Death, Prayer & Gratitude: One Tough Year in Texas
Never have lives less lived been as chronicled as they are right now.
That's a peculiar side effect of social media. Everyone overshares — where they go, what they had for dinner, where their cat is sleeping, that gnarly new mole on their thigh.
This ain't that. I’m more of an undersharer.
This is personal, painful stuff. Some of the best stories have value because they're personal and painful. Pain is relatable. We understand it from childhood and develop emotional muscle memory for coping with it. Our gratitude muscles are less developed. We need both for life's heavy lifting. I learned that in spades this year because I nearly shuffled off my mortal coil a few times.
That lesson, among others, is one of the reasons I choose to share this story.
I also feel I owe an answer to folks who have asked after me. "I heard you were sick, but heard no updates after that" is how it usually reaches my ear. This is the PG-rated version of the updates, folks, with most of the gore edited out.
Come with me on a journey if you have a minute. We'll start at the head of the trail.
2023 Sucked
No reason to try to say that eloquently. I watched my beloved father expire unexpectedly in July. Next to go was Sheila, my old canine companion, in August. I was living the stuff of a George Jones song.
It was too much to digest in one summer sitting yet there it was, stuck in my gullet like a stack of stale saltines and not a drop of damn water in sight.
My saving grace? History! There was work to do. Work is my shelter and my purpose.
I finished Ranger Aten's biography on what would have been Dad's 71st birthday then spent the next few months dwelling in the tedious typing of the rarest of Texas Civil War diaries. 1491 Days in the Confederate Army wrapped a few days after Thanksgiving. I edited a conversation Dr. Stephen Hardin and I filmed in November.
I was safe in the shelter of my history hiding place.
In early December, that oh-so-special Texas Monthly story about me was published and most of you know how the next scene played out. Death threats, name-calling, demonic voicemails — the online mob doing the only thing an online mob is capable of.
Y'all already know that story and it doesn't warrant space here. Point is, it just added to the pile.
By the time my lawyer sent out retraction request letters, I wasn't feeling so swell. My joints hurt. My eyes hurt. My guts especially hurt.
I've lived with autoimmune disorders much of my life but it was never anything a short course of steroids couldn't bring to heel.
This time, there would be no heeling.
The belly pain was new. It grew and changed. Although I felt like someone was taking a branding iron to my insides, I worked because that's how I'm wired — keep working until the job is done (sleep and food be damned,) then begin the next task, finish, repeat. Get the job done. Never stop.
I kept telling myself this pain was the usual stuff plus a pulled muscle. It would work itself out. Here's a tally of exactly where that thinking got me:
Number of E.R. Visits: 4
Number of Hospitalizations: 4
Number of history videos produced: 7
Number of books produced: 2
Number of times I should've died: 4
At every E.R. visit, the word on everyone's lips was "sepsis." That happens to be an unfavorite word of mine.
When this started for me in January, memories of watching Dad rapidly decline into septic shock were fresh in my mind. I take after him in plenty of ways I'm proud of but had no desire to mimic his manner of death.
Each time, the emergency room folks told me I had inflammation inside and maybe some kind of abscess...or maybe not. Each time, I spent a week or so on multiple IV antibiotics and/or steroids, then came home with another week of pills. Each time, I'd fare okay for about a month before the shivering, racing heart, low blood pressure, etc. would return. Then back to the hospital I’d go.
Pain was in constant supply. I even switched to protein smoothies and shakes, praying that would reduce the stress on my insides. I didn't have solid food for months. That didn't help me one iota.
By early summer, I was feeling blue. I missed my friends. I missed seeing Texas. I missed cooking and eating food. I missed life.
The antibiotics and steroids that kept me upright between hospital stays were ruinous in their own way. Tendon damage, oral thrush, sensitivity to sunlight, unsettling nausea, persistent anemia.
I felt puny and brittle, like I'd break apart if someone so much as sneezed near me.
The wait to see a specialist locally or at UTMB stretched into September. This was May. Thanks to the care and assistance of a dear friend in Houston, I got in with a competent specialist there. Quickly.
