All About Me..... I should be dead!


 

Coded Four Times: The Week My Body Quit and My Life Started Over

In February of 2020, I was burning the candle at both ends. I just didn't know it yet.

I had a full-time teaching job. I was coaching two different baseball teams. If you'd asked me that month how I was doing, I would have told you exactly that — burning it at both ends — and I would have said it with a kind of pride, the way people do when exhaustion feels like proof of commitment.

The Week That Broke Me

Saturday morning, I ran two practices back to back. I threw somewhere around 500 pitches that day.

Sunday, I rested.

Monday was our first high school practice of the season. I threw another 500 pitches.

Tuesday, I umpired two games.

Wednesday morning, my son woke me up screaming.

I couldn't answer him. I opened my mouth and nothing came out — no words, no sound that made sense. He called his mother, my wife, and told her to come home immediately. My son still went to school that morning. I went to the hospital.

The Word No One Expects at 49

Hours and many tests later, a doctor told me I'd had a heart attack.

I was floored. A heart attack at 49. I was in good shape. I was not, it turned out, in good health — there's a difference, and I learned it the hard way. I later found out I also had COVID, and that it had helped push my heart past whatever margin it had left.

They took me in for a catheterization to find the damage. What they found was a 100% blockage.

A few minutes after that, I coded for the first time.

I Coded Four Times

I should have died that day. I didn't, because a team of people worked to make sure I didn't.

After the first code, I was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to another hospital, 25 miles away. I coded again there. Defibrillators hurt — I want to say that plainly, because nobody tells you that. They sent me up to a room, and I coded a third time. This time they brought me back with CPR, which is its own kind of violence, and with the defibrillator again — bolts of electricity that felt exactly like what they sound like. That round cost me three broken ribs.

Then I coded a fourth time.

By then I was hooked to more machines than I could count. My wife was taken to the chapel inside the hospital to pray, because my odds of making it through the night had dropped to the point where that was the honest next step. I was sedated and intubated, and I did not take it well — I vomited repeatedly around the tube. My father and both of my brothers made it to the hospital. Nobody knew if I would wake up. It was, in every sense of the phrase, touch and go.

I woke up.

Waking Up Into a New Life

Recovery felt impossibly far away, even once I was conscious. Two days after I woke up, doctors implanted a defibrillator in my chest.

A few days after that, I was back in the hospital. I'd been resting on the couch at 12:40 in the morning when the defibrillator fired — twice, within about 45 seconds of each other. That's not a sensation you get used to. That's not a sensation anyone gets used to.

The Bill After the Storm

Then came the part nobody warns you about either: the bills.

Between multiple hospital visits, one surgery, a small library of medications, and the ongoing doctor's appointments that follow a heart this broken, I racked up somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 in debt. That was stacked on top of a mortgage, student loans, and a car payment — the completely ordinary financial life of a working, middle-aged husband and father, now colliding with a medical bill I never budgeted for.

I couldn't work. I want to be honest that the only thing that kept me employed was blind luck: COVID shut the schools down right around then, and I was able to teach from my couch. Coaching, for the time being, was over.

The Low Point — and the Beginning

I did eventually return to the field. But I was never the same. The things I used to love doing out there — the physical, competitive, all-in version of myself — were no longer mine to reach for. I worried I'd never get back on a jet ski, never get back on the water at all.

That's the low point. A body that quit on me four times in one week. A stack of bills I couldn't see the bottom of. A version of my life — coaching, competing, the water — that felt closed off for good.

I needed a plan out.

That's where the Abundance Engine Blueprint started.