Return From the Darkness
I blacked out.
I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes. There wasn’t fear or a flood of thoughts. There was only confusion. Everything happened so fast.
I was walking from my closet into the bathroom, getting ready for an evening out, when my body turned on me. A numbing sensation shot down my left leg, that sharp, electric feeling you get when you bump your funny bone. Before I knew it, I was on the floor.
I slowly came to in a pool of my own blood while my wife frantically spoke with 911. I tried to move my body the way I always had, and it didn’t respond.
There was no choice but to surrender. It was a terrifying event, something I had never experienced before. That’s when the realization hit me, everything can collapse at a moment’s notice. There’s not always a warning. There’s not always a symptom or a buildup to let you know what’s coming. One moment you’re walking. The next moment, you could be gone.
Before that moment, I thought I was in control. I was still trying to shape my post-professional career and set the tone for my future.
I was chasing something… momentum, validation, direction, acceptance, something I couldn’t quite grasp
.
Without fully realizing it, I had started trying to keep up with what I saw online, modeling myself after those “markers of success,” whether I knew it or not. I didn’t realize how disconnected I had become from myself and my surroundings in the process.
Surviving didn’t magically fix anything. To be honest, I thought I was owed more from life after having already survived a health situation that ended my prior career. I just knew I was smarter than before. Things like this would only happen to other people. Not me. I was wrong.
After coming back from the darkness, there was no euphoric clarity. No life montage flashing before my eyes. No voice in my ear telling me it’ll be ok and what to do next. Just the gratitude for still being alive, and a newfound, sobering awareness of how everything actually is.
What did change was an immediate outlook on life that was simpler and more honest. I stopped paying attention to things outside of myself and started paying attention to the things I had neglected. I began to focus on the passions and people who were already pouring into my life, rather than chasing validation from the unknowns and from those who weren’t reciprocating the same energy I gave them.
And I don’t think I’m the only one. Sometimes we’re either neglecting what’s right in front of us or waiting for some moment, some big event, some permission from an external source, to finally live our true lives. We tell ourselves that life will begin after some imaginary breakthrough we’re waiting on.
Why wait?
Pay attention to yourself and those around you. Think critically about where your time is going, and why. Good or bad, bring attention to it. The ordinary parts of life don’t feel meaningful until they’re taken away. And by then, it’s too late.
This experience motivated me to start writing again, to share my experiences and stories in the hope that we can get something out of it and grow together.
I'm glad you lived through it, but I'm sorry this happened to you. It is a scary thing. It does make you reflect on what matters most. And it does force a thoughtful person such as yourself to reallocate your resources and throw out stuff that doesn't really matter, while focusing on the stuff that does.
Lots of people, not just former pro athletes like yourself, tend to think everything about their health can be shaped by their own will, and that's just not true. There are some things that our bodies do that just do not make sense, and the warning signs we get may or may not be understood at the time.
Know that I say this as a widow who lost my young husband to four sudden heart attacks after passing a cardiac stress test earlier in the same year. If my husband could've done anything to stay, he would've; he fought valiantly for almost eleven hours before he passed away. The doctors said they'd never seen anything like it. He was trying to communicate, they thought, and I thought too, while he was in a coma after the heart attacks had caused massive damage to his body.
It was awful. And I've now been without him for over twenty years.
One of my best friends has an auto-immune disease similar to lupus, and her son has full-blown lupus. They have done everything they can to make life better for themselves, but there is no real cure for those diseases. You can get them into remission (her son is in a partial remission now; not sure what a partial remission is in this context, though). But you still have to deal with all of the issues and problems you've got, including the fact you can't work for pay anymore (too ill), you can't do things you've always loved to do (too ill), and even a night out for a few hours takes a lot of prep. (She's in her mid-50s, BTW, and was always quite active before.)
Another of my best friends has complications for Lyme disease that was missed, then misdiagnosed, and then after a few years of pure Hell for her, was finally treated properly. She's been able to resume much of her life, but it's not the same, and it's really frustrating because she did everything she was supposed to do. She, like my other good friend, has to prepare for a day out, and it's frustrating.
Even I have to deal with things often misunderstood, like fibromyalgia and migraines (much more, alas), and I have to pick and choose my spots. If I am going to do something labor-intensive one day, I will be resting the next.
I said all this, Chris, mostly to let you know I do understand what you've gone through. I am really happy you came out the other side, and I hope you and your wife did eventually have that date night you'd been planning. You're right that life is short and a lot of stuff we see is completely irrelevant to our own lives. We must focus on what matters before it's too late.
Get well soon champ! Your words are relatable 💯🫡