On September 22, 2004, I was involved in a serious accident and almost died, but against many odds, I didn’t. This is my story.

The day of my accident started out normally with my wife and I waking up early to make the forty five minute commute to work. I work at Microsoft on the Tablet PC and that day our entire group of over a hundred was having an offsite party on Lake Sammamish. The company was kind enough to hire a jet ski company to provide free jet ski rentals for everyone. I arrived early with some work friends and we hurried down to the lake for what was to be my last few conscious moments for the next 5 weeks.

Chandra, Petr and I were the first group out and after signing our waivers we got our wetsuits and life jackets on. We were having a great time spraying each other, I was jumping their wakes and before long we had gone about a mile out from shore. Petr stopped his jet ski and after spraying him and coming to a stop, he told me we were out too far and we should go in. He was also concerned that Chandra was being a little reckless and wanted to talk to him.

Chandra was driving his jet ski full speed at Petr and we think he was attempting to spray him, but unfortunately, after he turned his path went directly at me:

In the next moment, Chandra’s six hundred pound jet ski struck and demolished my jet ski before ramping up and striking me mid back on the right side. As his jet ski hit me, eleven of my twelve right ribs front and back, seventh cervical vertebra, scapula and pelvis were fractured and my right lung collapsed. The impact was enough to completely damage and eventually kill the tissue in the lower lobe of my right lung while throwing me forward over the jet ski.

I was now face down in the water and unconscious and moments away from drowning. Petr had the presence of mind to race over to me, jump in the water and turn me over, saving my life. As I was first turned over only a faint hissing noise came from my mouth, but I quickly started coughing and reached on to the side of my demolished jet ski. Petr guided me over to his jet ski and was scared; he didn’t know how to get me up on his jet ski, especially not knowing the extent of my blunt force injuries. We were about a mile out and it was just the three of us.

Someone out by us had seen what had happened and drove into shore to call for the paramedics, who were fortunately just down the road. Out in the water, Petr was still trying to get me up on the jet ski when I suddenly woke and struggled up onto the jet ski myself, despite all of my serious injuries. I don’t remember doing this and Petr tried to restrain me at first, but realizing that I was going to do it anyway helped me up. Once I was on the seat of the jet ski, I collapsed.

Chandra helped Petr get up on his jet ski in front of me and drove me into shore. At full speed, it took us five minutes to get there. I was collapsed on the seat and Peter was jammed up against the handlebars and as he drove me in, I asked Petr what happened. “You were hit by a jet ski”, he said, “hold on, the paramedics are coming.” As I was slumped on the seat and holding on to the sides of the jet ski, I slipped into unconsciousness.

Internally, I was bleeding badly and not breathing well with my collapsed lung. The paramedics put drainage tubes in my right and left side to drain the blood that was quickly filling the space between my lungs and ribs and filled me with life saving drugs. To those watching, I was simply having trouble breathing, but internally I was on a downward spiral.

I was rushed to Harborview Medical in Seattle, the best trauma hospital in six nearby states. I was losing blood quickly. Once in the ER, I was worked on by twelve different doctors and surgeons. They started giving me blood transfusions, but I was bleeding as fast as they put it in and they didn’t know if I would make it. My blood got so low that I went into cardiac arrest (or ‘coded’ as they say). I still don’t know if they had to use the defibrillator to revive me. I also had a stroke in my cerebellum that caused some minor damage.

My wife is a practicing Chiropractor in Kirkland, Washington and was working when my accident happened. At the time, she was four months pregnant with our first child. Her office manager got the call and came back to tell her. “There has been an accident”, she told Cortney “you need to get to Harborview right away.” Just then, Cortney’s mom Pam and friend Nancy came in the office for an appointment. As Cortney started walking towards her mom, she fainted and collapsed on the floor. Moments later she woke up on the ground with Pam holding her. Fortunately, Nancy knew how to get to Harborview and drove everyone there. In heavy traffic and all Cortney knew is that I had been in a serious accident and that I had passed three other hospitals on the way to the foremost trauma hospital in the region. She didn’t know if her partner and best friend in the world was dead or dying as they hadn’t told her. I can only imagine what she went through on that trip.

