I can’t really remember much of anything about it, except that I was dead.  And by dead, I don’t mean the kind of dead one sees in the movies or hears about from television, where you see a tunnel with white light at the end and you’re supposed to follow the light, I mean dead as in no breathing, no signs of life, that sort of thing.  Well, that’s not entirely true, because while I didn’t see any tunnels or white lights or anything of the sort, I did see people in white flying around.  Not winged angels or anything, but just a bunch of people in white, flying, in some sort of strange room type environment.

Now, what I do remember about it is the beginning and the end.  Kind of strange, I know, because it’s rather difficult to imagine a story without a middle.  Like when you’re flipping through T.V. stations, waiting for a friend and you catch the beginning of a movie, and when you return you catch the last five minutes of it – that’s what I remember.  

The beginning started just a day earlier, when in the morning my asthma started to act up.  Normally, in situations where my breathing is either very shallow, or congested, or sounds like an old coal train’s whistle, I take a puff or two on my inhaler, and I’d be fine again.  But, for reasons that will probably never be really known to me, that isn’t what happened.  I could conjecture that it was the exceedingly harsh winter winds that I was continuously breathing that day, or that the airborne allergens that I live in constant fear of were especially active at the time, or even that some combined offensive flanking maneuver occurred, in which cigarette smoke provided some form of cover for the cat dander and biting winds to collectively attack my larynx in an attempt to seize control of my lungs, but whatever the case, I was unable to breathe properly, and was continually worsening by the hour.

By nightfall, I was taking Primatene Mist almost hourly, and for those who don’t know what Primatene mist is, or the schedule by which one is supposed to subscribe to while using it, let me educate you on exactly what Primatene Mist really is, and coincidentally why you never see commercials for it on television anymore.  Primatene Mist is to normal asthma medications what a hundred pound sledgehammer is to a tack hammer.  Or, for those unknowledgeable on what those two items are, it is akin to using a car to smash into a thumbtack, instead of just pushing it in.  And I was basically performing vehicular manslaughter on my lungs once an hour, instead of the recommended once every four hours, and not really getting much better.

So, to put it mildly, I was not doing well.  But, given that I had spent over seventeen years of my life dealing with this painful, frightening, and sometimes unbearable disease, I thought I had the full measure of it.  After going through a childhood like mine, where at age ten you’re paying rent, your father telling you asthma is all in your mind, and spending nights sitting down wishing you would just die instead of having to deal with a throat that doesn’t seem to like you all that much, you tend to think you know the worst, and how to deal with it.  

For example, one time I will never forget, no matter how badly I want to, was the time my throat completely closed on me.  I was maybe 16 at the time, probably younger, and I was having trouble sleeping, as most people would if they had only one tenth the necessary amount of air flowing through their lungs.  And, because I grew up having to steal Primatene Mist inhalers because no doctor would prescribe it, my parents couldn’t afford it, and no doctor would listen to me when I explained to them that the medication they kept prescribing me wasn’t working, I was stuck without medication at 11:30 at night on a Sunday.  I would have gladly (albeit extremely slowly) walked down to Rite Aid to steal myself a new one, but they didn’t open Sundays, and I had run out Saturday afternoon.  All my various secondary cures were ineffective – the pure lemon juice I had squirted down my throat hadn’t dissolved the congestion, really strong coffee only worked when it was a mild case, and trying to slowly breathe out and forcefully breathe in was making me hyperventilate.

So I was stuck just dealing with it, watching television, hoping that I would just die rather than have to face the hours of waiting interminably just for a smidgeon of improvement, when it happened.  Unlike most times, where my throat would just sit patiently, happy to torture me slowly for some crime I must have committed in a past life, that day it decided that I deserved some crueler fate and simply closed up.

If anyone ever asks you how you want to die, don’t choose suffocation, and don’t choose drowning.  Perhaps you know that, perhaps not, but I do.  For at least forty seconds, which in a situation like that is equivalent to forty or fifty YEARS of torment, I did not breathe.  I could not yell, I could not talk or whisper or do anything at all except sit in utter panic.  Finally, by some miracle, or curse depending on your viewpoint, I coughed, and a good amount of congestion cleared, and I took the deepest breath I had ever imagined possible.

But that was during childhood, and this was not.  Perhaps, as my wife believes, the seventeen years of jackhammering my lungs had weakened them.  What I do know is that, like then, I had tried everything I could think of, and was simply not getting any better.  And, just like then, I simply tried to ignore it, hoping this time that it would go away, as it had so many times in the past.

Unlike all those other times, however, I had the company of my wife and her parents.  She watched me go from okay, to bad, to “fine” (a word she hates because she knows when I say “fine,” it really means, “I’m not doing so good but I think I can beat it” or “I’m doing horridly but don’t want to worry you” or “I really can’t tell for sure yet”) to the point where every other sentence starts with “Should we go to the emergency room?”  But, as I said earlier, I thought I knew the worst, and thought I could handle it, so I kept saying no.

