"Mankinds First Localized Human Disaster"

"After all these doubts and all these fears... After all these dreams without comfort,
Questions without answers,
I've finally begun the journey home. Just that one last mile..."
Stephen King's 'The Tommy Knockers'

   Sometimes things in life change very slowly- one ages and doesn't notice until the lines and the gray hair have crept in.   At other times things change so drastically that by the time it stops one has lost a good part of their life.
   When I was younger I always knew I'd not live after the age of 35.
   I was correct. That person is no longer here and has been replaced.

Changes that are drastic either destroy a person or make them stronger-even invincible

The Cliff Notes:

   Graduated in '84.   Bounced around for a bit moving with the folks then settling in Austin, Texas working for a veterinary clinic.    A couple of years into it I started having vision probs- turned out I was going blind from diabetic retinopathy.    After  year of laser and an open-eye surgery I was blind in the left eye with 20/200 tunnel vision in the right, I moved onto a small horse farm that a friend of mine from church had- I loved the ranch.   Quiet and peaceful with the horses and my cat for company.    The Sun set over the plains with a spectacular front-porch view and the coyotes sang me to sleep at night.    One night I heard a bobcat let out a scream as I was walking the fence line and another with a full moon shining through low clouds I saw the silhuette of a Great Horned Owl sweep silently past.

   A little into the second year the ranch was closing.    I had no money, a bad car and no place to go.    My dad tells me to come to Florida.   Got there and started college again.    Made friends and got engaged and yada-yada.

   While there one of my friends introduced me to an Indian-  Native American, with the feathers not the dots.    I began hanging with him and his friends and their families.    I had loved the Native Ways for some time and soon was adopted as a brother to them.    One of them, a Minquoise or something similar once said I was more native than most natives.    I was happy.    He was a Historian and started calling me 'Satanta, the White Bear'.    Said I was moody like the bear and fearless.  [[Turns out myself and the original Satanta have the same sense of humor-he had stolen some horses from the calvary and rode them to death before getting caught, he told them to buy better horses for him to steal.  :) ]]

   We used to go to gatherings and powwows almost weekly.    I miss those times-when I could feel the drums beat through me.

   I did some homeless time-almost two years of living in the woods or on a friends screened-in porch.     I worked whenever possible but still vision impaired and not being able to drive at night made it hard to work full-time.

   I lived for a bit in a rescue mission as well- you'd be surprised at the people living there-some very intelligent but with disabilities and other problems.    Yes- there was the occasional alky or junkie but they never lasted long.

   Eventually working as a 'Rent-A-drunk', Day laborer- I was able to get my own place.    I was there rain or shine and worked every day they were open and my work was good enough to guarantee me a ticket-a days work, even during slow times or weekends when many didn't go out.

   One job was in a cement plant making prison cells, building pylons and those things they put along construction areas to keep people from hitting the workers- those big concrete barriers?   Yeah- made those too so if you hit one-you are welcome.  ;)

   I ended up with pneumonia and that pretty much solved that-I was going back on the street.    One of the Rent-A-Drunks died on site from a heart attack.    It is very hard work when five guys pull 12 strands of 2" steel cable 60 yards and every ten yards the cable is strung through a set of steel separation plates-by the forty yard line it is estimated you are pulling 200 pounds each under stress from the plates.

   They called me 'Headhunter' on the site because I always wore my necklace of turquoise and bear teeth.

   At aby rate, living in a state park, using a motorcycle for transport and working there I was outside 24/7 and it finally got to me.   I spent two weeks in the hospital where they stuck a needle in the sac around my lungs to siphon off two quarts of fluid-I was kind of upsett because they used the living X-ray and I couldn't watch.   My dad had gone back to Texas and he and my mom invited me back so here I am.

   Got here and diddled around.   Worked when I could and lost lots of time not able to work.

   Then the fun started...

   May 2001.

   The start of early Summer in Texas.    I'd been working for my Dad and getting ready to go with a friend to see Tom Petty in a few days.    

   I'd been feeling a little dizzy off and on but figured it was an inner ear problem or just plain tiredness.

