Rich Garner

If you follow me or my wife on Facebook, or have seen the VERY few comments on Twitter, you might have realized that I had a brush with death Tuesday night which paralyzed half of my body and nearly killed me. So I wanted to give you the full details and let you decide how to respond to this story…

THE EVENT

Tuesday night we returned home from a night out and put the kids to bed. I came into my home office and began to work (cough…play…cough) on my computer. My mind went fuzzy. I couldn’t remember walking from the boys room to my office. I didn’t seem to be fully aware of anything like I was in a dream. I noticed that my left hand would not lift up onto my keyboard. It kept hitting the side of the desk even though I was trying to type. Now… remember, my mind is FUZZY. I’m not thinking clearly. So my first reaction is, “That’s odd.” Being the work-around king I am, I simply let my left hand drop and used my right hand to do the work. “There! Problem solved!”

Suddenly, I crashed to the floor cracking my head on a desk behind me. STILL FUZZY IN BRAIN, I simply tried to get up. No matter how hard I tried, I could not pull myself off the floor. I grabbed the desk and tried to pull up but it was impossible. I simply had no strength. I’m not saying I was weak… I’m saying I had NO strength. My wife heard the fall and rush in to find me face down on the floor with my head up against the wall flailing my right arm. She asked what was wrong and I calmly tried to explain to her that I had falling and was having a difficult time standing up, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was, “ahfweldnnanahknnpmmsffup.” She says hat I looked and acted like I was raving drunk and that she has never seen me like that before. She looked into my eyes, asked me to stick out my tongue, and being the wise woman she is, she realized I was having a stroke and called 911.

THE SCARE

The rest of the night after that was a blur. The EMTs arrived in 5 minutes and looked me over. They thought that sine I hit my head in the fall, I might have fractured my neck or skull. So they packaged me up in the neck brace and full body board. I remember th brace going on and them pulling me onto the board. Then I remember cold air, some flashing lights and a female voice telling the driver to run with lights and hurry but not to shake us around. They took me to Virginia Beach General. I don’t remember looking around much, but I remember having an IV put into me, and a woman telling another man, “Right now we are concerned about stroke, but we need to do a CT just to be sure.” Then someone told me that they were going to take cat scans of my head. I must have passed out somewhere around there, because the next thing I remember was being in the CT machine as it whizzed around me. I was nervous and fidgety so they keep telling me to hold still. I remember a black man and a white woman both telling me that I need to calm down or the test will take much longer. I tried to remain as still as possible.

Blackness. More hazy conversations. Some ceiling lights. And then I was aware enough to understand what people were saying, “Mr. You have a clot in your right (some medical term) artery that we need to break up before it kills you. We are going to put some medicine in your IV which should break it up. Do you understand?” I couldn’t nod, so I just grunted, “yehh.” That was when my mom and dad came in. All I remember was that they were scared. They looked over the scans as th doctor told them what needs to happen. For that exact moment, the medicine could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours to break up the clot. My mom was crying and my dad sounded VERY uncharacteristically terrified.

THE MIRACLE

The right side of my brain (which controls the left side of my body) had already gone without blood for almost 20 minutes. If blood flow were not restored soon, I could suffer irreversible brain d amage or even death. My wife ran out of the room. She found the nearest bathroom, dirty smelly and badly in need of a good plumber, and she got down all her hands and knees with her face to the floor. She prayed, “God, PLEASE heal my husband. Let the doctors come out and say that the blockage is broken up and blood flow has been restored and that he is going to be ok!”

Minutes later, she returned to the room and he doctor said ALMOST he exact phrase, “It looks like the clot is beginning to break up. He’s got th use of his left arm and l back and that’s a very good sign. It looks like he’s going to be ok.”

THE ESCAPE

Next, they needed to find out what caused this. So they send me onto Norfolk General where this sort of thing is specialized in. They told me they need to intubate me. I began to shake my head in protest and they said not to worry that they were going to sedate me and I would never remember it. Well, I remember a mask was put over my face and things got even more hazy. Then I remember seeing the intubation tool coming towards my face. I remember waking up from my sedation SEVERAL times to doctors asking me to look at them. I felt a large object in my throat and I tried to cough it out, but I couldn’t cough. I couldn’t even speak. I remember being very scar and trying to grab my throat only to find that my hand were tied down to the table as a safety precaution.

Over the course of the next few hours they inserted a catheter into my groin and ran it all the way up to my brain. This was to look for any sins of other blockages of sources of the clot. Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity on that table, they finally took the tube out of my mouth. I coughed hard and they said that was a good sign. The first thing I shouted was “PAIN!” I had been strapped down to an uncomfortable table with a previous and serious back condition and no one knew that it was causing me unbelievable pain. Thy shortly gave me morphine for the pain which, oddly, did absolutely nothing.

They then asked me questions about who I am, where I was and what happened to me. I answered simply with this, “I was aware of everything. Most of it was a blur, I remember everything that was done to me.” I then proceed to recount the night as best I could and they all seemed a little taken back. I was meant to be sedated for most of the night, but I was aware of almost everything. Pain as a way of keeping you awake despite sedatives.

THE TAKEAWAY

From that moment on, it was all downhill. Over he next three days I had so many visitors, family, friends and business contacts come by one of the nurses commented that we should put in a revolving door to my room. Damien Smith, co-founder of Guerrilla Social Media stopped by and one of the nurses asked him if I was a celebrity. We laughed about that so much my left side went numb. Doctors tell me that my brain is in a state called “brain-stun” where the brain has been without blood for such a time that it’s taking a really long time to reboot. (THAT terminology I understand.)

I will continue to have coordination issues and some exaggerated sensitivity on the left side for weeks, maybe even months. And there is always the possibility that my left side may actually become numb from time to time. It’s something I will live with. If that’s the worst reminder I will keep of the beautiful and wise woman who married me, came to my aid, got me timely help, and humbled herself out enough to send a powerful prayer that saved my life (don’t get m wrong, the doctors were all amazing and I am grateful, but my God is the one who provided the miracle)… then I am the SINGLE MOST BLESSED MAN IN THE ENTIRE WORLD!