STOP! Before you read this second part of my testimony, read Part 1 first. You may read part 1 HERE.
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Be careful what you ask for. . .
I continued to doubt as April of 1985 passed. As the month of July approached I spent the entire weekend in the Southern California town I left behind when I entered the United States Navy. I was home from San Diego. Home from my Navy career - for the weekend. My wife remained at her mother's house in the same town. It was a good two hour drive from my haze-gray-and-underway home in San Diego.
My ten year old brother had never been to the beach before, so I took him on Saturday. We played in the sand. I did a little body surfing. We got a little bit of a sunburn, which can exhaust a person, but we had fun.
I spent Sunday with my wife. She was a little upset because I hadn't spent much time with her and the baby while I was home for the weekend. It was the second or third time in Christopher's life that I had the chance to be with him, so I held my little son as much as I could. I also took my wife out to lunch and dinner, hoping the meals would satisfy her desire to spend time with me.
My son was only three months old. Our marriage was a little less than a year old.
I stayed in town later than I should have, for I needed to get back to the ship no later than 6:00 am, because that is when muster was. We were due to leave for a six month WestPac. The ship was going to head for Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, Diego Garcia, and ultimately the Persian Gulf.
I departed from Corona much later than I should have.
At that time in my life I was still battling with my belief in God. I had essentially turned my back on Him, and the faith I had learned as a child. But, hey, I was ten foot tall and bullet-proof, as far as I was concerned. Death could not come to me. Tragedy only happened to the other guy. I was mighty. I was arrogant. I thought I had everything under control.
I left from Corona for San Diego at 1:30 am, Monday, July 1, 1985, to return to the USS Chandler, and I never made it to my destination.
Exhaustion. I knew how tired I was. As I drove south on Interstate 15 I did whatever I could to battle my heavy eyelids. As I was nodding off, I had the windows down so that the brisk air could caress my face, and force me to remain awake. In Lake Elsinore I bought a cold milk shake, figuring the chill of the frozen desert would keep me awake, not realizing that the ice cream based drink would coat my stomach, bringing on sleepiness even more. The foolishness of a young mind, I suppose.
Just south of current day Temecula, just inside San Diego County, I lost my battle to stay awake.
Back then the southbound lanes of Interstate 15 were situated much higher than the northbound lanes. The median was a grassy hill seperating the two. It was at that point I fell asleep at the wheel. I was traveling 80 miles per hour in a small Toyota Tercel. I was not wearing a seat belt. The car slowly veered to the left. As I slept, the wheels crossed the shoulder, and hit the grassy hill that separated my lanes from the southbound lanes below.
The car began to roll down the hill. Side by side, end over end, the Tercel flipped and flopped across the highway. Along the way the doors, the hood, the trunk cover, and every piece of glass in that car was torn away. The roof of the car wound up crushed to my seat, virtually in line with the middle of the tweaked steering wheel. The wheels were buckled up under the vehicle. I was thrown on the final roll, the eighth roll, I have been told.
The vehicle came to rest on the slow lane of the northbound side of the freeway, upside down, pointing north. I was thrown over that shoulder of the highway, which was an embankment, a long embankment, one covered with boulders of all shapes and sizes. It is believed I landed head-first into the sea of boulders at the bottom of the drop. The report indicated that at least twenty minutes had passed before I was even found.
When I was discovered I was unable to breath on my own. I had aspirated, meaning that I had vomited, and the liquid wound up in my lungs. I was literally drowning in my own puke. My heartrate was nearly non-existent. The scene was one of tangled blood and flesh. Unconscious, the reports would later indicate that when they found me I was not only not breathing, but had 0% oxygen in my blood.
I was dead.
On the life flight helicopter ride to Palomar Memorial Hospital in Escondido, California, they worked feverously to revive me.
This is what I get for daring God to give me a wake-up call.
As the helicopter approached the landing pad at the hospital, they revived me successfully. I was in a deep coma for a week and a half. I had a respirator hooked up to me for three days so that I could breath. The damage to my head was a left-temporal fracture. It was a fracture that went along my left temple, back above my ear, and then down into the ear area. To this day I am deaf in my left ear because of it, most of my loss of hearing due to nerve damage, and the destruction of three bones in my ear.
Spinal fluid flowed from my left ear into a bed pan for three days. My eyes were badly hemorraged. Family tells me my eyes looked like those of an insect, they were so swollen. My face was torn open and my right cheekbone was exposed. My left knee was severely damaged, killing any hopes of running 20-plus miles a day like I had been doing for so many years. My back and neck were twisted.
My dad, the United States Marine that was the epitome of "tough," and able to handle this kind of thing due to his tough skin hardened partly by his years in Vietnam during the mid-sixties, took one look at me and had to leave the room.
Mom says she held my hand and it felt dead - cold and clammy. Dad was in the bathroom rinsing his face with cold water, finding it difficult to imagine that somewhere inside that damaged body or torn flesh lay the son that he had chosen to be the father of since I was nearly three years old.
My wife had a new born baby to worry about. She had to take care of our three month old baby, and her husband was lying in the hospital, possibly dying, possibly severely mentally retarded for the rest of his life due to the severe head trauma.
After a week and a half passed I came out of the deep coma, but I was still kind of in a coma. The lights were on, but nobody was home. I responded to basic stimuli. My eyes were open. I was like a child responding robotically to basic needs and desires like hunger, sleep, and the occassional "yes" or "no."
At that point they transferred me from Palomar Memorial Hospital in Escondido, California to Naval Hospital Balboa in San Diego. My new home was a trauma ward where most of my neighbors were the victims of motorcycle accidents wearing "halos" screwed into the bone of their skulls.