In the hospital, I was fighting for my life. Sometime in the night I was finally stabilized and was listed in critical condition, the most serious condition. Those doctors saved my life that night and I will be forever grateful to them.

I spent the next five weeks in the trauma intensive care unit. I overcame pneumonia before developing a life threatening infection. The infection I had was caused by bacteria that had an 80% mortality rate. It was resistant to antibiotics and I was given Cipro, which is the strongest antibiotic in the medical arsenal and is the last line of defense against drug resistant infections. For three weeks I fought the infection. I was operated on five times to remove dead tissue that was feeding the infection. The doctors were very concerned with the rate at which the infection was spreading and my chances were in doubt.

For the five weeks that I was unconscious, I was constantly dreaming. I remember most of these dreams. For some reason, I frequently found myself on a large boat in Thailand. There was always a lurking threat of being found and thrown overboard. I was constantly hiding and the feeling I had was that of ‘holding on’. Upon reflection, being found and thrown overboard represented dying. Another dream I had was being strapped down on a bed and being forced to do things, like breathe shallowly. In many of my dreams I was cold and uncomfortable, I was definitely not singing with the angels. Once in a while I would have a pleasant dream. One afternoon when Cortney’s mom Pam was doing energy work on me in the hospital, she was in my dream. In that dream, I was strapped down and forced to breathe in a difficult way for a long, long time. The dream just seemed to be going on forever when suddenly Pam was there behind me. I heard her say ‘I’m here Sam, everything is going to be OK’. As she said this, I felt a warm comforting energy sweep over me and everything did feel OK.

Eventually, my body fought back the infection and my white blood cell count dropped back to normal. The next hurdle I had to overcome was the ventilator.

When I was first admitted to the ICU, I was in such bad shape that I couldn’t breathe on my own. I was hooked up to a machine that breathes for you called a ventilator that sensed when I was about to try to breathe in and would puff air into my lungs. Air was directed to my lungs via a tube that went through my mouth and down into my lungs. After being on a ventilator for several weeks, my breathing muscles had begun to atrophy from not being used.

At some point in the fourth week, it was decided that it was time to wean me from the ventilator. This is a terrifying process for the patient because when the ventilator is switched off, it is very difficult to breathe. Nothing that I’ve ever experienced causes panic quicker than not being able to breathe.

At first, I would go off of the ventilator for thirty minutes at a time and the doctors would see if I could tolerate it. These were called breathing trials and would gradually get longer as I tolerated each increment. Some of this was done when I was sedated and some of it was done when I first started to regain consciousness, sometime late in the fifth week and early in the sixth.

I was very groggy and disoriented when I regained consciousness and I remember the doctors and nurses telling me that I was in Harborview recovering from an accident. After a week or so, it finally sunk in and I became consciously aware of what had happened. At the same time, the breathing trials continued. Initially, I didn’t know if a doctor or nurse was going to be around or of they would just go to lunch while my breathing trial was happening. It was very frightening to watch them turn off the ventilator and to have to start breathing on my own. It was difficult at first and there were times when I would grab onto the doctor and beg them to turn it back on, which they always did.

Eventually I was weaned off of the ventilator and could be transferred to another part of the hospital. I moved from the ICU on the second floor to a bed on the seventh floor and the worst part of my stay began. In the ICU, each patient had a dedicated nurse twenty four hours a day. All that nurse does is monitor and care for you. On the seventh floor, the ratio was less kind. On nurse might see four or more patients and were often very busy.

Although I had been weaned off of the ventilator, I hadn’t been weaned off of the strong drugs that the ICU is authorized to administer. Because the seventh floor was not allowed to give me these drugs, I went into withdrawal. I had difficulty breathing and would breathe very shallow and then hyperventilate. Then I would stop breathing for a while and start the whole thing all over again. At the time, I was dreaming that I was forced to lay on a stiff bed and shallow breathe all the time. I didn’t think I could make it and was barely hanging on.

