want to start a diatribe, but also because I didn’t think they could relate. I’m still unsure of the latter, but I have begun to give up on preventing the former (ex. this post).

When I have broached the subject with professional colleagues in medicine and/or behavioral health, most are quick to question the harsh picture I paint, often times noting how “normal” I seem despite the issues I relay. But I usually rebut their comments with my honest belief that I have succeeded as an adult not by following in my parents’ footsteps, but by avoiding them.

Maybe this is overly harsh on my part; maybe it paints me as a spoiled brat who can’t be thankful for having a relatively privileged childhood (especially in comparison to the countless patients I have cared for in the boroughs of nYc and ethnic enclaves of Chicago). If it does, so be it.

[I do feel unbelievably grateful to my parents for the opportunities my siblings and I were provided as children. They provided a foundation upon which we could build successful lives, but not without significant interpersonal and financial struggle. However, I find it beyond reproach that their personal and financial decisions as adults have led them to try to make our adult lives a constant mind-field of horrors.]

When I mention the number of times she has moved homes/apartments in the 18 years she’s lived in Lexington (7 at last count) or the numbers of jobs she’s quit or been fired from (well over a dozen), or the fact that she can’t financially support herself enough to afford a car, people usually start to give me a puzzled look.

And that’s why I want to Throw Momma from the Benz.

I want to help her, which is why I’m in Lexington, but I don’t want to do it because I’ve been coerced (which is how I feel). I want to help her because that’s what most appreciative children do for their parents. But I don’t feel like the child in this situation. I feel like the parent. And I find myself helping her due to my own self-preservation, trying to prevent an even more dire situation, and a desire to not become my father (who abandoned his own parents in their final years).

Admittedly, of my siblings, I have suffered the least from her behavior. At the first opportunity (college) I got as far away as possible, but still within a close proximity if I felt the need to be of assistance. Or if she felt it necessary to request my presence.

My brother and sister were not so lucky. Both of them were at one time living in Lexington as young adults, and both of them were “required” to financially support my mother, despite her being gainfully employed. She would tell them “you have no choice. I need you to pay for [insert anything that costs money… rent, car payment, utility bill, groceries, etc].” When they would ask why, she would say, “Because I am your mother.”

I avoided this fictional financial indebtedness to her by keeping my expenses and salary close to the vest. Being on the other side of the country made this quite easy.

Yet, she once broached the subject with me over the phone when I was only a few months from starting medical school. As usual, I avoided giving her any monetary values as answers to her probing questions. But this time, she responded to my vagueness by requesting that I give her a substantial amount of money. The same amount that had been left to me by a Great Aunt and Uncle when they passed away; it paid for my first year of college. I was so infuriated that I asked if she was purposely trying to sabotage my life.

She has not asked for any money since.

“You have no choice” was used frequently when I was in college and grad school two hours away from Lexington. She would tell me to come home to help her move from a house to an apartment or one apartment to another.

“You have no choice.”

I would simply and succinctly inform my friends and roommates that I would be away for the weekend to help my mom out. In the course of those six years, I helped her move three times, and she moved herself a fourth time [which was technically the third move].

I point out this third move, because this was the time she quit her job in Lexington, took a job back in my hometown of Wichita, KS, and showed up at my sister’s doorstep in Wichita. She told my sister, “I’m staying here. You have no choice.” When that job didn’t pan out, she returned to Lexington, though only God knows why.

On each of the moving occasions, I would arrive and no pre-planning or packing would have been done. It would all have to be done in the course of a day, relegating the necessary process of purging crap from one’s possessions to wishful thinking. Yet somehow, even the crap from a previous move would have been unpacked into a corner somewhere, only to be required to be packed back up for the next move.

What is a grown adult to do when your parent constantly puts you in positions to be less of an adult than you wish for yourself? In the study of human behavior, this is the truest definition of pathology.

Thankfully, both of my siblings were able to get out of Lexington and out from under her financial thumb (as far as I’m aware) and relocate to Boston, where I had created a life for myself and tried to make a place for them to start anew.