Thus began the journey that has me at the keyboard now.
After rounds of torturous testing, I learned that a couple of inches of scar tissue had nearly sealed off my gastrointestinal tract. Those ugly bits would need to be sliced out, obviously, and I would surely do that just as soon as I could take six weeks off from work.
So, never, basically.
My mind was changed in the middle of an especially brutal July scan in Clear Lake. Mid-scan, there was a power outage.
Lying on a cold table in a colder room in nothing but a hospital gown, in an awkward position, in dire pain, in the dark, exchanging quips with a person in the next room who you hope works there...who among us hasn't been there? I was livin’ the dream!
When the generator kicked in, the staff scrambled to see if the thirteen glamor shots we'd made of my guts had been saved. If not, we'd have to start all over again.
The technician powered things on and up popped the last image they'd shot. I saw, for the very first time, just how ominous this thing was. I was spellbound.
Imagine driving up 59 in southwest Houston in all of its six-lane glory, when it suddenly narrows, not to a single lane, but to about two feet.
Such was the situation in my viscera, but in miniature.
The highlighted area is where my Highway 59 narrowed from six lanes to nearly nada. Seeing this, rather than hearing more vague language about "scarring," convinced me to embrace the risks of surgery.
Not long after the power outage scan, I was seated across a desk from Dr. Erik Askenasy, a highly regarded gut surgeon. He said fixing this would require a couple of hours of surgery and a few weeks of recovery.
"It'll suck for sure," he said, but the end result would be me eating solid food again and feeling pretty swell. Still, I couldn’t commit. The idea of abandoning my responsibilities for the time it would take to recuperate met with firm resistance in my brain.
Dr. Askenasy laid it out for me just this way: "When you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you'll get on the surgery schedule. I'm not here to sell you on it. When you're ready, you're ready."
I was well past sick and tired.
I'd lost 28 pounds. Every hospitalization made me feel less like me, physically and otherwise. I knew I’d shrink away to nothing and it's damn near impossible to get anything done when you're nothing.
So I helped myself to the first available surgery slot: August 1.
What could it hurt? Worst case scenario was that I'd die and I could see that on the horizon anyway. I had seven days to get work/home/my head straight before that day.
I was still working on steeling my resolve on the morning of the Big Day. Just before showtime, Dr. A made his appearance.
I had my questions. He had his.
Mine were the banal questions of an anxious person. I was also deeply curious about what music he'd be playing while I was being gutted like a redfish. His answer (Ricky frickin’ Martin) wasn’t even in the top one thousand answers I thought he might give.
Dr. A's question for me carried real weight and, I believe, carried the day.
"Would you mind if I prayed with you?"
Say what now? You're about to jam your hands into my abdominal cavity and you want to glorify God first? Bring it on, bro!
He prayed. I prayed. We prayed.
It was as soothing and as beautiful a prayer as I ever heard. I get choked up just thinking about it. A surgeon who humbly asks to be an instrument of God, rather than try to play God? Apparently that's a real thing in some quarters.
As we rolled into the operating room, I felt entirely at peace with what was about to happen to me, regardless of the outcome. God's love was welcome in that room and God's will would prevail. After a brief tour of the operating room, the nap-inducing injection was administered.
When my eyes opened next, I found myself in the recovery area, alive and stoned out of my mind. I glanced at the clock and attempted basic math. Had my surgery really taken that long or had anesthesia destroyed my ability to add and subtract?
There was nothing I could do in either case, so I closed my eyes and listened to nurses holler at each other about my blood pressure being too low. Nothing I could do about that either. I rested and let them work.
As the sun set on August 1, I was stable and in my hospital room. Dr. Askenasy paid me a surprise visit.
"How are you still alive?!" he wondered, with jubilation that didn't match his question at all. I looked at him the way a puppy looks at a ceiling fan the first time he sees one.
Then Dr. A gave me the grand tour of my refurbished anatomy.