One night, I feebly told the nurse that I was having pains. When she asked where, I pointed to my chest. I think I was just having difficulty breathing, but chest pains are taken very seriously. Within minutes a team of doctors was taking chest x-rays and trying to determine if I was having a heart attack. In the flurry, no one would answer any of Cortney’s questions and she was terrified. It turned out that I had not been having a heart attack and eventually went back to my labored breathing.

Cortney was panicked and was sure that a mistake had been made in transferring me to the seventh floor. The doctors were all new and were still reading reports and getting used to me. They couldn’t answer any of Cortney’s questions to her satisfaction and instead just told her that they thought my condition was normal and that I would be better soon, but I wasn’t getting any better. There were times when I would stop breathing and Cortney would push the nurse button and they wouldn’t come for over five minutes. During on of these episodes, Cortney ran to the nurses station to get help and was told to wait by the nurses, that they were busy.

The stress of the past six weeks was taking a terrible toll on Cortney and she was teetering on having a nervous breakdown. Desperate, she called Ronniemae, who was an angel nurse from the ICU. She and the nurse coordinator, Andrea, from ICU put Cortney in contact with one of my ICU surgeons who came up to see me immediately. He determined that my transfer out of the ICU had been premature and that I needed to get back there and back on the ventilator.

I was transferred back to the ICU and was quickly put back on the ventilator. By this time, they had removed the tube from my throat and performed a tracheostamy to cut a tube into my throat below my Adam’s apple. This was far less traumatic for me since I had regained consciousness and would not have tolerated a tube being down my throat. I was quickly put back on the ventilator and then weaned more slowly. Over the course of the next week, I was completely weaned from the ventilator, this time for good.

In all, I was given over seventeen pints of blood during my six weeks in the ICU. During my stay in the ICU, I was given drugs to keep me unconscious and to prevent me from recalling the horror of my early traumas. In all, I had six surgeries including one to remove the lower lobe of my right lung which had become infected. In order to get to the infected tissue, the surgeons had to remove a four inch strip from my side, following the contour of my right scapula and up under my right arm. To heal the wound, they used an ingenious machine called a wound-vac that vacuum sealed the wound and provided a negative pressure on it. For some reason, this causes the would to heal very fast and my wound went from being 4 inches wide to ½ inches wide in only six weeks!

My accident happened on September 22nd and on November 3rd, I was transferred to a hospital 20 miles away called Regional hospital. I could have gone back to the seventh floor, but Cortney didn’t want me to given the experiences we had there. Regional was a great place to transfer to; the doctors and nurses were great and I spent the next month recovering there.

When I first arrived at Regional, I had just been weaned from morphine. Under normal circumstances, taking morphine will get you high by producing a euphoric feeling. When you’re in as much pain as I was, it simply feels like your pain goes away. You don’t feel any euphoria, just relief. The withdrawal symptoms that I experienced were very powerful; I felt anxiety, confusion and my nervous system went through changes. Every time I ate I would sweat profusely and have to get under the covers. This would last for hours and I would just be normalizing when it was time to eat again.

I was also suffering from ‘ICU-dementia’ which is a condition brought on by sleep deprivation. The ICU is a busy place twenty four hours a day and it’s hard to get a good night sleep.

On the second night I was at Regional, I woke up and thought something was wrong. I was suddenly in a strange environment and was certain that I’d been kidnapped. The nurses seemed to be hiding something from me and were actually treating me quite harshly. I became convinced that I was on a boat and had been kidnapped by bandits! I confronted them and asked them to let me go, but they just seemed amused! I threatened to take my neck brace off, and they threatened to restrain me in return. I remember kicking my feet and asking them why they were being so mean to me. I thought it would be best to get a good night sleep before confronting them further. When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I’d been hallucinating and apologized to them.