And so, without any of the three of us to pilfer money from, she has slipped into a place wherein she rents a small one-bedroom apartment with no basic amenities (washer/dryer, tv, cable, internet, etc), can’t afford a car payment, and still has belongings with some monetary value packed into cardboard boxes in every available corner.

A part of me is sad at how different her life is from the one I have created for myself over the last 15 years (ex. she tried to convince me NOT to become a physician before I left for medical school).

A part of me is infuriated that her behavior is self-inflicted (it is a choice to be so rude/nasty/inconsiderate that you can’t keep a job), even though it is pathological.

A part of me is curious as to how this whole situation will resolve itself (it won’t; my simple presence here is an admittance that it can’t).

A part of me is resigned to the fact that I can’t Throw Momma from the Benz. (I wish I could. I want to. But I can’t. Doing so would be repeating the sins of my father.)

So I’ll do what I can, when I can, for as long as I can. She knows this. And recognizes that my future earnings will make “what I can, when I can, for as long as I can” an indefinite amount, an indefinite number of opportunities, and an indefinite length of time.

But I have to be ok with that. It’s the price I’m willing to pay to not have to Throw Momma from the Train.

Nine Lives… part II

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Elbrecht

[Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape with the fall of Icarus”, ca. 1558]

In case you missed it: Nine Lives… part I

To recap Lives 1-4…

#1: Pneumonia-induced bubble boy survives on Atari and Jell-O

#2: Asthma and Animal Allergies combine to nearly suffocate my ascendance into teenagerhood.

#3: Tracheitis can nearly kill me, but it can’t keep me from dancing with a Debutante.

#4: Semi-Survivor… German-formulated Panzer tank (aka The Ghetto Sled) prevents death on the highway.

Life #5: Ended at age 22. After surviving four years at an alcohol-soaked university and burning through two lives, I spent the summer between undergrad and grad school living in Cincinnati. Due to my desire to avoid returning to Lexington for three months, my buddy Gib had offered a bed in his folk’s place as a way-station between earning my Bachelor’s degree and an attempt to go into even Higher Education.

After cozily sleeping til 11AM, one morning I awoke to find that I was having trouble breathing, but this was unlike anything I had experienced in my previous four lives. I quickly ran through my routine of airway-saving measures, but nothing alleviated the difficulty I was having.

Alarmed by my obvious distress, Gib and I hopped in his car and went to the nearest Urgent Treatment Center. The young doctor manning the office took one look into my mouth and his jaw hit the floor. With his pupils dilated to the size of nickels, he immediately insisted I rush to the hospital; he’d never seen such a large tonsil.

I tried to calm him down as he attempted to convince me of my imminent doom. He provided a pen-light and mirror; I could then see my left tonsil was so swollen that the back of my throat was barely visible. I continued my insistence for not wanting to rush to the hospital. He looked at me incredulously. But I was so relieved it was only a pulsating tonsil, not a swollen trachea, bronchi, or alveoli causing his (and my) concern.

He eventually relented and gave me some antibiotics and an appointment to see an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) doctor in two days. And a stern warning that if I began feeling worse that I HAD to go to the hospital.

On Monday I went to my appointment, where the nurse echoed the young doc’s assessment: I had the grand-daddy of pulsating tonsils. The ENT doctor entered the room, asked me to hold on to the arms of the chair like my life depended on it, and grabbed a needle which he plunged into the swollen mass.

He retracted it, looked puzzled, and admitted he had expected it to burst. But only a small trickle of blood had exited. Disappointed, he gave me a different antibiotic prescription, some pain medication (Codeine), insisted that I go on a liquid diet, and asked for me to return the following Monday. And also provided a stern warning that if I began feeling worse that I HAD to go to the hospital.

Gib and I stopped by the pharmacy and filled my prescriptions on the way home. The Codeine knocked me out cold. So much so that I spent the next week sleeping on the couch in the TV room. In the same clothes. Every day. I couldn’t even make it up the stairs to the bed because I was so drowsy. Our friends would come over and ask if I was dying.

Each day, Gib would run out to Mickey D’s and grab me a vanilla milk shake. It doubled as a vehicle for my antibiotics and Codeine, as well as a cooling force against the warm pulsations. After quietly sucking it down, I would roll back over, and go back to being nearly comatose.