By the time I’m well enough to move, it’s way past midnight, and while I’m not dead (yet), breathing so shallowly has gotten to me, and my wife helped me slowly crawl up the stairs.  She helps me undress, and while I cannot lie down (because the worst thing in the world for me to do when I have an attack is to lie down) I am able to watch television in the hopes that it goes away enough for me to pass out.

But it doesn’t, and after another hour, I concede, and she quickly runs to wake up my father in law to take me to the hospital.  She helps me dress, and as she does so, I am suddenly panicking, more than I had the entire night, and I keep apologizing.  My breaths are coming quicker but shallower, and I am both hyperventilating and getting no air whatsoever.  I am dizzy, unable to really move at all, and all I can think of is how horrible this must be for my wife to deal with, and how truly sorry I am to put her through this.  I keep repeating that in my head, and I think out loud (although how could I without being able to get any air?) I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.  I remember entering the hallway and looking down the stairs, and nothing more.

In the car, I remember breathing very short, forced breaths.  I must have gotten down the stairs somehow.  I can’t remember.

I awoke to hear a steady beeping, and feeling very faint and weak.  I don’t remember much of anything at all besides that about the room at first.  What I do remember, more than anything else about that place, was the fact that my wife was by my side.  I didn’t know where I was, and I probably didn’t even know who I was, but I knew her, and I knew peace.  I smiled, and she explained all that had happened to me.

I had died on the way to the hospital.  No breathing at all, I was out cold.  Dead.  Cheryl, my mother-in-law had carried me down the stairs and threw me in the car. Charlie, her husband, had driven like a man possessed, ignoring every single sign, car, and obstacle to drive up to the hospital, carried me through the doors, and had yelled at anyone who would listen that his son had stopped breathing.  My wife had been hysterical in the car when I went limp, and Cheryl had helped get me out of the car and had spent the rest of that time consoling her.  Four days had gone by, and I was in the Intensive Care Unit of Flushing Hospital.  Everyone I knew, knew what had happened.  People had visited me, my job had been notified, and everything was okay.

But it really wasn’t okay, not at first.  I had to spend two more days in the hospital, during which I was also told that the men in white suits that I had seen when I was dead were the orderlies trying to hold me down so they could put the tubes in me.  There were six of them.  The reason I remember them flying was because I kept punching and kicking them, and in the end it took those orderlies and eight shots of morphine to knock me out so that I wouldn’t move.  Ironically, my wife had always called me Hercules, because of some semblance she sees between the Disney cartoon and I, and now she had proof, even if it wasn’t the kind of proof one wants.  She also called me Wolverine, because of my tendency to heal quickly after cuts, and the doctors agreed with her on that as well – my lungs were undamaged after all that I had put them through, and they were all amazed that I was back to normal after less than a week.  

Or, as normal as one can be with morphine withdrawal, something the hospital neither warned me about nor prepared me for.  During my time at the hospital, eating their horrifyingly bad food, I was never told to move around, and so I assumed that I was doing well, but was just weak.  Morphine withdrawal, however, is the most painful experience I have ever been through – consciously, anyway – because it involves such fun activities as hours of projectile vomiting whenever you move while  having food in your stomach, and dry heaving when you don’t, the inability to stand up, sit straight or balance whatsoever, and (as if that wasn’t enough) headaches and aches throughout your body so painful that you would rather drag your vital organs through crushed glass than go through them.  And that’s the fun part of withdrawal!

So, after many nights of bucket-worshipping and peeing-in-a-cup, I slowly redeveloped the ability of moving around, albeit with help – either my wife, Cheryl or a cane – and slowly recuperated.  I think the best day during that time was the day I didn’t vomit, followed closely by the day I actually walked to the bathroom by myself (with copious breaks in between, however.)  It wasn’t a fun time, but it beat being dead.

But then again, when I really stop to think about it, regardless of how little I really know about what truly happened, and knowing about all that happened in my past, I realized something.  I’m still dead.  Or rather, since that day, I’ve always been dead.  Because after the hospital, and after I got over the withdrawal, I noticed things I’ve never seen before.  I noticed how truly beautiful it is to live in this world.  To see the individual leaves on a tree, or the tiny branch at the very top that a little bird is setting a nest on.  Or the joy that comes with just being able to walk by yourself, wherever you want to walk, and not throwing up after two steps.  Most importantly, the person who thought he knew it all, could handle it all, and knew what the worst that could happen was, died that day.  And, luckily for me, he did, because in doing so, he saved my life.  So, every year, in a strange sort of way, while most people only have one day for them to celebrate their life, I am fortunate enough to have two.  And, for those like me who’ve died and gone to Earth, Happy Death Day to you too.