I was wheeled to surgery & my friends escorted to the waiting room where they waited over 5 hours while I was under knife, saw, drill & whatever else it takes to cut through & open a person's scalp & skull. (reminds me of a favorite 'Sonic Youth' track "Expressway To Your Skull"). I'm told that the waiting room became quite the weird scene with Megan crying hysterically at times & my friend Billy & his bandmates sitting on the floor passing a bottle around to drink their way through it. When my dad showed up he had a drink with them. I'm sure he needed a one after 4 hours of driving with the words "he probably will not survive" in his head. So pop, & a bunch of my friends sat around sharing stories, some from my friends that I'm sure I wouldn't have wanted my dad to hear & vice-versa. It's been funny & heart warming hearing about those conversations.. And so.. the night passed.

In the early morning hours a doctor took my dad aside to tell him the situation. My dad told everyone that I had survived the surgery & was being taken to the ICU.

  My father was allowed to see me. He told everyone I was alive, but unconscious, & there was a strong possibility I would be comatose forever.

  The next morning, my family & Holly returned & were greeted with the news that I was already awake & talking (never could keep my mouth shut). They were also told that I was trying to get up & go home… (A good sign.) I had to be strapped to the bed because when I woke up I pulled my breathing tube & I.V.’s out. Here's why I did that..

I remember being in a semi-conscious state & hearing doctors or nurses say that I might be a "lock in". I knew what it meant to be a "lock in". A lock-in is when you are conscious but blind, deaf, dumb & completely paralyzed. You're awake but have no way of letting anyone know you are there. A presence of fear gripped me and even seemed to torment me. I didn't know then that this presence of fear was an entity that was going to continue to haunt me & even try to convince me to take my own life.

    Back then as I absorbed the conversation about being a "lock-in" Images from the scariest film I had ever seen ("Johnny Got His Gun") raced through my mind. I also remember psychically screaming lines from the Dr. Suess book "Horton Hears a Who". I was screaming "I'm Here, I'm Here, I'm Here" inside my head. I was the most terrified in these moments than at any other time during my ordeal. At some point the energy of my terror & what I call my "psychic screaming" allowed me to punch my way out of my paralysis. I then pulled my breathing tube out as well as everything else they stuck in me. I'm told they then strapped me down to get all the tubes back in. One of my biggest fears is being kept alive in a hospital by machines. If my body cannot live on its own without the assistance of machines, then let it die so my spirit can leave this temporary shell.

I REFUSE TO BE PART OF A MACHINE ATTACHED TO THE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY. CONSIDER THAT AS PART OF MY LAST WILL & TESTAMENT. If you need more info on this feeling, see the movie "Johnny Got His Gun". I am not afraid to die. I am afraid to live under the power of machines. If my body will not live under it's own power, then LET IT GO.. It goes to place far better than here.

    This I now KNOW first hand. AND everything we do here does matter in eternity, so do good knowing that all your deeds will face you in eternity.. Your brain is your "black box" flight recorder & is hooked into the universal neural network. That's just a fraction of the wisdom I was given while out of my body. I began writing the particulars of the visions & data I received as soon as I could hold a pen but kept a lot of what I experienced to myself. I told a few close friends & family about my vision of earth dying of consumption & the "mission" I felt I was sent back to earth for, but tried to keep silent about that for fear it would arouse suspicions about my mental health & keep me in hospital longer. I knew I had to get home ASAP so that I could act on what I was shown while dead.

Holly said I spent the next several days asking where my car was & plotting an escape.

  One of My first post-op memories was hearing someone asking me to wiggle my toes. Upon hearing that I knew I was screwed, but I was able to move them. It was difficult & my fine motor coordination was'nt there. However, I was not paralyzed. I was not totally blind. I was not in a coma. My anger at the fact that my head was cut open without my say so, that I was plotting an escape & that I was pissed that I couldn’t get my usual raw-food vegetarian cuisine was a sign that I was still me.

Divine intervention? And winding up in the right hands.
  Neuro surgeons are almost never in emergency rooms. I wound up in one where not only was there a neuro surgeon, but one of the best neuro surgeons in the southeast. Not only did my surgeon (Dr. R.E. Rydell) know what to do & to do it fast, He was also acquainted with the particulars of my extremely rare type of affliction. The medical name for the type of aneurysm I had is 'arteriovenous malformation' or AVM.

  The National Organization of Rare Disorders lists this congenital defect under rare disorders, but my doc knew what he was dealing with before he opened my head. In my surgery report, my preoperative diagnosis states the following… “Right temporal intracerebral hematoma, possible venous malformation. What are the odds of landing in an emergency room on a Tuesday night with a neuro surgeon who knows the particulars of an extremely rare brain disorder? That alone was more proof for the existence of God than I’d ever need, but I got much more proof than that during my out of bbody experience and the path that experience has set me on ever since.

   I had a full frontotemporal craniotomy under emergency conditions (which means they cut the whole side of my head open, peeled my scalp back, removed a section of my skull to get in my brain where my bleeding was stopped, the AVM removed, the pools of blood within my skull evacuated, & a resulting hematoma also removed… (I had a massive stroke from all the blood lodging in areas where it had no business being).

  Click here if you'd like to read the thank you letter I wrote Dr. Rydell. I also posted my surgery report in case you would like to read the particulars of cutting open a person's head to get in and work on their brain...

continued, next column.

^^^Before^^^ & ùùù√After√ùùù

This pic taken several weeks after surgery. I'm pissed that no one took pix when I had loads of tubes sticking in me or when my head was all stapled up. The staples would have been a great CD cover for my industrial band. I kept the staples & made a morocca with them; it sounds great!. You can hear it on the new Auditorium album.

