Man Kyle, you are one deep mofo, seriously. We talk a lot on AIM and I honestly had no idea what your background was, not that it changes anything in my view, if anything it makes you a cooler person to me to have been through so much and you keep your head up and don't let it show. Since everyone is telling their story, might as well tell mine. When I was 15 I had a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lung. I was chilling in my room one night and all of a sudden it was difficult to breathe, like breathing through a coffee straw, or a flattened straw...almost like asthma, from my friend's description it's a very similar feeling. So I tried to remedy it myself with hot steam from water, hot tea with honey...nothing helped. Finally I woke my dad up and he rushed me to the nearest hospital. I found out about the PE and the doctor goes "good thing you came in when you did, 15 more minutes or so and your lung would have collapsed and any longer...we may not have been able to help you recover." Pretty fucked up thing to hear when you are 15. For the next month I'm stuck in the hospital, every single day I get pricked about 10 times for blood tests, they were trying to get the right dosage of blood thinners for me to prevent a 2nd PE. They also could not explain how or why I had one in the first place...apparently a PE is extremely rare for people under 30-40. Go figure.
So every day the doctor comes in, checks my chart, and says "maybe you will get to go home tomorrow bud"...every fucking day for a month. My parents thought I was going to try and kill myself from the depression. The first week in the hospital, my dad's brother went apeshit and killed his wife and a couple of her co-workers at her job before turning the gun on himself once the cops showed up. Little did we know he and his wife were having trouble and she had left him...he couldn't handle that, obviously. On top of that my oldest cousin on my mom's side had found out he was epileptic (sp?) at the age of 27 with no prior symptoms in his entire life. He was going somewhere, he was head chef at the Bellagio in Vegas, very high paying job. I'm talking thousands of $$ per week, just to run their restaurant. They took away his job and his driver's license. He got so depressed about it and took too many pills and killed himself. That was the second week I was in the hospital.
All in all it was a fucked up month, to say the least. I honestly don't know what got me through all of it, including my family getting through my uncle, aunt and cousin dying... But a few years later I got this tattoo:
It basically translates to: "Every day is one day less", in gaelic.
It is a reminder to try and live every day to the fullest, make that day mean something. On my other arm I am getting a similar one but the phrase is "There is life after survival", which is about my experience with the PE and everything. It's my outlook on life that you shouldn't let things get you down and affect your life in a way that it takes a moment away from you. As an example, people that are in horrible car accidents and are afraid to even get in a car afterwards...that is like cheating yourself out of life. You shouldn't let something affect you so much that you can't do something you want to. My family thinks I'm nuts because I don't show my feelings when family members die, etc. I just tell them that being upset about it and letting it depress you or anything will not make it better or change the fact that they are gone or undo what has happened, it just makes you mope around and miss out on living.
And a big +1 to how cool this place and it's members are for being there, from anything about audio to getting through life's BS.
~006
