Coma Support Group

This is an amazing story that I thought I would share, it comes from the 1st 2 chapters of a book written by a good friend of mine who nearly died in a skydiving plane crash in which 16 others were killed, including one of his closest friends. He woke from his 6-week coma with a broken neck, his head in a cage and catastrophic injuries. Doctors told him he was destined to live a life of limited activity; certainly he would never be able to skydive again.

Despite all this, Dan went on to become a multiple world champion skydiver and world-renowned coach, living his dreams in ways most of us can only imagine.

His book has been published by a small publishing house with a very low marketing budget, but I think this is a story worth reading, so am sharing here. I hope it is a little comforting.

Thanks,
Emma

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WAKING UP

Something was wrong. I was groggy, fading in and out. My
body felt tired, weighted down. What was going on?

I tried to see but my eyelids were too heavy to lift. I summoned all
the strength I could but still didn’t have the power to peel them open.
The last thing I could recall was training with my new skydiving team,
Airmoves. After nine years of competition, much of which was spent
living in my van and eating out of a cooler so that I could afford team
training, the owners of the Perris Valley Skydiving Center in California
had presented me with a team sponsorship opportunity. I would get to
pick and run the team. They would cover the training costs.
This was it, the opportunity I had always hoped for. Since money
wasn’t an issue, I was able to pick the teammates I most wanted. The
first person I called was James Layne. I had known James since he was
eleven and had taught him to jump when he was only fourteen. His
whole family had worked at my drop zone in Ohio.
James was like a little brother to me. Even before his very first jump
seven years earlier, we had decided that someday we were going to win
the national and world championships together. This was our chance,
a dream come true.

