Celebrating my 1st Alive Day

The new most important day in my life

It’s the time of year for retrospections, and I’m here to add my own. 

As I view my life I will now forever remember December 28, 2022 as the day I came very close to dying. 12/28 is my Alive Day. That is a term sometimes used by veterans to describe the day they very nearly lost their life. The same goes for me, except it wasn’t combat that almost killed me, it was my own body. 

That night I went to the emergency room hardly able to breathe. Any physical exertion made me majorly out of breath. I had this issue for a couple of days but it kept getting worse. I had even gone to prompt care a couple days earlier and was treated with a steroid believing it was an allergic reaction. On December 28th I decided I needed to go to the ER after a 15ft walk from the bathroom to my bedroom made me so out of breath that it took 20 minutes to recover. 

My parents took me to the ER and when I got there things started getting even worse. I got on oxygen and I still wasn’t able to catch my breath. If you’ve ever gone to the ER and had to get put on oxygen there’s a good chance you were put on somewhere between 1-5 Liters of Oxygen per minute and it probably wasn’t even pure oxygen. For about 2-3 hours in the middle of the night I was on 40 Liters of 100% Oxygen and I absolutely could not catch my breath. So much oxygen was being blasted into my nose yet it didn’t seem to make a difference. I was fighting for my life. As it went longer I started to question whether I could keep it up. I was getting absolutely exhausted from the effort.

At one point I slipped down in the bed in a way that made it impossible to absorb oxygen. This event caused me to experience a taste of going down the path of dying by asphyxiation, of choking to death. I started to lose sensation in my lips, my vision narrowed, I started to screech out in loud unintelligible noises trying to get any sort of help. Relatively quickly a group of nurses came to lift me up in the sheets and got me sat in a position where I could actually breath and absorb oxygen again. While my breathing wasn’t good yet it was much better than literally dying for lack of oxygen. I knew pretty immediately what I had just experienced.

They ran a series of tests but I was hard to initially diagnose because I had no other symptoms other than being out of breath. There were no other signs pointing in any sort of direction so it took a few hours to adequately diagnose what was happening. I got asked many times if there was anything else going wrong with me or if I had some other ailment that would point in a direction. I felt helpless when all I could tell them was that I was out of breath and that while I was obese I was otherwise perfectly healthy with no other conditions. 

They finally diagnosed me as having a pulmonary embolism(PE), a blood clot in the lungs. I was in St Mary’s in Galesburg and they were trying to figure out how to get me to St Francis in Peoria or another bigger regional hospital. The normal procedure for something like this is taking a small tube and snaking it up the body into the lungs, the snake would then release blood thinners to destroy the clot. This procedure is surgical and St. Mary’s wasn’t able to get it done (I think due to the severity of my condition) and St. Francis in Peoria didn’t have any beds open in its ICU. So not only would they have needed to find me somewhere to go but I also needed to get there. I later learned that my conditions were bad enough that they wanted to fly me in the helicopter, but I was 50lbs over the weight limit at the time. Wherever I went was going to have to be by ambulance. Even then, from my point of view it didn’t feel like I had enough time to make it through that ambulance ride. I was getting truly exhausted and in the moment started seriously contemplating if this was how I was going to die. 

But the doctors got an idea. The reason the snaking procedure mentioned before is the standard response is because a majority of people who suffer from PEs are older and in worse health after years of diabetes, smoking, other chronic illnesses, or just aging. While I was obese, I was an otherwise perfectly healthy 27 year old. In addition, the year earlier I had lost a good amount of weight and worked out so I was doing pretty decent. Doctors many times through this whole deal (whether rightly or wrongly) said I didn’t look like a typical PE patient. 

So the doctors proposed that they just pump my whole body with extreme blood thinners instead of just to the clot with the surgical procedure. This isn’t the normal procedure because again most people with PEs are in poor health and if they were put on the extreme blood thinners it may clear the clot but they’d most likely die of internal bleeding. But since I was young and healthy I was at a much much lower risk of internal bleeding. There was still risk involved, so they left the decision up to me.

As mentioned I was feeling the time ticking down. I was starting to have doubts that I could last much longer. Every ounce of my being, energy, and focus was on my breathing because I simply could not catch up. In those hours my breathing was my entire life, no other thoughts or concerns outside of my breathing and trying to catch up.

I just want to reiterate that again because it still didn’t feel impactful enough: In those hours my breathing was my entire life. The amount of concentration I had on breathing was a level of concentration I don’t know if I’ve ever given to anything else in my life ever. 

There was even some lost time when they had misdiagnosed me as having pneumonia because they had looked at a different patient's CT scan. That was only about 15 minutes lost but when you’re in “fight for your life” mode every minute is important. 

So my parents and I decided I needed to go with this treatment. The doctors pumped me up full of the super blood thinners and then in about 15 minutes I was finally, FINALLY, able to catch my breath. This compound they pumped into me, that was later billed to my insurance for $47,000, saved my life. After it cleared the clot I was able to chill a bit. After about 5-6 hours of being in the ER and fighting for my life, I could chill. I had gone to the ER at 9pm so I was finally able to get just a smidge of rest around 4-5am.