I had no idea that my surgery hadn’t gone as planned. My belly was dotted with five incisions where I expected just one. Missing from my insides weren’t just a couple of inches of hideous scar tissue.
Nope.
All told, about two feet of my original factory equipment had been chucked into a surgical bucket. It was keeping a pathologist company now.
When Dr. Askenasy got inside my belly, he found a minefield, then moved to disarm each of the mines. A snip here, a snip there, another one over yonder, remove this and that, connect this to that, divert some blood flow this way ...and then put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Among the landmines were those that had my surgeon scratching his head over how I'd made it alive to his operating room. On three or four different occasions, various sections of my entrails had actually ruptured.
Each of those triggered the shock that eventually compelled me to go to the hospital. But because I kept on working until my own faulty alarm bells went off, each of those events should have sent me to meet my maker.
They should have been catastrophic.
Yet there I was, recovering quite handily from major surgery. I understood Dr. Askenasy's enthusiasm. God had delivered me safely into capable hands. The right hands.
Dr. A knew it and now I knew it, too.
I stared at the wall of my hospital room, wondering about the possible reasons why I was preserved rather than being found dead on my kitchen floor. I may never be able to express how jarring that news was.
Luke 10:41 echoed in my head:
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful..."
I was released just three days later. I brought my Semper Texas "Home" shirt just for the occasion. My crooked smile is the product of pain meds, dull pain, lack of sleep, and relief. I was out of it but, dammit, I was upright!
I believed on that day that the worst was behind me. Stone cold drunk on sleep deprivation and gratitude, I could only see the healthier future that lay ahead. I was giddy.
Turns out, I was way out over my skis. By the end of the ride back to Corpus, I already felt unwell. Because of the timing of my hospital discharge, I'd missed lunch and a dose of my post-op medications.
Remedying those issues, then topping it up with solid rest in my own bed would make me feel better, I reasoned.
I was off by an order of magnitude in my estimation of how fragile I still was. Two days after my release, I was violently ill. Three days after my release I was in an ambulance speeding back to Houston.
Now, when you've just had plumbing work done and are in the vehicular equivalent of a bouncy house, four hours feels like an eternity. I hugged myself tightly to keep my insides in and with every violent, jarring bump, I'd holler up front:
"Guys! Did we just run over a deer...six times?"
"Did you just mow down all the carts in a Walmart parking lot?"
"Hey Caesar! Are we actually driving through a sorghum field right now?"
Caesar and Rudy were hilarious and gracious men. They made the ride memorable by their kindness, which eclipses pain in my memories of that night.
I know I was lucky to be aware of the condition of the bouncy house ambulance suspension. I know I was fortunate to be able to talk to Caesar and Rudy at all.
The first night back in Houston I shared a hospital room with a lady who, from beyond the room divider, gave me explicit instructions on myriad ways to prepare squirrel. I did not request this information. She just kinda shared it when inspiration struck her.
The scene in Forrest Gump where Bubba gives a recitation of shrimp concoctions? I lived that...but with squirrel and with detailed cooking instructions.
The rest of Houston: Round Two grew more traumatic after I was moved from the room of the Pasadena Squirrel Lady. It’s better for both of us if I omit the gory details.
There wasn't much that went right. It was terrifying at times and utterly exhausting. My fortified gratitude for the gift of life was sometimes the only reason I didn't give up on making it home.
When I grew too tired to participate in my own care, I thought about my surgeon telling me how many times I'd nearly croaked and how ecstatic he was that I was still around. That kept my head above water.
The teamwork of my surgical guys, the specialists on call, and some remarkable nurses enabled me to come out the other side and come home.
Eventually.
As my friend, the esteemed (non-medical) Doc Hardin, has said to me repeatedly, "It's hard to be inconvenienced when you're dead."
Ain't it so?
Eventually, I was released from the hospital. Eventually, I started intravenous treatments with new meds that will (hopefully) prevent my innards from becoming a minefield again. Eventually, I did experience what the surgeon promised me — a feeling of normalcy. No more fear that eating might kill me or make me wish I was dead.