   I woke up in one morning and someone had moved the walls, floor and ceiling to the wrong places.    It was Bizzaro World.    I crawled into the bathroom knowing I was going to have to take a trip to the hospital.     I climbed in the shower and then crawled back to get dressed as I could not stand.   I then made my way downstairs and called my Dad and waited.     The nausea was overwhelming and I waited by the Porcelain Bus.   

    My Mom showed up sometime later-how long?    No idea-in fact I lost tract of time during this period until about September- Not just because of 9/11.

   At the hospital 2000 years later I got the word- I'd had a stroke.

    I was 35.

    The diagnosis tho' not terminal was pretty sucky.    They didn't think I'd ever walk again or regain speech functions to 100%.     The world swam and I couldn't concentrate, see or talk.   I lay in bed for a week at the hospital.     A  friend of mine visited and noticed I wasn't eating.    He asked how it was going and I told him everything was 'white'.   The food was white.   The TV. was white.   The room was white.   Everything was white.   

   I went home.   I lay in bed in and out of reality for several weeks.   I crawled to the bathroom now and then and I saw ghosts.

    When I slept I experienced another lifetime as a Hispanic man who was a teacher.   The school he was employed at was new when he started.   I remember the fresh laid turf and new paint.   When I was awake in Meatworld I was me but when I slept I lived his life skipping years from the point where I'd woken up to the time I lapsed into sleep again.    The school aged as he did-the new grass developed paths from countless kids walking across it and the windows were meshed over to prevent vandalism.   The last I saw he was retired and graying.   The school was closed as we walked through it one last time.    There was graffiti on the walls and broken windows.   The grass was dead and the place empty.

******** 

   Then one time I was riding with my Dad on some business but too weak to get out of the car as he went inside several places.    I remember drifting in and out and seeing people walking down the street-and they would fade out or a car would pass through them as if they were not there.   I spent some months like this and word was that I might try to commit suicide rather than living this way- mentally I was ok.   I had decided to give it a year- I was determined to overcome.

   I slowly worked my way back to walking and now in 2005 have done some mountain climbing and hiking including a month-long trip to the Southern Oregon mountainous coasts where I averaged 8 miles a day.

   But back then it was a struggle.

   Come September 2001 shortly after 9/11 I thought I was having a heart attack.    I'd spent a couple of weeks fighting what I thought was a flu.    I was admitted to the hospital with total Renal failure and promptly put on dialysis.    It was at that moment I realized I had gained a hundred pounds in fluid weight- I looked like the Michelin Man.

   Three years of this and I never gave in.    I had some hard times in-between.    There were nights I slept on my knees leaning over the bed on prayer position to allow me to breathe.    But I kept the faith.

   May 06, 2004...I was on the way to dialysis at 9 in the morning.  I'd stopped for a snack- a foot long sub and medium drink at Subways.   On the way back to the Jeep, my cell phone rings.     The phone was a requirement to be on the transplant list after the heart stints two weeks earlier.

******
   It was the call.
******

   A lot of things go into a transplant...tests and waiting, if no one volunteers to donate for you or is a matching candidate.    Once there-there is more testing and preparing for a surgery you might not survive.   The one thing also required is a donor organ.      Mine came from someone who died.

   What little I'm pretty sure of is that it was a young woman with a child.    The child lived but the rollover of this girl's van took her life.    I don't know her but I think of her a lot...and her kid.

******
   The surgery was at two-in the morning and lasted 7 hours. I was given a pancreas as well as a kidney, ending three years of dialysis, the daily sickness, special diets with no milk, beans or cheese as well as a lot of common everyday foods   This ended 36 years of diabetes with shots twice a day and related problems.

******

   Things have gone great for a year now as of 05/05/05.   Cinco De Eye-o. 

 So when you need a miracle you can come here and read...or look into a mirror and realize *you* are a miracle.

******

09/22/08

I recently returned from a two-year trip. Spent a year in Pennsylvania. Got some nice images and met some good people, but like any trip I met some real strange people.

Went down to Arkansas and spent a year there. Certain situations almost cost me my right foot- I stepped on a dead catfish from an aqaurium. The owner did not dispose of it properly and I got to pay the price. It took constant debriding and three surgeries along with a year of my life to recovery from one drunk assholes screw-up.

SATANTA...
like the bear I am temperamental so stay out of my berry patch and don't piss in my beer.