Once I was conscious, my healing progressed very fast. I’m not sure why; I’ve always had a great attitude and learned several years back how to consciously direct my thoughts to produce a desired outcome. This coupled with all of the focus and prayers coming my way gave me a sort of ‘power steering’ to heal myself. At this time in my life and up until today, I have felt very connected and close to my source and it responds very quickly to my conscious thoughts for healing.

Early after my accident a friend of ours, Rachel, suggested that we sign up for a free web page on www.thestatus.com which is a wonderful free site you can use to keep friends and family up to date on your condition. People can also post their thoughts and prayers on the website and it became a great community of people concerned with my healing. By the time I was home, the site had been visited 36,000 times by over 860 people. For some reason, word spread fast of my accident and friends of friends of friends were soon praying for me. I’m still so grateful and a little puzzled at the outpouring of support me and my family received on the site.

As I was suffering from the withdrawal symptoms of morphine, I reached my low one night. After dinner I started to sweat and it wouldn’t stop. I felt chilled and even though I was under as many blankets as they could pile on me I still felt like I was lying in frigid water. I was shaking and my teeth were chattering despite the fact that my skin was hot and I was sweating. Consciously I knew that I was warm, but my nervous system was certain I was freezing cold. This went on for hours, we called the nurse and they said there was nothing they could do and that the cure was ‘a tincture of time’.

Cortney and Michael were there with me that night and eventually had to go home. They felt helpless as they left and I continued to feel like I was freezing to death. Once they left, I turned inward to my source as I realized I was all alone in this. I remembered back to my training and saw in my mind the energy that was being used to make me feel like I was freezing. I took that energy and mentally diverted it into feeling relaxed and normal. Within moments, my teeth stopped chattering and I started to feel normal. As long as I continued to focus on diverting that energy, I was fine. As soon as I stopped, I would start getting cold again. For an hour or so, I held my focus and kept myself warm. To me, this intense kind of focus is really an advanced form of prayer. I hold the image in my mind of what I want to occur so that my inner source, or what I was taught was the God within me, can manifest that reality. Sometime in the night, I woke up; I must have fallen asleep with that focus in my mind as I was no longer freezing and felt normal. I never went through that torture again.

Another time a week or so later I was still getting mild sweats after I ate and for some reason that day, I had had enough. With all of my will, I focused on feeling normal and no longer sweating after I ate. I focused on my brain and nervous system and put a sacred symbol I had learned on top of them in my mind. Within a half and hour of this, I was no longer sweating and after that day, never sweated again after eating.

I soon found that the speech therapist held some of the keys to my freedom. She decided when I could eat ice, drink, and eat real food again. After a few days at Regional, my trach tube came out and the wound on my neck began to heal. Since the tube was out, I could technically begin to eat and drink again, but they took it slow to make sure I didn’t have any complications. For the last two or three weeks that I had been conscious, I was getting all my food and water through a feeding tube that went through my nose and down to my stomach. Even though I was being given water in the tube, my mouth was terribly dry and was a source of constant discomfort. Finally, I was given an ‘ice test’ to see if I could eat ice without choking. After I passed it, I could finally eat ice and hydrate my dry mouth.

I still wasn’t cleared to drink on my own and I longed to be able to drink again. I could request ice whenever I wanted and persuaded the staff to flavor the ice with a little 7-UP. Most of the time they would sit and watch me eat the ice, but every once in a while they would be busy and just give it to me and leave. When they did I would breathe hot air into it to melt the ice and then drink it! It was wonderful to be able to drink, even if I wasn’t supposed to. Finally I passed by drinking and eating test and was able to have real food again.

At first, my appetite was very weak; eating food was a big chore that I didn’t look forward to. Part of that was my small stomach; the other part was that the food was disgusting. Worse, they were still pureeing the food so I was eating liquid gross food. They kept my feeding tube in because I still wasn’t eating eighty percent of my food at each meal. One day after eating, I threw up and somehow managed to pull out about half of my feeding tube. They pulled it out for good and told me that if I didn’t eat enough they would have to put it back down. That was enough motivation for me to choke down the food after that.