Troy Widgery was next on my list. Troy was a young entrepreneur
and good friend whom I had coached when he was on the University of
Colorado Skydiving Team. At the collegiate national championships a
year earlier, I had told James and Troy that somehow, someday, I was
going to get them both on my team.
Richard Stuart had been the camera flyer on my previous team,
the Fource. But like me, Richard still just hadn’t had enough of team
training and competition.
To fill the one remaining position, I held tryouts. Tom Falzone outperformed
the rest and completed the team lineup. Perris Airmoves
was born.
We were five months into our training and had made about 350
practice jumps. Everything was going better than I had ever imagined,
and I have quite an imagination. We were improving at an
unheard-of pace and had already gone head-to-head with some of
the top teams in the country. The U.S. Nationals gold medal was in
our sights.
And then . . .
The crust on my eyelashes glued them shut. Using the muscles in
my forehead, I finally pried them open a crack. A faint white light was
all I could see, like I was inside of a cloud. It was silent. Where was
I waking up? Was I waking up? Was I dead?
I had no idea what was happening, how I got here, or what was
going on. But I did have one absolutely vivid image in my head, a
crystal clear picture of something that seemed to have happened just
moments before waking up. It wasn’t a dream. It was as real as any
real-world experience I had ever had. I could remember the entire
thing, every action, every word, and every thought.
It went like this: I was in free fall. Almost as if I had just appeared
there. I love free fall, and finding myself there at that moment seemed
natural. I was at home, at peace, part of the infinite sky.
But after a few seconds I noticed that this wasn’t normal free fall.
It was quieter. The wind wasn’t blowing as fast. I wasn’t descending.
A gentle breeze was suspending me. It was okay, it was fine. I was
floating, flying, but it wasn’t right. What was I doing there? I wasn’t
afraid. I felt safe, but confused.
I looked up and saw James flying down to me just as if we were
on a skydive together and he was “swooping” me. His expression was
that silly, playful smile he so often had in free fall. He was obviously
not confused at all. He knew exactly where he was and what he was
doing there.
He flew down and stopped in front of me. Still with a smile on his
face, he asked, “Danny, what are you doing here?”
I answered, “I don’t know.”
James said, “You’re not supposed to be here, you have to get back
down there.” I began to get a grasp of the situation.
I asked him, “Are you coming with me?”
His expression changed to one with a hint of sadness. He said, “No,
I can’t.”
I tried to persuade him to change his mind, “C’mon, James, we
were just getting started. You gotta come with me.”
James raised his voice, interrupting me. “I can’t!” It was obvious
that the decision was final. It seemed as if it wasn’t his decision. He
continued with a gentle smile. “I can’t, but it’s okay. There are more
places to go, more things to do, more fun to have. Tell my mom it’s
okay. Tell her I’m okay.”
For a few seconds we just looked at each other as I accepted this for
the reality it was. He changed his tone and spoke with some authority
as he gave me an order. “Now,” he said, “you need to get back down
there. You need to go get control of the situation.” I unquestioningly
accepted this as well, still not knowing what the situation was that he
was referring to.
James stuck out his hand palm down, the way we always did when
practicing our “team count,” our “ready, set, go” cadence we would
use to synchronize our exit timing. A couple of minutes before exiting
the plane on a training jump, we would always huddle up and
practice this count. The purpose was as much to get psyched up for
the jump as to rehearse the cadence. I put my hand on top of his.
He put his other hand on top of mine. I put my other hand on top of
his. We looked each other in the eyes. Both of us with gentle smiles of
love and confidence and sadness. James started the count. “Ready.” I
joined in as we finished it together. “Set. Go.” As was our routine, we
clapped and then popped our hands together, locking them in a long,
strong, brotherly grasp.
James had one more thing to say, and he said it with absolute certainty,
“I’ll see you later.” It was clearly not a “good-bye.” I had no
doubt that we would see each other again. Before I had even thought
about an answer, the words “I know” came out of my mouth.
Slowly I started to descend. As I did, James began to fade from my
grip. The wind picked up as I was now falling through it, no longer
suspended by it. Everything went black.
As I woke, James’s words, “Get control of the situation,” still rang
clearly in my mind. If only I knew what the situation was.
I knew I wasn’t dead. I squinted, trying to see more clearly. The
white light slowly brightened. A few small red and green lights came
into view. As if coming from a distance, faint electrical beeping sounds
began to reverberate from the silence.
My vision started to sharpen. I could see I was surrounded with
lights, gauges, hoses, and wires running in every direction. The glowing
white light wasn’t the heavens. It was the bedsheets and ceiling
paint of an ICU hospital room.
I stared straight up from flat on my back, the position I found
myself in. What’s the situation? I thought that James and I must have
been in some kind of accident together. James was gone and I wasn’t.
I tried to pick my head up to look around the room. My head
wouldn’t move. I tried to turn my head to look to the side; it wouldn’t
move. Oh my God, I thought. I can’t move my head. I’m paralyzed. It
can’t be true. Don’t let it be true. This can’t be the situation.
I was filled with a sense of fear far greater than anything I had ever
experienced before. I felt myself starting to give up and caught myself.
Don’t panic, don’t panic. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and tried
to calm down. It’s got to be something else, there has to be more. I told
myself not to come to any conclusions too soon, to pause and reevaluate
the situation. I started again.
I opened my eyes. I could see a little more clearly now, and there
was no doubt I was definitely in a hospital bed complete with all the
bells, whistles, buzzers, and instruments. I tried to move my head
again. It wouldn’t budge. “Stay cool, stay cool. Try something else,” I
told myself.
I tried to move my toes. I thought I felt something, but I couldn’t
lift my head to see them to confirm. I remembered hearing about
people who were paralyzed but had ghost movements when it felt as
though they could move even though they couldn’t. “Stay cool, Dan,
stay cool. Look for options. Try something else.” I had to talk myself
through it every step of the way.
I tried to wiggle my fingers. It felt like they moved. I tried to move
my hands. I could swear they worked. Did they move? I couldn’t turn
my head to see my hands but nearly stretched my eyes out of their
sockets trying to look down to verify that my hands were actually
moving.
Peering past the horizon of the bedsheet, there were no hands in
sight. I tried to lift my hands higher. They felt so heavy. Were they
moving, or was it my imagination wishing them to move? Slowly, I saw
the bedsheet rise. Like the sun rising in the morning, slow but certain.
I brought my hands all the way up right in front of my face, trying to
prove to myself that it wasn’t a hallucination. I stretched out my fingers,
clenched my fists, and then stretched them out again. I put my hands
together to see if my right hand could feel my left and my left hand feel
