5 Weird Things I Learned After My Near Death Experience

One of the first things I remember the paramedics telling me as four liters of blood gushed into my chest cavity (which was then repeated by doctors and nurses nonstop over the coming months,) was how common it is to see someone of my size and build have a lung collapse on them with barely any outside encouragement. Are you maybe picturing me to be heavily overweight, so there was a lot of inertia slamming me into the luxurious, gentle embrace of those soft cushions? Or maybe you've gone the other way, and you're imagining that I am frail and feeble, with bones made from sawdust and hope?

Nope. I was in trim shape thanks to all the full-contact boxing I was doing at the time, and stand tall at a lofty 6'4. These are major red flags for getting what is called a pneumothorax, or its more hardcore blood cousin, the haemothorax, which was the one I got after losing a dust-up with a couch. At least I got the rad one.

"We see it all the time" is a phrase I heard a lot, which is weird, because I had been the same height and roughly the same weight for almost ten years by that stage. So why in the raging fuck did no one at any point think to mention it in a decade of doctor's appointments? What other seemingly arbitrary things are out there that will try to kill you for no reason at all? Do folk in the northern hemisphere have a predisposition for their hearts to explode if they see too much of the color blue? Can sponges kill redheads? Who knows?!

And being so far from home, I could initially understand why my closest friends didn't show up to see me. But I was confident that would change when I transferred to the Central London hospital close to my house for major surgery. Thanks to movies, I know that if there's one thing I can rely on in times of trouble, it's my friends. I'd get my surgery and we'd all high-five. Then I'd make a joke like "Hey! Go easy next time!" And then everyone would laugh because this is my damn movie, remember?

Whether it's doing something as simple as suggesting we go bowling because talking about our problems is too hard, or helping me face an angry Mike Tyson, everything in pop culture told me that my best buddies would be there when I really needed them.

So it came as a huge shock that my core group of friends, whom I had known since childhood and considered to be almost brothers, didn't come to check on me. Not even a call, text, or sheepish Like on one of my many, many petrified Facebook status updates to let me know they were thinking of me. It was only after getting better that I found out that close friends abandoning you during times of real hardship is a depressingly common problem that stems from people not wanting to face their own vulnerabilities. Thanks, psychology, you stupid dickhole.

At the time it stung like hell, and this was coming from a guy with a sack of blood where his left lung used to be. But looking back, it capped off my 20s in a kind of beautiful way that I could never have achieved without giving the Grim Reaper a little peck on the cheek. Instead of strained friendships that evaporated awkwardly into nothing over the decades, this meant that there was a definite stop. The only play in which I get the lead role by default had a clear and concise End of Act I.

Reams and reams of blogs and websites talk about how flirting with death will change you for the better, up to and including suddenly being certain of an afterlife. All I can guess is that the guardian angel that was meant to be guiding me to the white light that day must have been balls-deep into an It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and medical marijuana binge, because I got none of that special treatment.

The only sensation that did stick around after the event was a nagging worry that the world was not what I thought it was. It was no longer mine anymore. Instead, it is a horrendously dangerous place that will fucking murder you with a couch on a whim and not care one bit about it. This is something of a regular thing for people who have almost died to have to deal with. A thing that, again, I was woefully unprepared for, because Spielberg never thought to leave a memo.

But when they finally do release you back into the wild, it's exactly like you've been taking shots out of a stripper's bum cleavage all day and then suddenly remember that you have to go to a kid's birthday party. You're too far gone to control yourself in any proper way. This came to a head when I went back to work way too early in my recovery. I still vividly remember my old boss's face when she insisted I go to the emergency room like, this second, because my entire face had turned blue from blood loss. That landed me another two weeks in the hospital.

This is another lesson that pop culture totally failed to prepare me for. In montages of people recovering, you never see the months of someone trying to work out how they can stop the blood seeping through their work shirt because they leaned forward too fast and split a stitch. Or how you have to curl up and sit with your eyes closed from time to time, no matter where you are, to keep from blacking out due to the uncanny numb sensation at the back of your skull that's been brought on by all of the super strong painkillers. They don't show you tearfully swearing at the top of your voice in the bathroom because morphine derivatives are just the worst for jamming your pipes up like an LA freeway on Thanksgiving.

Goddamn it, pop culture. Before his transition into canned ham, you taught me via Steven Seagal that I could come out of a seven-year coma and go straight into kickass martial arts, weight training, and heavy punning to prepare for my sweet revenge. In reality, recovery is a constant thing that takes over your life for a long, long time. To put it in a way that you and Steven Seagal can understand, it'll be a while before you're ready to take anyone even close to the blood bank.