When the following Monday finally arrived, Gib’s mom offered to take me back to the ENT. With my appointment at 11AM, I rolled off the couch at 10AM, stumbled upstairs, took a quick shower and changed my clothes. As I clumsily made my way downstairs in a Codeine-induced haze, I felt like I needed to cough.

So I reared back and tried to clear my throat as if a hair ball was waiting to be expelled.

The result was a barely audible pop accompanied with a release of pressure; I could only assume it was my tonsil exploding. Almost instantaneously, I could feel the now-former contents of my left tonsil pouring down my throat.

The feeling induced my gag reflex, so I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a little Dixie cup, and promptly filled it with the pus-blood mixture from my tonsil.

The Mum (aka Gib’s mom) still insisted she take me to the ENT to make sure I wasn’t in need of some sort of surgery and stitches from the explosion. Thankfully, I wasn’t. But the doc still poked another needle into the tonsil, hoping for a secondary explosion, which did not occur. Apparently my hack-cough had expelled everything into my stomach or the Dixie cup.

[Note: Obviously, this End of Life wasn’t as traumatic as #4… however, I did have left over Codeine from this experience, which I subsequently used one night about a year later while drinking beers with a girl I was “dating” named Jasmine. My body could not handle this volatile mixture. Medically, no one’s body should be able to handle this volatile mixture. It felt as if every orifice of my body needed to expel whatever contents were within. Based on the sounds coming from my bathroom, my roommates could have only assumed I had contracted Ebola and would need to be scraped from the tile floor in the morning… Life Lesson Learned: Never, Ever, mix alcohol and prescription pain meds… Or date women whose name will automatically make your friends think you met her at a strip club.]

[P.S. Note: Remember, say NO to drugs. And women with stripper names.]

Life #6: Ended at age 28. While in the midst of applying to medical school, my girlfriend of 3.5 years, who doubled as my best friend, decided that spending the rest of her life with me wasn’t going to make her happy any more. It was completely unexpected and obliterated the limits of my coping mechanisms. The aftermath was not pretty. I spent three months living by myself in the duplex we had shared, leaving incredibly early in the morning and returning only to sleep. The time between was filled with work, exercise, and wanderlust, leading me into random neighborhoods of Boston.

However, the break-up itself wasn’t the reason Life #6 ended… though it did represent the meta-physical end to a life I expected to lead. More so, Life #6 ended because the person who emerged out of the depths of those three months was a new “me”.

Those three months, which were book-ended by her departure and my younger brother moved in, were best characterized as “Hepatitis and He-Man.” With my life suddenly devoid of its biggest asset, I would spend Friday and Saturday nights indulging in the company provided by my friends or the Enormous Room in Cambridge. These shenanigans would be off-set by the legendary-in-my-own-mind workout sessions I found myself completing at the gym on the subsequent day.

On a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I would often slowly begin to rouse myself, eat a light meal, and pack my bag for the gym. When I got there, I was a beast. All of the carbohydrates (and pain) I’d ingested overnight were begging to be burned away. I obliged by conducting my own personal indoor triathlons (torture sessions) over the next several hours. I had never so effortlessly pushed my body to its limits. Using the elliptical machine as my run, a stationary bike, and swimming laps in the pool, I escaped from my world of heartache and hepatitis. The endorphins I felt kept my mind at ease. The fatigue I usually felt after an hour of exercise never arrived. The sore muscles were completely absent. The willingness to quit had evaporated.

Things that had previously limited me, in mind, body, and spirit were no longer present. And I felt like I could accomplish anything I put in front of myself. This belief and the limits I overcame have served me well in the subsequent years.

And from that experience, emerged Life #7… which thankfully, by my count, I’m still on. It’s been good so far, filled with medical knowledge and clinical skills, amazing adventures in the Caribbean… Miami… Boston… Chicago… nYc… Columbus, countless new friends, and a life full of opportunity.

But I must say, in the future it would be nice to avoid any future brushes with absent airway induced death. And vehicular assaults. And soul-crushing misadventures of the heart.

Especially since I only have two lives left after this one.