Two in Six: Why Me?

Many times when something bad happens to someone, when tragedy strikes, people tend to ask themselves "Why Me?"

For the second time in six years, I awoke in a hospital bed unexpectedly connected to many wires and machinery and full of drugs. As I regained consciousness from the surgery, I became aware of Margaret, a nurse in the step-up unit at the Hamilton General Hospital. I overheard her as she walked around the unit helping out her patients. As I listened to the way she handled patients and dealt with the other staff, I immediately knew that once I awoke I was going to like Margaret. She had a personality. She seemed to be a genuinely nice person. I looked forward to meeting her.

The saying “Déjà vu” is defined as “having the strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past”. Six years ago, I was in a hospital bed at Sunnybrook hospital in what was the biggest shock of my life. It began as a normal evening at home in Toronto and I started playing the drums. It was something I was doing at the time on an almost nightly basis. I was working on mastering two extremely difficult songs both physically and technically. I have an electronic drum kit so I run the song through the amp and then play along to it, sometimes through a live amplifier but most times on my own with headphones.

Green Day and Blink 182 just about killed me.

So, on August 25, 2010, as if by some miracle, Kathryn's niece Sarah happened to be downstairs with me as I asked her to check out my masterful drumming. The Green Day song "American Idiot" went without a hitch, but something happened when I played "Give Me One Reason" by Blink 182. I started to feel tired and then weak. I think I told Sarah that I need to practice this more. Really, all I remember is that I awoke in a hospital bed 2 days later after being in a drug induced coma (ah that explains a lot some of you may think). I was in good shape at the time, playing hockey 3 times per week and even won a tennis ladder at the club. How could this happen to me?

Sarah screamed for Kathryn, terrified and shaking uncontrollably. She was only 15 years old at the time, what an ordeal to go through. Kathryn came downstairs and performed CPR. The paramedics came and I was on my way to Sunnybrook hospital. Kathryn's calmness and ability to remember and perform the CPR correctly in fact saved my life. While in hospital, the first doctor to come to see me to address my situation told me that it was not a heart attack by traditional definition, but a failure of my heart's electrical system and the name he gave it was "Sudden Cardiac Death".

So, if you like to gamble or are into statistics and numbers, then let's have a look at the odds that I am even here today alive and writing this blog.

The doctors at Sunnybrook told me that only 2% of people who have "Sudden Cardiac Death" survive. This is no typo, we're talking 2%  ! Compound that with the fact that I was doing so much drumming that week, and it happened to be the week that Sarah came to visit us from Montreal. She just happened to be there that one time that I collapsed. It's hard to calculate these odds when you stack these two things together but bottom line: I have no business being here today, I am so fortunate to be alive that to me it's just beyond comprehension. It's something that I think about every day.

I recently watched the Netflix documentary Tig, about stand-up comedian Tig Notaro was diagnosed with cancer in both breasts in 2012. Upon finding out she had cancer, she addressed it to open her stand-up comedy show. There is no video of the event but an audio recording was made, and it eventually went viral and led to the Nextflix film. Tig agonizes over the death of her mother, and then a very short time later, is diagnosed with cancer. She questions how two things like this could happen to her, thinking perhaps that after the first, she would be somewhat immune or free of tragedy for a while. What the heck does God think he is doing? You already got me, I've already suffered?

It's interesting, I don't really feel that way. Actually, I thought I would. I just feel lucky. When I look at my life today, I've never been happier. I have an incredible wife, Kathryn, who is the most amazing person I've ever known in my life. I have two fantastic children, Shayne and Anika, ages 8 and 6, and they amaze me each and every day with everything they do and achieve. It's hard for me to believe now that when I met Kathryn, I was not interested in having children. I owe everything to her for being patient with me and helping me overcome some serious fears which were strangling me from past experience. Where would I be today without her?

My career was going well even though I had some major setbacks from 2011 through to early 2015, but somehow things had turned around in a big way in 2015 and 2016 and it's never been better. I'm involved in some amazing local community efforts and have been fortunate to have met so many incredible people and neighbours along the way here on my favourite place on earth, Guelph, Ontario (I love my Guelph)!

Things were going so well . . .

On Sunday night, October 23, 2016 at 8:19 pm, I got the call. What started out on October 4 as blurry vision, headache, and a possible infection has now become something alien to me. Dr. R, the neurosurgeon who performed the left craniotomy to remove the brain tumour personally called me at home with the news. It was the news we were anxiously waiting for after an agonizing 15 days. Kathryn was with me. We had him on speaker phone in my office-jam room.

"It's cancer".

This week I will be going for tests to find out what it's all about. Dr. R believes it's a secondary tumour. I've had chronic back pain since the middle of August so it's very likely that there is a link. My sister Sue is a physiotherapist and she mentioned getting an MRI done back in September, but this was complicated by the fact that I have an ICD device implanted in me from my previous heart issue back in August of 2010 and therefore unable to have an MRI done unless the ICD is removed. I'll be going for many tests this week and then a plan will be put in place to help me with the battle.

To all my friends I can't express enough how completely overwhelmed Kathryn and I have been because of the friendship and kindness of all of you. Kathryn keeps telling me how she can hardly keep up with just answering some of the offers of help and kindness that you have all shown.

It's been very difficult to keep everyone informed hence the reason I started this blog. I love to write, and I need to keep people informed, so it just made sense to create this personal blog to document this experience.

I have some truly incredible stories to share with you of my experiences over the past two weeks, and I plan to use this blog to share some of these funny, inspiring, and sometimes crazy stories.

So, I survived the "Sudden Cardiac Death" and now I've just been diagnosed with cancer. Am I going to ask Why Me? Why this again?

No, I'm not going to think like that - I'm just going to win.