After a month, or so, passed, congnizant responses became evident. My rehabilitation included memory games, and learning how to walk again. With the kind of head injury I had, the brain reverted back to childhood, slowly growing in maturity as time passed. I was like a child for the longest time, and most of the staff doubted I would ever become as I was before the accident again. The brain was growing up again. The doctors were amazed that I was not dead, for the type of head injury I suffered has a high mortality rate. Those lucky enough to survive are often severely mentally retarded, unable to even perform the most basic of tasks in order to function independently.
The neuro-surgeons and neurologists assigned to me expected my wife to have to take care of me in a similar fashion she was taking care of our child. And at the time it couldn't get any worse, it did. I began having epileptic seizures. Up to 80 siezures per day, a large portion of which were petite mal and grand mal.
Seizures, deafness in the left ear with a constant ringing that remains to this day, couldn't walk without assistance because of the destroyed knee - God had done a real number on me. My pride always rested in my high intellect and athleticism. When I was younger people could tell me twenty random numbers, and I could recite them forwards or backwards on the spot. It was a great way to entertain friends. Now, I had difficulty figuring out how many fingers I had on my hand. I would never run again, and the high intellect and memory portion of my brain had been damaged. Even my balance was screwed up, thanks to the left ear damage. And on top of all of that, I had to listen to the tinnitus in my left ear 24/7. It was enough to drive a man insane. The ringing in my ear never stops, and sometimes becomes so loud I have difficulty understanding what someone is saying.
I made sure God was aware of my dissatisfaction, if He even existed. "How could you do this to me?" I asked Him angrily. "You are not a loving God if you did this to me. What kind of loving God would allow me to go through this? You took away everything important to me."
My memory was shot. My intellect was gone. I couldn't even remember myself, half the time. The only reason I knew I was married is because somebody told me. There was no way I would ever run again, much less walk, with the destroyed knee, and pain in my lower back and hips.
I was angry.
I was an angry patient that was always negative. I was always having a lousy day, and I never smiled. I couldn't even sit up on my bed - I would fall over, once falling off the bed and winding up with a few stitches just above my left eye.
How could God do this to me?
After a couple months I got to the point that I was able to walk with the assistance of a cane, making my own bed, and I was spending a lot of time in the TV room. At one point I saw my ship on the news in the Persian Gulf rescuing a fishing boat after it had been attacked by Iraqi vessels.
A new neighbor was brought to me in the bed beside mine, near the end of my stay in the hospital. For me it had been a long three months. My neighbor, Chad, came from an aircraft carrier. Aboard the ship he was in the Supply division, and had fallen through a hole in the deck normally reserved for a "dumb waiter" style of contraption. He fell a few decks, and landed on his head. His head injury, as bad as mine was, was worse. The swelling was so bad in his skull that he had to go through surgery for them to put a tube from his skull to his bladder inside his body so that the pressure of the swelling in his head could be released. The fluid would simply be urinated later after travelling through the tube into his bladder.
For someone in such bad shape, my new neighbor was not angry at God at all. In fact, he was a pretty happy guy.
We talked often, played chess, and quickly became friends.
Problem was, his positive attitude was really beginning to piss me off.
How could I be angry at God with this knucklehead beside me always smiling?
His survival truly was a miracle, as was mine, but he was happy about it as if the injury that he had recieved was a gift. His life was over, for the most part. He would never be able to fly again. His sea-going days were over as well. The tragedy, this horrible trauma that had befallen him, was something to thank God for. "Thank you, Lord," he would say. "Thank you for what you have given me."
"Thank you for what?" I asked. "You're screwed up. How is it in the face of all this you are always smiling? Because I sure as heck don't see any good reason to smile."
He smiled, as expected, but didn't say a word. He reached under his pillow and he pulled out a book. The book was a familiar one. I had seen it before. I recognized the black leather cover. The gold trimmed pages. The words "Holy Bible" on the cover. In other words, it was the book I learned from growing up, and the one I had been battling against for more than a year. He lay the book of the Christian Faith that I enjoyed during my younger years on his stomach. I simply gazed at the very book I had been rejecting.
As this book lay on his stomach, I looked at it dumbly, as if I had never seen such a display of the obvious in my life. But I knew exactly what it meant. My survival was a miracle. And these bad things were simply storms that would eventually equate to a good thing in my life.
The storms of life strengthen us. It is through them that our character is built. I was finally beginning to understand that. Remember, before this moment I was a doubter, a doubter that thought he might be a believer, but didn't necessarily "know" Christ.
Staring at that Bible, however, caused something inside me to break. It was a feeling very similar to the feeling I felt when I first saw my son in the delivery room three months before. I loved my son so much that it hurt. I felt a similar pain at that moment. The pain was immense. What had I done?
Througout the years I have made my mistakes. I realized, however, regardless of all of the sin in my past, it was at that moment in time that I needed to grow. The friend's Bible reminded me of who I was. I needed to reaquaint myself with my Savior.
Now as I approach my 43rd birthday, and my neurologist teases me about my room temperature IQ (well, not quite that low. Post accident it sits at 119), I believe I have gained a touch of wisdom, and my faith in Jesus Christ has grown.
The writers of the New Testament walked with Him. They saw the empty tomb. They stood on Calvary. They walked the paths that Jesus walked. But I don't think we fully understand, sometimes, the full scope of His gift to us. We get so wrapped up in the Resurrection on Easter that we forget about the crucifixion.
At that moment in the Naval Hospital Balboa, San Diego, California, I reintroduced myself to Christ, and He to me. I no longer only believed. The miracle of my life led to me knowing Him.
When I tell people this story, often the response is, "Wow, you sure were lucky."
Luck had nothing to do with it.
I look back now, on that day I reopened my eyes, and I remember an old saying I said as a child.
Please be patient, God is not finished with me yet.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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