? I go… missing
No longer exist
One day, I hope
I'm someone you'd miss ?https://t.co/29MGZmHsfR— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) May 16, 2019
Via Dave Fahrenheit’s twitter feed, for Deadspin:
… All I remember is waking up in a fog with a bunch of tubes sticking out of me and thinking it was the morning after the awards. I also remember thinking that I was in the hospital because I had somehow gotten into a fistfight and lost. Someone—I don’t remember who—informed me that this was not the case. Then they gave me a topline summary of my injury, along with the day’s date. I found myself first in disbelief, and then morbidly amused. I may have even chortled.
But now that I know more details about what happened, I am less amused and more extremely freaked out. I wasn’t awake for all the scary parts of my injury, but everyone I loved was. When I finally came to, I could see the fear and terror still in their eyes, even after the worst had passed. I could see it in the eyes of my poor mom and dad, who sat vigil at my bedside every day after surgery, praying for me to wake up. I could see it in the faces of my brother and sister, who did likewise. I could see it in the faces of my friends and of my co-workers, who quite literally saved my life and were then informed that I would likely be hospitalized for months before I could walk out into the light of day. Not a single month, as it turned out to be. Months.…
… I find myself in a strange situation where people I love were traumatized and devastated by what happened to me, but I—the dude who actually suffered the injury—fell into a two-week time warp before waking up strapped to a gurney: emaciated, woozy, confused, and irritable. I’m left to reverse engineer my own trauma by talking to my loved ones, poring over dry-ass medical charts, and checking notes that my wife kept throughout the whole ordeal, notes that I can’t bear to read. For as long as I live on, I owe it to my family and friends and colleagues to fully appreciate the fact that I somehow didn’t die, and that they saved me. I feel shitty that they had to go through that. I feel bad that I let my brain explode. When I recounted my injury to a nurse practitioner at the MinuteClinic the other week, her jaw dropped. “You’re so lucky you’re alive, you have no idea.”…
I cheated death, and now the Reaper has a chit for my head that he can cash in any time he likes. I now know firsthand that he doesn’t always telegraph his arrival. I was blindsided. When I was young, I thought nothing could kill me. I know I’m old now because I believe that everything can kill me, including just going to a work shindig. I have the receipts to prove it.
There may come a day when I can recover some of the memories I lost from this whole episode, but I’d prefer that day never come. I try not to think about what happened to me, but I do every day…
oatler.
I remember Magary’s anti-mayo screed in “The Takeout”. Preach, brother!
Raven
Looks like my brain MRI after my stroke.
Raven
Well fuck, I spend a good bit of time on this
spudgun
I’ve been a longtime DM fan and reading this was terrifying…to know how close we were to losing such a wonderful writer. Thank gawd he’s ok!!
I still think about his Deadspin article post-election (actually, around the 2017 Super Bowl) where he admits to breaking down and crying in the middle of disciplining his daughter for acting up during church, trying to impart to his child how stressed out he was about this terrible new world we were living in, without getting into details she couldn’t really understand. I originally began reading him for his grumpy-man snark and humor, but man, can he write the serious stuff, too.
TomatoQueen
In one of the comments there is useful & pertinent advice about setting up your mobile phone to make an emergency call even if the phone is locked. Everyone should do this.
debbie
Jesus, he’s lucky to be able to write about it.
spudgun
@Raven: Oof!
spudgun
A standout for me from the article – I could be reading it wrong, but it seemed like the medical staff thought he was just drunk and were ready to SEND HIM HOME, except that his friend insisted they do tests and keep him in the hospital.
WTF?!? Thank gawd for that friend!!!
GregMulka
I was in a bad car accident when I was 17. I was on the way to football practice. I got in the car and woke up in the hospital 11 hours later.
I was lucky that a bad concussion was all I had but reading Drew describing everyone’s description of what happened was so damn familiar.
This thing that happened that may or may not be your fault doesn’t feel real. Your brain broke but you can’t remember why or how it broke. You wake up and there are just consequences and effects. Your life is entirely different. There is a possible time bomb sitting in your head and you’ll never know why. Not really. You just have everyone’s description.
RAVEN
@GregMulka: Funny, I fell out of tree (showing off for girls) after football practice and shattered my left leg in 18 pieces!
Steve in the ATL
Damn, this story puts my gripes about overcooked squash into perspective.
SiubhanDuinne
@RAVEN:
Funny notfunny.
I hope this was many years ago, and nothing recent.
(In my family we have a long-standing, multi-generational tradition: if anyone relates an anecdote about when they were young — especially if they came off looking silly or stupid in the telling — one of the audience members is obliged to ask “How old were you?” and the answer (invariably chorused by everyone present) is always “TWENTY-THREE!”)
JPL
@debbie: Yes he is. It reminded me of Leto and his road to recovery.