The first time I made a grocery list was a surreal experience. I couldn’t remember what in the hell I ate back when I used to eat. The first time I went to lunch with a friend felt like a miracle. I marveled at the experience of sitting down, ordering whatever I pleased and enjoying it.
And that surgeon who helped me find peace through prayer before cutting me open, who kept me from circling the drain in the weeks after?
That man had one more magic trick up his sleeve.
When I appeared before Dr. Askenasy for a follow-up, he asked if we might take a selfie together.
Odd ask, I thought. He's not a plastic surgeon. He hadn't done anything on the outside of me to warrant a selfie. He hadn't made my nose smaller or my face younger. Besides, I still felt like a sick person and, to my eyes, looked like one.
I stared at him blankly.
"I want to send it to your other docs to show them how well you look. I want them to see that you have color in your cheeks!"
The Selfies: He took one and I took one. He gets paid to have steady hands. My hands were still the shaky hands of a sick person and I snapped this perfectly imperfect picture. After being ill for the entire year, someone finally said I looked better! Someone pronounced me healthier! I bawled like a baby for fifteen minutes after we took this. This was the moment I started feeling like a person again, rather than a patient.
With some of my physical strength back, I returned to my office in September, prepared to take on the world. I am elated to drive again, to live again, and to be productive. I'd been productive while I was sick, sure, but this is different.
It’s time to apply what I've learned because I want to make good things of the extended misery I experienced. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
More God, more Texas.
Cherish those who cared about your life enough to help you; offer politeness to those who didn’t.
It's okay to take breaks, dummy.
It's okay to say no, dummy.
Deal with fools differently; ignore most of them entirely.
Fight harder, smarter and with a bigger smile for Texas history.
The only way out is through.
I have not yet arrived in peachy keen territory. My cardiac muscle was damaged by extended runs of elevated heart rate, just like my dad's had been. His was fatal, mine gets stronger every day.
I'm still working with my doctor to kick anemia to the curb. My treatments, though not chemotherapy proper, have my hair leaping off my head. Lucky for me, I have lots of it. If it all falls out, I'll buy an Elvira wig. Hold me to that.
I still have bad days.
But don’t we all? I'm having one right now, as a matter of fact. I'm in pain. I'm taking my stop-gap medicine, resting, paying attention to my vital signs, per my doctor's instructions.
I know it’s okay. I know what “go to the hospital” feels like now and this ain’t it. This too shall pass. One day soon, there won’t be speedbumps like this anymore.
So why am I telling you any of this? A few reasons:
First and foremost, because I love you. You're a big part of my life, the reason I had purposeful work to come back to.
Many of you have been here for a big chunk of the eighteen years I've published Texas history. We are Texans together and there's a lot of love in that simple statement. We're in this together, regardless of how "this" is defined at any given moment.
I had nurses and doctors born all over the world — The Netherlands, La Porte, Iran, Robstown, Vietnam, Missouri, Missouri City, Colombia, Michigan, Pakistan, a Marine from Denton, a nun from India.
They're all proud Texans, in this together with all of us. They each had something to share or ask about Texas history when they asked me what I did when I wasn’t a hospital inmate.
Another reason I decided to spill these personal beans is to offer a reminder about gratitude. Please, never underestimate the power you have to remind yourself how bad things aren't right now.
Each time I laugh, I remember the times it hurt too much to laugh, then I laugh that much harder because I can. When I feel puny, I remember that I was recently too weak to stand. When I eat a meal with friends, I'm conscious of the gifts of friends and the ability to eat.
I encourage you to do the same. Relish the things you can do. When you're having a bad day, I invite y'all to think of your worst day and compare the two.
Contrast is king. It has the power to slingshot us back to gratitude for what we have and what we’re able to do.
Speaking of power…
The most significant reason I chose to talk about this openly with y'all is prayer. I humbly ask you to put in a good word for me the next time you talk with God. The undeserved gift of His mercy is the most important ingredient in my recipe for healing.
I’m grateful to be here to do the work I love and to have you to share it with.
Onward!
