Gone Critical

Gone Critical:

I Should Have Died

Brian J. Cloutier

Smashwords Edition

Gone Critical: I Should Have Died

Published by Brian J. Cloutier

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Brian J. Cloutier

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Dedication

To everyone who believed in me and encouraged me to write this book and who was always there when I needed their help. To Pat, Ken, Fred, Jack and Tom for being just a phone call away when I needed help. To Dr. Aggarwal, Dr. Brettler, Dr. Gulati and Faith for giving me the care, both physically and mentally, that I needed to save my life. You made this journey as bearable as possible. To Sam Whittaker and all those people who helped me make the book a reality by helping me work through the process of getting something published I can’t thank you all enough. A special thank you to Mimi Gualtieri for the wonderful job she did editing and making sense out of my manuscript. Without everyone’s help, this would be just a manuscript collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. Thank you all.

Introduction

This book is about how my life changed dramatically following a very unusual set of circumstances involving an unusual form of cancer and events that would alter my life forever. My goal in writing this book is to make everyone realize that no matter what challenges you may be facing in your life today, there is always a way to overcome your difficulties. There are always people in worse conditions that work through their problems to live normal, healthy lives, and we should hold these people up as examples to follow.

With that thought in mind, I hope you will find this book to be interesting, informative, and in many ways entertaining. In writing this story, I have been forced to relive a number of sore spots in my life, all of which have affected me in different ways and all of which have added up to make me the man I am today. This book relates my experiences of being in a coma for several weeks, as well as my suffering from systemic poisoning, renal failure, and a case of necrotizing fasciitis (the flesh eating virus) in my right leg. All of this on top of my original diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I originally wanted to write just about the worst medical problems I had ever faced in my life, but in consulting with friends and family on this point I came to realize that if I didn’t give you some information regarding my life surrounding these events this type of story would be interesting mostly to medical professionals. Therefore, I decided to surround the story with the other parts of my life that I hope will help to make for a more complete narrative. I think I accomplished that goal, but it will be up to you, the reader, to decide for yourself if my time was spent productively.

I am not a professional writer, nor have I ever attempted anything this extensive before so I hope you will forgive me if this book doesn’t meet the standards of the great writers. I simply wanted to tell my tale in the best way possible so that the largest number of people would enjoy reading it. The hardest thing I had to decide in writing this book was where to begin. Just like you see on TV, the writer frantically pacing the floor, biting their nails, with a blank piece of paper in the typewriter, I, too, had to figure out where to begin. The only difference was that I do not have a typewriter, I use a computer, and I usually do not bite my nails. If I started too early in my life, I risked boring you to death with my somewhat normal middle class upbringing in the 1960s.and 1970s Then again, if I started the story too late you would have too little background information and this would have made for a confusing story. I think I finally decided on the perfect starting point that draws a good middle ground between too much information and not enough information. The point at which I decided to start is when my life started changing when I was informed I had cancer. If you find yourself using toothpicks to hold your eyelids open while you read this story, then you can blame me for not finding the correct starting point after all. However, I think you will be pleased with the starting point and the story as a whole.

The medical information in this story is as accurate as possible and based on my own recollections with the assistance of friends, family and my many doctors along with reviewing my actual medical records for the details. I tried very hard to make the hodgepodge of medical information understandable and as clear as possible. Being able to understand the medical aspects of what I lived through is important for making sense of the whole story, so I spent as much time on explaining the details as I felt necessary. In addition, I am not a medical professional myself so I needed to add some level of detail just so that I could follow what I was writing. Sometimes I feel like I could be a medical professional after all I have been through in the past several years. I certainly have had a lot of exposure to the medical profession, and I have spoken to more than my share of doctors in various fields of expertise.

