(05-06-2014 12:52 PM)nachoman91 Wrote: (05-03-2014 09:43 AM)bitcruncher Wrote: I've never won the lottery. But I can pretty much match Frane Selak disaster for disaster.
Sounds hard to believe. Lets hear your tale?
Most have already heard this tale. But here it goes again, for your benefit.
When I was 3, my heart stopped while riding my tricycle. I crashed through a door, and fell 10 feet headfirst on concrete. I had a grapefruit sized knot on the back of my head. This was in the 1950s, and the doctor said, "the swelling is going out, not in, so we'll just leave it alone." The swelling was subdural brain tissue, or brain tissue that's outside the skull, that was being forced out through a hole my skull (
opened by the fall) by the swelling of my brain. That was my first traumatic brain injury (
TBI), and it effected my balance. I was prone to falling when changing direction or attitude. I started taking ballet when I was 5, which helped my coordination and balance considerably.
My heart stopped again when I was 13. I was playing a clarinet at halftime of my Junior HS football game. In the middle of a song, almost at the 50 yard line, I fell over backward. I woke up nearly 5 minutes later with 4000 people staring at me laying on the field. I never played the clarinet again.
During hand to hand combat training in Army basic training, the guy I was training with got tired of getting thrown around. He pulled his bayonet and tried to run me through. I caught his knife hand a little too soon, and got the bayonet through the wrist. I was smart enough not to pull it out, so I didn't bleed to death.
I got shot 3 times in Vietnam. Each time it took a while to get treatment, and one time when they finally got around to me, they initially declared me dead. A paperwork error ensued, and as a result, my name is on the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. I was also inside 2 helicopters that were shot down, forcing me to walk back to the front lines.
I passed out during the construction of the New River Gorge Bridge. According to all reports, I fell 440 feet into the top of a pine tree. I came to at the foot of the tree, in a pile of broken limbs, with several broken ribs and a collapsed lung, to go along with several other assorted aches and pains. I met the rescue party at the foot of a cliff about 150 feet up the hill from where I landed.
I've passed out due to my heart stopping, cracking my skull each time, in a warehouse in Charleston, WV, a warehouse in Omaha, NE, the computer science lab at WV State, and the Mojave Desert near Twenty Nine Palms, CA. I used to do a lot of freehand climbing too, and passed out while climbing El Kapitan at Yosemite (slid 150 feet down a steep incline into a pile of mud). I passed out while climbing Seneca Rocks. Another convenient pile of dirt saved me, and I quit climbing after this.
And to top it all off, the last 3 times my heart stopped on me before they discovered why I had been passing out my entire life, I was driving. Christmas of 1996, I passed out on Jefferson Road in S. Charleston, WV, the main drag between I-64 and US-119. I had my brother's 2 sons, and a boy who lived in my mother's neighborhood in the truck with me. One of the boys said I quit talking in the middle of a sentence, leaned my head against the window, and we sideswiped a car before riding the guardrail to a stop. On a windy West Virginia highway, I passed out on the one straight stretch on the road, and the only place with a guard rail at that time, to keep you from going into the creek.
July 4, 1998, I was heading to work in Oak Ridge, to put the finishing touches on a proposal for a government contract. My last memory is turning onto Pellissippi Parkway 7 miles from where the wreck happened. Apparently, I passed out where you're supposed to turn to go into Oak Ridge, and instead I ran the red light, tore the front end off a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and t-boned a Chevy. Nobody in the Jeep was hurt, and the driver held my IV while they waited on the helicopter. The driver of the Chevy was quite so lucky. But he wasn't seriously hurt, even though his mother wanted him to sue me to get rich quick (
No seat belt - no worry). Although I have no recollection of what happened. I got another TBI, skull fractures, compressed C3, C4, T3, and L4, broken clavicle and 2 ribs, fractured sternum and 2 more ribs, damaged the hip, shoulder, and knee on my right side, bruised my heart, and collapsed both lungs.
As an added kicker, it was after this wreck that it was determined that not only had I picked up hepatitis B in southeast Asia, I had also picked up hepatitis C. Both were the southeast Asian strain of the virus, so they assume I picked up both at the same time. It's as good a guess as any, since my liver was shot and I needed a transplant after having hepatitis C running chronic for 25 years. If only hepatitis C had been discovered before 1988, or mine discovered before 1998. I developed liver cancer in 2001. Each tumor had high levels of radiation injected directly into the tumor to keep it from spreading. If the cancer metastasized outside the liver I was no longer a viable transplant candidate. I had to wait, but I was one of the lucky 30%. I got my transplant on June 30, 2004, and continue to be monitored by the doctors at Vandy. But 70% of the people on the transplant list don't live to get their transplant, because not enough people donate.
The last time I passed out due to my heart stopping was November 8, 2008 - the day after my birthday. I suffered whiplash, another TBI, and a stupid cop, who ended up losing his job over this. It was about 6 months after this accident, they discovered that my heart would undergo episodes of asystole (
stopping for ~3.4s each episode), sometimes in series. When my brain became oxygen starved due to the brain not having any blood in it, it shuts down from anoxia. There is no warning. A pacemaker corrects the problem. But I no longer drive. Too much damage to my central nervous system.
