Live Like You’re Dying
Like any writer, I came to Nashville with the song in my head and in my heart. I spent the spring and summer of 2021 learning about the city (about the wonderful state of Tennessee) while playing guitar, finishing songs, going to Honky Tonks, and making friends.
The money I had saved for my Nashville adventure had began to wane, so I started to drive for UBER and LYFT part-time. This was good. One, the money was nice, and two, I began to learn how to get in and around Music City, avoid traffic hotspots, and learn about the surrounding areas. I was becoming a Tennessean.
In December, after about six months into my journey south, my beloved mother was coming to the end of her battle with breast cancer. This was a battle she had not lost but indeed won, as she was originally diagnosed in 1989 and had lived brilliantly until the eve of our 85th birthday.
After spending an extended visit in Eugene, Oregon, tearfully and lovingly saying goodbye to mother, I returned to Nashville and an uncharacteristically cold patch of winter. In the middle of December, I was behind on my budget, heartbroken, and moving too fast, trying to make sense of things with pure activity.
Momma passed on January 2 of 2022. About a week later, I found I was short breath almost constantly, couldn’t sleep soundly, and had little appetite. I experienced Covid-19 in the February of 2020 and though this was a winter flu with its hold on me. Still, I didn’t slow down.
At around four A.M. in the morning of January 11, I called 911. When the dispatcher asked me what was wrong, I simply muttered, “I can’t breathe.” Deftly, a Nashville paramedic team came and picked me up. By the time they got there, my oxygen saturation was most likely near the teens. I was hypoxic and beginning a fall into full-blown Covid pneumonia.
I then spent 42 days (31 in the ICU), in the Tri-Star Southern Hills Medical Center in South Nashville. It was there that my adventure to Nashville almost ended. I had blood clots throughout my body, was experiencing grave pulmonary fibrosis, and was receiving 100% oxygen to keep my lungs working.
I clung to my re-breather, could barely move in bed, and suffered bouts of ICU psychosis. Still, I clung to that precarious perch as I knew the doctors and nurses were discussing intubation and ECMO, a machine similar to the heart-lung by-pass machine used in open-heart surgery.
Then, my archangel of a sister, Lorraine, arrived. Lorraine had been the caretaker of my mother’s last months on earth and was putting her affairs in place when she heard I had fallen ill. She had made the journey across the country once she heard that intubation was being discussed. A respiratory therapist for 35 years, Lorraine came to Nashville, Tennessee, a place she had never seen, to save her little brother from the ravage of Covid, pleural fibrosis, and extensive peripheral neuropathy.
She did. On February 11th, I left the ICU with her beside me, and 11 days later, the Southern Hills Medical Center. I can never repay her for coming to me then, nor can I ever thank those medical professionals for the remarkable jobs they did in stabilizing my health. I made many friends in those 42 days.
Why did Covid get me so bad? Even some of my current doctors are confused now. What is now termed “Long-Haul Covid” is a new medical phenomenon and, no doubt, studies of this virus and how it affects humans will go on for decades. I’m now just a case to point to.
Leaving the Southern Hills Medical Center, I was happily sent off by more than a handful of nurses and ICU team members who told me sincerely that they didn’t think I was gonna make it through those long nights in the Critical Care Unit. That’s how bad it was.
It is now almost 5 months since Lorraine pushed me out of the hospital in a wheelchair. I couldn’t walk and was still anxiously sucking 6 L of tank oxygen as we got into my VW Jetta and drove back to Lakewood, Illinois, where she lives and now assists in my recovery.
Although the problems of ‘Long Covid’ will remain for quite a while, I am a new man. A cannula of oxygen is no longer strapped to my face constantly. When I am sitting, I breathe like a normal person. When you’ve spent months frightened that you won’t be able to get oxygen into your lungs when you try and get into a chair from bed, this is a big thing.
Mine may not be such a special story, but it is a story I can tell now with a personal effect on the wisdom of the ages:
Life Is Precious. Breathe it in. Live Like You’re Dying. Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff. Love Your Friends And Family. Do Good.
These are good things for a songwriter to remember when he’s getting back down to work.