Physical therapy started working with me to strengthen my arms and legs and initially would help me stand at the side of my bed. I could only stand for a short time before getting tired and going back to bed. Next I learned to get in and out of a wheelchair, take a shower on my own and eventually to walk with a crutch. At first I could only walk twenty feet or so, but that doubled or tripled every day and soon I was free to walk all over the hospital. I progressed much faster than anyone thought I would and the nurses started talking about sending me to rehab.

The best part of life at Regional is that Cortney would come and visit me every single day. Now that I was conscious, we could start to catch up and re-bond. She told me all about my accident, my time in the ICU and how many people were out there pulling for me. She would download thestatus.com and bring it in on my laptop so I could read all of the kind words people were posting. I could also write my own updates that Cortney would take home and post for me.

The more conscious I became, the more boring the hospital became to me. Towards the end of November, I was ready to transfer to rehab but I had to wait some time for a bed to become available. Finally on November 30th, I was transferred to Harborview Acute Rehab; I was on my way home.

Rebab at Harborview was great; the people there are top notch and helped get my left shoulder, which had frozen when I was in ICU because of my fractures, working again. I was also able to take a neuropsychological test to determine if I had suffered any brain damage in my accident. Happily, the results showed that I was functioning above average for a normal person and didn’t have any lasting brain damage.

My stay in rebab was very short; I was only there for three days. Originally, the doctors thought that I would have to be in rehab for at least a month, but my healing was much faster than their expectations.

I went home on December 3rd, 2004. In all, I was in the hospital for just over ten weeks. As I write this, I’ve been home for two weeks now. I still have a way to go to complete my healing. My right side is still stiff and sore and my shoulder is only partially unfrozen; but I’m alive!

When I stop and consider how close I was to death and how fast I recovered, I’m so thankful to the God within me that saved me by grace and has been my constant companion through my recovery. I also thank my loving wife, who was my rock and my anchor to this world through my recovery. The steadfastness, resolve and excellent decisions that she made during my ordeal were otherworldly and I am in her debt. I also thank Shana, Michael, Katie and Pam, who supported Cortney and were constantly by my side in the hospital whispering encouraging thoughts to me. I also thank my family for their support and all of the friends that showed their support to Cortney and I on www.thestatus.com; your support was so needed and much appreciated.

Although I am still learning from my ordeal, a few things have become clear. First, I never felt victimized by this experience. I never once asked 'why me?', I simply woke up feeling thankful to be alive and set out to heal myself. Because of this, all of my energy could be focused on healing and not wastefull and unproductive emotions. From all of the close contacts with my source, my attitude and from helping to inspire others, I feel that this experience was a deepening of my soul. I lost nothing and gained everything.

This experience also showed me the value of being a kind and thoughtful person: when you're in your most desperate hour, all the people that you've loved give back to you. It's like warmth radiating off of rocks that have been warmed by the sun. I've known unkind people that have hard times fall on them and while people feel bad for them, they don't always rush to their side. Being kind has always been its own reward to me, but this experience showed me a whole new aspect.

Last, it is so important to visit family and friends that are in the hospital and send healing and loving thoughts to them. I was fortunate enough to never have a single day go by without a visitor, even when I was unconscious. Cortney, Katie, Shana, Michael, Pam and Isabella were there every day during the first weeks of my ordeal and my parents and brother stayed as long as they could, whispering in my ear how strong I was and calling me back to this world. After I had woken up, Cortney was there with me every single day for at least five hours, most days for eight or ten hours. I also had close friends come by to visit. From my experience, this is critical to healing. The ICU nurses told Cortney that they could tell who would make it partially by if they had visitors. Laying in a hospital can be a very lonely thing without support; I was so touched and blessed to have so much.

I continue to be taught by this experience ...

One cannot underestimate the impact an event like this has on your life, and the lives of those around you. It is my deepest prayer that this event provided the fertile soil for the growth of the souls of everyone involved.

By grace, I was saved. I did not save myself, but the God within us all did. To that God, and to all of your that are facets of that God I give my eternal thanks.