my right. They worked. Yes! What an incredible relief. My arms and
hands weren’t paralyzed. Okay, so far so good, back to my legs.
I tried again to move my toes and lift my feet. They were too far
away to see and too heavy to lift. I gathered all the strength I had, as
if I was trying to bench-press four hundred pounds, and focused it on
my knees. Ever so slowly, the bedsheet started to lift. Slowly my knees
came up high enough that I could see they were moving. I wasn’t
paralyzed, not at all.
I still didn’t know what the situation was, but no matter what, it
wasn’t as bad as I had feared. I felt a sudden relief, and though I had
never been a person who prayed very often, without even thinking I
found myself thanking God for lessening my burden.
Why couldn’t I move my head, though? I reached up with both my
newly working hands to feel my head. As I did, I came in contact with
two metal rods. As I explored further I realized my head was in a cage.
I couldn’t move my head not because I wasn’t capable but because it
was being held still by a halo brace.
My neck must be broken. But for a person who moments earlier
thought he was completely paralyzed, a broken neck seemed like the
common cold. The experience of thinking I was paralyzed from head
to toe was truly a gift. It would forever put things in perspective for
me. I decided at that moment that I would never complain about my
injuries, no matter what they were.
But what had happened? I asked the doctor, but he skirted the
question and instead filled me in on my condition. In addition to
breaking my neck, I had a collapsed lung, cracked skull, a severe concussion,
and crushed insides causing other internal injuries. It’s hard
to believe, but none of this really fazed me. It was still much better
news than I had feared. I asked him again, “What happened?” He
acted like he didn’t hear me.
The doctor was concerned about the nerve and brain damage but
seemed confident that I would ultimately be able to walk out of the
hospital and lead a relatively normal life, as long as my normal life
didn’t include any contact sports or rigorous activity at all. I would
certainly never skydive again.
A little while later, Kristi, my girlfriend, came in. I asked her what
had happened, but she dodged the question. I kept asking her, pushing
her; I had to know. Finally she said, “It’s bad, Dan, it’s so bad.”
That was the first time it occurred to me that if James and I were
in an accident of some kind, it was likely that the other members of
Airmoves were in the same accident. I asked her again what had happened.
“It’s so bad” was all she could say. I pushed her relentlessly.
Finally, she told me. There was a plane crash. A plane crash? I hadn’t
even considered a plane crash. I realized what that could mean and
tried to prepare for the worst, that my entire team may be gone. The
sudden emotional barrage that hit me was overwhelming. I was starting
to lose control and caught myself. I closed my eyes, took a breath,
and calmed myself down.
I later learned that Kristi had been by my side since the crash. She
and my friends and family did not know how, if and when I woke up,
they would tell me that James was gone.
I asked her, “How’s my team?” She tried to speak, but still, the only
words she could muster were, “It’s bad, Dan, it’s so bad.”
I needed an answer. I said, “I know James is gone. How is the rest
of the team?” She froze in disbelief. She looked at me, staring deeply
into my eyes, and asked, “How do you know that?”
I answered directly, “He told me.”
She continued to stare at me, wondering how that was possible.
Almost relieved that I already knew about James, Kristi told me that,
compared to me, my other teammates were fine. Troy and Tom were
banged up and had broken a few bones. Troy had to have surgery on
his hip. But all things considered, they were basically okay.
Richard had missed the plane. His camera helmet broke just minutes
before we boarded, and he had asked another cameraman to take
his place while he went to fix it. In the thousands of training jumps
Richard and I had together, I could never remember him missing a
jump. Kristi was quiet. There was more.
We were flying in the Twin Otter, which carries twenty-two people.
It was worse than I thought, way worse. For some reason, I had
assumed that Airmoves had been alone in a single-engine Cessna. Of
the twenty-two people on board, sixteen had died in the crash. Most
of them my friends, including Dave Clarke, the cameraman who took
Richard’s place.
The emotional bombardment continued as Kristi told me who we
lost. The names included members of Tomscat, a team from Holland
that I was coaching, the pilots, instructors, and camera flyers who
worked at the skydiving school, and students who were there for their
first jump, in what was supposed to have been an experience of a lifetime
for them. Kristi was right: It was bad. So, so bad.
Because I was just learning about this, I had assumed that it had
all just happened. As I was absorbing this information, I was hit with
another shocker. The crash had occurred over a month ago. I had been
in a coma for nearly six weeks. How could that be? I picked up my
arms and held them in front of my face. They looked skeletal. I had lost
forty pounds. I touched my face and discovered a beard. It was true.
What hell the families and friends must have been going through
over the last month while I had the luxury of being unconscious.
What sorrow and grief they must have been experiencing. I felt so
badly for them, and guilty that I wasn’t there to be with them through
this difficult time.
It immediately occurred to me that I had to be strong. It may have
been new to me, but they had been dealing with it for over a month. I
was experiencing this grief for the first time, but I would have to do so
on my own. I didn’t want to drag my friends and family back through
it all again.
If only they knew what I knew. If only James had been able to share
with each of them what he shared with me. I knew that our friends
were gone, but that they were okay. I knew they had more places to
go, more things to do, and more fun to have. I knew we hadn’t said
good-bye, only, “See you later.” I wanted to share this with everyone,
but I also knew that they would think I was nuts and that the brain
damage I had suffered was more severe than they thought. I kept it to
myself, except for telling one person. As James had requested, I called
his mother, my dear friend Rita, from my hospital bed and passed his
message on to her.
“You need to go get control of the situation.” What exactly did James
mean? I thought about that a lot. I believe he was alerting me to the
fact that I was about to wake up in a different world than the one
before the crash. I would be arriving in the middle of a situation that
was overrun by sadness, fear, helplessness, and defeat. I believe he was
warning me that many people were going to try to define the situation
for me and tell me what my limitations were. He was telling me not to
be a victim, not to let anyone but me decide my fate and that I didn’t
have to let go of my dreams. There was more to “life” than what we
experience in this physical world. He was telling me it was all okay.
James was reminding me that prior to the crash, I had taken control
of my life. I had found an activity that I loved, pushed myself to be the
best I could possibly be at it, and set my sights on becoming the best
in the world. I had shown the courage to follow my dreams and the
faith in the world to believe that the few things that were out of my
control would work out as they should. This attitude toward life had
never steered me wrong in the past. And it wouldn’t then.
I believed him. I trusted him. And I decided.



