Eighteen Days of Death - Personal - http://maxpages.com/shadowalker08/Eighteen_days_of

Eighteen days of death is how I refer to my eighteen days of being comatose in a hospital in Loma Linda, California, starting on the night of November 27, 1987. They are days and nights that I will always remember, and are hard for me to forget. This is about what caused my being comatose, and about my mental and physical traumas from being comatose.

On the night of November 27, 1987, I went to a friends birthday party, where there were a lot of drug and alcohol abuse all around, of which I was a part. While at the party I consumed, an equivalent to, one case of beer out of a keg, and one-fifth of tequila out of a gallon bottle, I also had smoked some marijuana (man made alcohol, God made grass... who do you trust?). To say the least, I was well over the legal limit of alcohol consumption.

The party had gotten a little too loud and out-of-hand for the apartment where the party was held, so we decided that it should be moved to a place in the desert, known by all the partygoers in Ridgecrest, California as Cherry Hill. Before leaving the apartment I had a feeling that I should not do anymore partying but, in a sense, was talked into going along. Before leaving the apartment parking-lot, everyone piled into cars and trucks, they decided for me to ride in the back of a friends truck, because the cab of the truck had already had four people in it.

On the way to Cherry Hill, the person driving the truck that I was in the back of, was equally intoxicated and driving like any drunken fool (fast and out of control). When it came to driving on dirt roads, it became even worse. We were traveling at a rate of sixty miles per hour, doing fishtails on a dirt road. Being the drunken fool that I was, I stood up and started banging on the cab of the truck, telling him to slow down. I was then thrown from the truck from the force of the truck swerving back-and-forth.

As a result of being thrown from the truck, I landed headlong onto the hard surface of the California desert, known as The Mojave Desert, that surrounds Ridgecrest, in the Indian Wells Valley. I landed on the top of my head and slid thirty to forty feet on my right side, scraping away most of the flesh on that side of my face and torso area. My right eye popped out of my head and was hanging from the eye stock (the part of your eye that connects your eye to the optic nerve). My right ear was also hanging by a thread of skin from the side of my head. I was subsequently unconscious, incapable of verbalizing, and deemed by my friends, that were gathering about, to be taking my last breaths.

It took over an hour for the ambulance driver to find the location where I was at. When the ambulance finally arrived, I was covered with a yellow blanket by the Emergency Medical (EMT's and hospitals use a universal color code when using blankets on patients and accident victims (yellow means they do not expect you to live). Nevertheless, I was rushed to the hospital.

Ridgecrest Community Hospital was not capable of treating the massive head trauma that I had, so UCLA was called which is approximately 400 miles from Ridgecrest. They sent a helicopter to heliport me to Loma Linda University Medical Center, Loma Linda, California. Loma Linda University Medical Center is among the six highest ranking medical facilities in the world. Even with their high knowledge of medical procedure and skills, they had no expectations of me living through such trauma; they gave me a six percent chance of surviving.

Roughly seven hours after I had fallen out of the truck, my blood-alcohol was taken for the second time at Loma Linda, and it registered at 0.46, 46 percent of the fluid flowing through my body was alcohol. The average adult is comatose at 0.40, and is clinically dead at 0.50. I had a subdural hematoma (blood clots between the layers of the brain), my brain was swollen out of its cavity.

I was given 1,000 milligrams of morphine, phenobarbital, and thorazine each every hour, inducing the coma that I was already in. To reduce and relieve some of the swelling of my brain, the surgeons drilled three holes in my head, approximately one half inch in diameter each. The morphine and phenobarbital were for pain, and the thorazine was to slow the activity of my brain. For eighteen days I laid quiet, scared, and alone within myself. My only way of communicating was by squeezing the hands of people who asked me questions.

After I came out of the coma, the first thing that I remember, was a nurse saying to me, "Today we're going to teach you how to walk."

My first reaction was, "I know how to walk!" I stood up and fell to the floor; I knew a little less than I thought I did. I had to learn almost everything that my seventeen years of life had already taught. That was something that I refused to believe for a long time but, it was true. I had to learn how to walk, read and write, and because of the tubes that were stuck down my throat, I even had to learn how to talk.

The next thing I remember was seeing myself in the mirror and crying. At that time in my life, like any average seventeen-year-old, my hair was one of the most important things to me. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my head was shaved. Before my accident, my hair was very long, past the middle of my back.

After leaving Loma Linda, among other things, I was told that I had been clinically dead more than eight times. I was told all the events that had occurred the day and nights before my awaking from the coma. I had to have Speech Therapy, Physical Therapy, and Occupational Therapy for more than one year after leaving the hospital. I could not return to school without my doctors' permission, which I could not get for about one year.

A lot of people think that being comatose is not as bad as it is but, it is something that I would never want to go through again, or wish upon anyone. My eighteen days of death still effect the ways I think and feel to this day. I hope that someday more than my family and I will learn from my Eighteen Days of Death.

"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose."

__________________

ROMANS 8:28. THE NEW TESTEMENT OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST, THE HOLY BIBLE, COMMONLY KNOWN AS THE AUTHORIZED (KING JAMES) VERSION. THE GIDEONS INTERNATIONAL.

Serenity Prayer

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; and the Wisdom to know the difference.

But God, grant me the Strength not to give up on what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless."

Sign My Guestbook

View My Guestbook

Mike Franks

Send Me E-Mail Click Here

Visitors: 01092

Page Updated Wed Jun 28, 2000 4:52pm EDT