   I don’t remember too much from the ICU except it was freezing & that I wanted to pull all of the tubes & needles out & go home because I knew I couldn't afford to be there for any length of time. Plus I wanted to get to work on writing down & sorting through all the information I received while out of my body.

   As it turns out, I would be in the ICU several days, on a recovery floor for a week & on a rehabilitation floor for 2 more. I remember a lot more from the rehab floor.

    As I discovered that I could begin to do things like walk, they (the hospital staff) found out that they would have to put an alarm on my bed so that I would'nt walk around by myself & try to fly the cuckoo's nest.  

    It was very hard to walk at first… It took all my concentration. 3 books got me through this phase - "The Miracle of Mindfulness", The Prison Epistles of Paul, & "Frontal Lobes Supercharge", which reminded me that the brain is capable of feats we are just beginning to understand.

    My doctors kept reiterating how lucky I was… That I really beat the odds just by living & that it was incredible that I could be up walking & talking just days after such a serious operation. I was afraid to tell them what I saw while out of body & how those visions were partly responsible for my progress & need to get home so that I could get "on mission".

    My skull bones fused back together quickly & there was no need for a metal plate, so no worries at the airport metal detector for me! My doctors opined that it was probably because I was in such good health going in that I survived & was recovering so quickly.. ( I have been a vegetarian since my teens & have been a raw "Foodist" the last few years). I completed 2 weeks of rehab therapy on the recovery floor & met some of the most wonderful people I think I will ever meet (my rehab nurses & doctors).

  The next news was that I could be discharged from the hospital but that with my particular brain injury (anytime a craniotomy is performed it is considered to be a traumatic brain injury) I would not be able to go home alone either. I was put in a nice assisted living facility for a couple of months while I went through a physical, occupational & speech/cognitive rehab program on an out-patient basis. I worked really hard to complete this in record time. I also wanted to prove I could live on my own again so that I could get back to my home, my computers and my reason for being put back on this planet.

an MRI of my brain a few months after surgery

  The assisted living facility or A.L.F. was quite an experience. It was like having several sets of grandparents. I was at first, resistant to going, but I’m so glad that I did as I have very many precious memories that I'll always treasure & I’m planning on going back there to volunteer as soon as I can.

   The rehab programs measured my deficits & gave me exercises to correct for the disruptions that were occurring in my neural pathways. It was discovered that I had left homonymous anopsia, which means that I have no peripheral vision to the left.

   My brain injuries were in the right hemisphere which controls the left side of the body. The peripheral blindness continues to this day, as does some fine motor coordination problems on my left side as well as a weird, slightly numb frostbite-like pain on my left side. I’m told that with time & some continued therapy; these things may correct themselves as my brain continues to heal.

   I’ll update this article as I get more “missing time” info from friends & family & as things continue to (hopefully) heal. At this point I can’t drive because of the peripheral blindness & am told I need to rest as much as possible, which is difficult for an active guy like me. The good news is that with time & therapy there is no reason to believe that I won’t be able to return to everything I used to do. I’ll be praying for that & I hope if you read this you’ll say a prayer for me too. I know now that prayer is a directive force.

    Having lived through this I feel blessed & not at all depressed or in a state of "Why Me." Yes I have to face some debt & may be partially blind for the rest of my life & unable to drive, but now when I wake up to another day, I realize all that we take for granted. Now, every day, the miracle is to walk the earth & witness creation, & I know that even if I don't get any better, that I have what I prayed for when I new I was near dead, which is the ability to think, write & carry on with my project; a website that I hope will make a contribution towards better days for all of us on this 3rd stone from the sun. As you can see (if you click the link, I have been able to continue. It's months later now (July, 2004); I'm still half blind, but hopeful. Unlike most other people I know why I'm here and what I have to do, so I'm getting back to work on it because we don't have much time to turn things around on this planet (environmentally speaking). The most frightening thing I saw during my N.D.E. was the end of all biology on earth.. I was also shown how we might avoid that & my work is now about getting that information out of my head & sharing it with the world. The end of life on earth or a new golden age is a choice being made by humans. If we do not choose correctly the earth will die of consumption. I saw it. That same entity of fear that had me in it's grips at the point I was a "lock-in" seeks to drive all life on earth toward a similar fate.

Here's a fun tangent:
One of my favorite bands, The Flaming Lips, has a song called "Guy Who Got A Headache & Accidentally Saves The World" Check it out for fun, Then look at my new site & see if they were perhaps being prophetic =->

I'm a bit financially screwed by this, so if you can help out with a donation, well, that will help me continue to donate my talents toward what I think could lead to a better future for all.

I've tried to take the good of what's happened to me & turn it into greater good. My verbal abilities, which should have been destroyed by this incident actually seem to have been improved, so I've used that to write all the material on my new website & author 2 books & a trilogy of feature film screenplays. The books have to do with human & environmental health. The screenplay "Apocalypse Near" has to do with taking the world's environmental issues into a new stage of healing. I believe I'm creating a new mythology for the masses to understand the symbiotic relationship that can exist between the microcosm of self & the macrocosm that is our universe. This work is also part of the upload I feel I received during that time I was out of body & adrift between biological earth life & eternal spirit life. I can still get in contact with that place through a system of meditation I received while there. If you wish to read any of this material, please contact me.

11/06 UPDATE! Check out the healing method I'm deploying to rid myself of nerve pain, defeat my epilepsy & cure my blindness. I will post updates as I use this system.