I also spend time studying the problems I have, so I have spent a fair amount of time looking in medical books and on medical web sites. I always felt it was important for me to understand as much as possible about what was happening to my body as I fought with the medical issues in my life. I think we all should take that level of interest in our bodies. It is good to see the doctors and the specialists, but it is equally as important to truly understand what they are telling you. I have found that by keeping ahead of what is going on with my body and by better understanding my problems, I can more clearly communicate with the doctors when I do see them. In addition to improving my own level of care, I have also been able to reduce the number of conflicts in my health care recommendations from doctor to doctor. For example, I am on a number of different medications daily that I need to take at certain times. I have a schedule that needs to be followed in order for me to get the proper results from the medication. Some require that you take them with meals, while others require that you take them after waiting a period of time after meals. In order to take them all properly, the schedule was the only way to go. I took the time to understand what each medication and supplement was for and why it was taken when it was. This helps when I am admitted to the hospital or a doctor suggests new medications. Because I understand my medications and what they do, I can assure that I don’t receive conflicting medications or too much of any particular drug. It also allows me to talk intelligently with the doctors about side effects or any other problems that may develop from taking the medications.

The more information you can arm yourself with, the less chance that a mistake will ever be made in your healthcare. No one is perfect, and you are your own best, last line of defense against mistakes in your healthcare so you want to be prepared. Utilize things such as the free help you can get from the pharmacy. Most large chain pharmacies provide help with monitoring your drugs to watch for duplication or conflicting drugs. They will also check to be sure your side effects are handled properly. When it comes to your drugs, the pharmacist is the next best person to talk with after your doctor. They offer all these services free of charge, so why not take advantage of them? When it comes to protecting your health, every little bit of assistance you get from any source is worthwhile. That includes things like checking websites such as www.WebMD.com, where you can find easy explanations for different diseases and common drug information.

Okay, now, before you start getting too nervous about the medical stuff, let me just say that I did not write a medical textbook here and I did not get so deep into that line of information that you are going to need an aspirin after you put the book down. As for those of you with a weak stomach, I can also reassure you folks that I did not get so graphic as to make you feel as though you need to keep a bucket handy to stick your head in. Just be thankful there are no pictures in this book! Even though I could have made better sense out of things if there were pictures, there was no one around to take pictures of the whole event from the time I was admitted to the hospital in 2007. You were lucky this time. I stayed on the middle ground between the two extremes of not enough detail and too much detail, and therefore I think you will be able to read my book without falling asleep or tossing your cookies during your luck break. On a side note, isn’t tossing your cookies a strange thing to say when you consider the results? Maybe we should say something like tossing the pea soup or maybe tossing the beef stew. Either would be a much better description, don’t you think? But, I digress.

As I mentioned earlier, I am not a professional writer, but I did consult with some professionals during the writing of this book. The best suggestion I received from all of them was to write the book just as if I were telling the story to someone sitting right in front of me. At first, I had trouble with that suggestion, because I could not see why I would be writing all this down if the person was sitting right in front of me, but they are the professionals so I am taking their advice. One of the hardest parts about telling a story to someone who is not sitting in front of you is that when you pose a question, it takes forever to get an answer. You do not get any immediate feedback, like yawning or snoring. Without that immediate feedback, it is hard to tell if you are on the right track in your story telling. I thought the answer to that was to publish only one chapter of the story at a time and then wait for the feedback.

If the feedback was good, then I would publish another chapter. But if the feedback was bad, I would rewrite the next chapter and see how that went. After thinking about this possibility for a while, I decided that this, too, would be an impossible task to manage, so I was back to writing it all in one book that would be published all at once and taking my chances. Of course, I’m kidding about that last part about printing only a chapter at a time. I knew all along that this would be a whole book with chapters printed all at once. There is no other way to logically produce a book. On the other hand I do intend to try and make this book available on different media so that you will have your choice of ways to read it. In today’s day and age, there are a number of alternatives to the printed word. I, personally, prefer the good old fashion paper book that I can hold in my hands so I can feel it and smell it. Old habits die hard.

At the beginning of this project, I wondered if I would be able to put into words the things I have experienced so that you would be able to feel the same experiences. I have tried hard to do this, and I hope I have succeeded. Only time will tell. Nevertheless, for now let us get this project started with chapter one. I hope you will enjoy reading this book. Your satisfaction is all I ask of this project. Oh, and one other thing, if you do find this book to be interesting, please tell a friend or two and pass the word around for me. I would greatly appreciate it. As you can see, I’m not too proud to ask for help when it makes sense.