Then a few hours later I was taken by ambulance to the University of Iowa hospital where I stayed for 6 days. Thankfully my stint in the ER was the worst of it, and everyday afterwards I was just getting better. I came into that hospital on 40 L of oxygen, getting my vital signs taken every 15 minutes, and 3-4 ports in my body to take all the medicines I was on. 6 days later I was able to walk out on my own with a fresh prescription for blood thinners. 

This experience was the most dramatically life clarifying event of my life. 

You know the cliché saying of “Live everyday like it’s your last”? Until this event I could intellectually understand that phrase, but I certainly didn’t feel it. Now I feel it, I feel it deeply. I now know everyday that out of the blue it could be my last. And dammit I’ve been determined to live my life to the fullest.

How did this change my life? It gave me unbelievable levels of clarity of what I needed to do. The year before I had acquired an interest in Existentialism philosophy. To summarize the whole branch of philosophy in one poorly structured run-on sentence: “Life in of itself has no greater meaning, there is no greater purpose given to us by the universe, it’s all meaningless and random, so why not go out and live your life to the fullest extent you want because why waste your one life, which is all we can be certain you have?”

Like the lesson of “live every day like it’s your last”, I intellectually understood the tenets of Existentialism but didn’t feel them. 

I feel them now.

Even while I was still in the hospital I was starting to think with much greater clarity about my life. I knew I needed to get going on what I wanted to do. There was going to be no more waiting around, no more putting things off. I was going to live my life and do the things I wanted to do.

I’m happy to say that for the last year I have been truly living my life, doing what I want, experimenting with finding my life’s calling, and working hard to achieve my long term goals. 

I stopped waiting around and have done what I feel I’ve needed to do. 

I’ve gotten my nutrition and exercise down, I’m down a total of 140lbs from my heaviest ever, and 90 of those were lost this year. I now have enough strength to carry myself and the cardio endurance to be able to walk as much as I’d like without getting winded. I recently was able to do an hour on the exercise bike which was a massive milestone for me.

In addition I’ve done so much for my health. For a few months I was doing therapy (I need to get back to it). Through that I was able to learn some insights into myself and my needs that have made me feel so much more whole as a person, like I’m my true full authentic self.  I also got diagnosed with sleep apnea and got a sleep machine to help. I now floss and do a skincare routine regularly! I’ve been trying to do whatever I need to do to make my health better and it’s been paying off. 

I was also able to travel a lot this year. In the Spring I was able to go on a last minute trip to Cancun. Mid summer I was able to do a long weekend with some friends in Chicago. Later in the summer I did a two week long road trip seeing Washington DC, Western MA, and all the rest of the northeast. Then in the fall I did a work trip for a week in Georgia. On all of these trips I learned so much and on the non-work trips I had a blast. I have found that one of the things I want in life is to experience everything I can, and I was able to experience quite a lot this year.

I also made big progress on my projects. Early in the year I spent a lot of time putting together a serious business plan, but in the end I realized it wasn’t quite the move for me. I valuably learned that opening up a restaurant is most likely not the path for me, and that’s okay! I also started the Galesburg Revival Society which has been a fun project. It’s taken me a little bit to figure out leading and running an organization, but I’m learning a lot and getting valuable insights.

Now at the end of this year I’ve been devoting a lot of time toward trying to figure out what I want to be in life. While I’ve now dabbled in quite a bit I keep returning to my writing. I know I didn’t release a lot this year but I’ve come to believe my purpose is in some way connected to writing.

If it’s not writing exactly, my purpose is somewhere in ideas. I love ideas, I spend all day thinking about things. I most relish an interesting idea or a new morsel of information. I love assembling information and knowledge into new, interesting arguments. I love taking different ideas from different areas and bringing them together. I love gnawing on problems that don’t have straightforward solutions. I just want to be able to read and write in service of trying to find these new ideas and new ways of thinking. 

So I plan to do that as much as I can. My theme for 2024 is going to be “Build”. (Learn more about choosing a theme here) I want to build up myself as much as possible. I want to build a better body, build my skills, build my portfolio of work, build my experience – anything I can build within myself I want to build.

As part of that I intend to be writing a whole lot more. Inland Nobody will no longer be a blog solely focused on Galesburg urbanism. I intend to write about whatever I can. I want to release weekly and I have some great stuff in the pipeline. I have some really great ideas that I’m very proud of. 

I want to thank everyone who’s reading this and everyone who has an impact in my life; good or bad. Life is the sum of all of your experiences and I’m happy to say that I’m happy to have all of them. I am happy with who I am today and happy to continue working toward being my most authentic self. 

December 28th is henceforth my life day. It is such a momentous day in the history of my life and I shall start celebrating it with much more vigor than even my own birthday. While my birthday was important for that whole being alive thing, my Alive Day marks the point where I stopped wandering and started moving with clarity and purpose. I’m not going to say that it was a good thing that I almost died, but I cannot imagine I’d be doing as well as I am now without it. I am so fortunate in this life, I have so much and have been able to do so much so far. 

I look forward to 2024 as a year to continue this trend. While I’ve learned so much I still have so much more to learn about the world and myself. Maybe next year won’t go as great, but the learning is not going to stop. And hopefully the ideas won’t stop, I love the ideas so much and hope you will too. But in the end I’m just happy to be alive and hope for many more Alive Days to come.