[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.