Writing this book has gone a long way towards helping me to come to grips with what happened to me, so even if it never is published it still served a worthy purpose. I have tried to render the dreams in all the details that I can remember, which in itself was an undertaking. I found that as I wrote one section of a dream it would remind me of something else that I experienced in another dream. So it was never a case of just writing one dream after the other, I went back to the details on all the dreams many times as I remembered more details.

In the end, I think the dreams are complete in their detail and they give a good sense of what I experienced. I left out the names of a lot of the medications that I was given because they gave nothing to the story and only added to the complexity of an already complex story line. In addition to that, I also left out some of the less interesting medical terminology that also added nothing to the story. I didn’t want to add in all this information and have you, the reader, spend most of your time with your nose in a medical dictionary. The medical aspects of my coma are not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to tell the story of the dreams I had during this entire event and nothing more. I wanted to show how my life has changed as a result of the coma and to give hope to anyone facing a tragic event like this in their own life.

Chapter One

In the Beginning

It was the best time of my life. Things were going very well for me back then. I had a great job in the IT department at the local university hospital and had recently been promoted to director of the engineering group within the department. I had a beautiful, intelligent wife and we had just purchased our first home together a few years earlier in a beautiful local community. I worked on that house as if I were being paid for the privilege. I was putting everything I had into that house. I not only wanted to show my wife that I could take care of her and the house, but also that I could build the dreams we both shared at the time. I really enjoyed doing the work around the house and I was always looking for the next DIY project. Things seemed to be going well through most of the early 1990s, and I thought things would always stay the same. Little did I know that by the end of the decade I would lose almost everything that had meaning to me. The losses were directly related to the health issues that I would soon be made aware of. The losses would take control of my life.

As I said, things were going very well for me in the first half of the 1990s and I don’t think I could have been any happier. As I built the life of my dreams, I continued to look for ways to make my wife happy and to bring new joys into our lives. One thing we both shared was a love of animals, dogs in particular. So naturally, we had to have one or several. That was okay though because there was plenty of love in that house to go around, What little was left over we shared with the cat, who didn’t seem to care either way. Cats can be so aloof. Our little family had a lot of fun, even though I would sometimes get needlessly uptight about an animal on the couch or another of their many questionable habits.

When I look back on things like that now, I cannot believe that I let anything so small and meaningless, get to me. It is amazing what a little perspective and the passing of years can do to your memories. Most of my life I spent in needless hours striving for perfection in my life in everything I did and everything that surrounded me. I always felt that I was capable of doing better all the time. I was constantly striving to be as perfect as I could be, and I felt that everyone else around me should be doing the same. My expectations for myself were set high, -too high-, and therefore were very difficult to attain. What I finally came to realize, too late, was that I was really just being a jerk about some things and giving myself an ulcer for nothing. No one is perfect, and to hold a laser-like concentration on trying to be that way was not only a waste of my time and energy, but it made me seem unapproachable to some people, people I loved. I was too strict and uptight for my own good. As the phrase goes I had a stick up my butt, but none of my friends were willing to point that out to me. Those who tried just made me feel like I was failing because they were seeing my faults. That made me try even harder.

It took several considerable changes in my life to make me realize just how squared away I had made myself. I lived by the rule that there was a place for everything and everything in its place, or else. looking back on those times now, I have to shake my head and wonder, who was that person? I have certainly changed a lot since then. I had to learn the hard way that there is nothing in life worth being that uptight over. In the end, everything will work out on its own if you let it. I wasn’t a nasty person or anything like that I was just overly neat and orderly about everything. I never meant anything by it it was just that I felt this was how things had to be if I was going to take good care of a house and a wife and all of our four-legged family. It seemed to me that if I could make everything perfect, then I could make my wife happy. It never occurred to me that maybe this was not what she wanted in order to make her happy. I could have saved myself a lot of time and heartache if I had only realized this many years sooner.

We were married in December 1991 and it was a beautiful wedding. We had both been married before and done the big wedding thing so we decided to keep it small with immediate family only and held it at the Justice of the Peace’s office. The night we decided on was the 25th of December because we felt it was already a beautiful day, and what better day to start out on our lives together than to celebrate it on the night of our Lord’s birth? It was a naturally beautiful time of year with decorations already up for the holiday, and besides, we didn’t want to wait any longer.

We found a Justice of the