FOLLOWING YOUR DREAMS


Human beings are born dreamers. Through dreams we explore
our limitless imaginations and consider the true possibilities
of things we perceive to be impossible. Most great human achievements
began as someone’s impossible dream, a crazy fantasy. It was the
dreamers of their day who imagined electricity, flying machines, walking
on the moon, running a four-minute mile, or instantly communicating
on a cell phone or the Internet. All of these were considered
impossible right up until the moment they actually happened. Soon
after, they were thought of as everyday occurrences.
Our dreams provide us a stage from which we can fantasize about
things that don’t seem feasible within the constraints of our physical
realities. They encourage us to question our often false perceptions
of the limits of those realities. Through our dreams we are open to
exploring all possibilities. Without our dreams, we too often surrender
to our established limitations and underestimate our true potential.
Dreaming is an essential part of what it means to be human. The
same way we are born hungry and need to eat to grow, our minds and
souls crave inspiration and need our imaginations to show us all what
we are truly capable of being and doing.
It is human nature to want to expand our capabilities. As long as we
can imagine reaching the next level in our chosen field, most of us will
instinctively want, and choose, to do so. Once babies have crawled,
they want to walk. As soon as they walk, they want to run. Once they
can run, they want to jump. We are rarely satisfied with where we are
while we can still imagine, and believe, that we can do more.
Few things have the power to motivate and inspire us to reach for
our full potential the way our dreams do. Successful people from every
walk of life—be they athletes, musicians, soldiers, doctors, policemen,
firefighters, entrepreneurs, or entertainers (just to name a few)—usually
agree on one thing. As children, long before they ever achieved
success in their field, they dreamt and fantasized about becoming
great at what they did. It wasn’t money or fame that inspired them as
children. It was the pure love and purpose for the activity itself. Most of
them can hardly remember a time when they weren’t insanely passionate
about it. Every dreamer is not successful. But every successful person
is a dreamer.
As children, we all had dreams like these. But in our early years,
most of us were discouraged from believing that we could actually live
our dreams and achieve our highest ambitions. We were more often
pushed by family, friends, and society in general to take a more secure
route, keep our expectations low, and avoid failure and disappointment.
We were guided by advisors to go after goals they thought we
had the best chance of accomplishing, ones that didn’t demand too
much effort from us.
As opposed to looking at things from a perspective of abundance,
we chose to see things from a minimalist perspective. Minimal desire
leads to minimal goals, requiring minimal effort. Since we would be
aiming so low, the likelihood for success was high so there was minimal
chance for disappointment. But is the definition of success aiming
to be half of what we are capable of being in a field that we tolerate
but certainly aren’t passionate about? I don’t think so. And fortunately
for me, my family didn’t think so either.

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Read the rest/ read reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Above-All-Els...

Find out more about #DanBC: http://www.danbrodsky-chenfeld.com/

#Aboveallelse
Posted on 04/11/12, 09:42 pm