Rusty
While making dinner I got a headache and went to lay down. Woke up (really became aware) 12 hours later in the neurology ward of the hospital with my family standing all around looking completely freaked out as they asked me my name, if I recognized my wife, what was the year, could I count backwards from 100 by 7’s (the doctor later told me no one ever gets that right). In between I was mostly awake but I didn’t remember it. EMT’s, an ambulance ride, an ER, another ambulance ride, another ER at a bigger hospital. A week in the hospital, out for a week, back for another week (developed blood clots, but no sign I had them the first week) and the final diagnosis was, migraine. When something goes wrong with your head and they have no other explanation, the default is migraine. I had the same sense as the writer, your brain could just abandon you, it was unnerving for a long time, and then you just get on with your life.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steve in the ATL:
Wait, you OVERCOOKED YOUR SQUASH and this is the first we’ve heard of it?
O.
M.
G.
???
Bonnie
My younger brother was 66 when he had a stroke a few years ago. He lived alone; so no one was around when it happened. His neighbor came by a day or so later found him and found a note on his refrigerator that said, “If I am dead, call (the name of one of our cousins he was good friends with).” My cousin had a very high position in our Tribal community (we are Pacific Northwest American Indians). When he got the call from my brother’s neighbor, he dispatched some of our health care people to go pick him up. They did and took him to a local hospital. I rushed down to see him taking a cab. It was one of the most horrible sights of my life. I don’t think he knows I was there. I had been in touch with one of my brother’s best friends and, gave him the bad news. He was in the hospital for a couple of months, maybe three. He was later transferred to a hospice type facility. It was very hard for me to go see him. Every time I did I broke down in tears later in the day. In the meantime, our Tribe had already started building a facility for our Elders for when they became incapcitated in their later years. It was finished last winter. He was moved to our new facility, which is called the House of Respect–great name!. Since then, he has improved miraculously. I cannot tell you how happy I am when I see him now; and, he recognizes me and can talk some. It has been uphill ever since; and, I have a slim hope that he can lead a good life now. However, it never occurred to any of us that I (his older sister) would be in this position. I had hoped he would be the one taking care of me. The lesson we learned was if you have a stroke, have it where someone is around and can rush you to the hospital. The sooner you get help, the more they can do for you. Stay in touch with your loved ones so that you can help immediately if needed. And, I feel blessed now that people who really care about him are taking care of him. Yet, there have been many bad days these last few years. I blame president* for this (and maybe for other troubles that have occurred since he became president*, which includes the death of my cat). How can any of us Americans live good lives with all the negativity that permeates this country day-in and day-out because one of America’s worst human beings was elected President. I agree with Raven above and reiterate: Love your brain and use it to love others.
Steve in the ATL
@SiubhanDuinne: me? Lord no—still crunchy when I’m working the pan. It’s my danged South Georgia wife!
boatboy_srq
A) I have a friend who has had multiple TBI-inducing incidents. One of which was a car accident. In which she was ejected from the car. Through the sunroof. Which was metal. And which was also shut. She has near-constant pain, and severe difficulty remembering things. Her life is a collection of notebooks, all in some order only she understands.The medical profession is anything but kind. She is treated – regularly, by most practitioners and nearly every pharmacist – as some layabout drug-addicted “she-was-asking-for-it” girl every time she goes through her list of prescriptions requesting a refill (yes, we KNOW all those painkillers are opioids; she needs those because SHE EFFING HURTS! Do you get it?). At least once a routine scrip refill resulted in some genius calling the local PD because she was obviously too healthy to need those meds, and it took her PCP on the phone with the attending LEO to straighten things out. Had she been a veteran, or a pro ball player, none of those people would have blinked. We are not living in a post-sexist society.
B) Magary is at least as lucky he has worthwhile health insurance to cover all that care and medication and therapy as he is that he had people to put him back together. “Take care of your brain” rings kinda hollow when anyone else with any other group would have been treated like the drunk the ICU first thought he was, and afterward he’d be too BLEEPed to pursue the malpractice suit such indifference would merit either from the horrific bill or the brain damage suffered from the hospital’s misdiagnosis.
trollhattan
Magary is a treasure. I hope he truly recovers and has a long, productive life.
Ran across this blog by a heart transplant recipient who experienced unexpected cardiac failure during her ER residency. Her donor family recently reached out to her. Well worth the read.
Ruckus
@Rusty:
Glad you are alright.
None of that is fun. Doc once told me he thought I’d had a TIA and ordered tests.Of course he ordered the wrong ones so I spent 8 months getting them straightened out and done before finding out for sure, no TIA, no clots, all those parts are fine. They may be the only ones.
Not true on that counting backwards by sevens. One doc stopped me when I got down to 58. Not sure if he knew the answers but I rattled them off and he just stood there shaking his head. It wasn’t my first time with this one. The answers come easier when you do this somewhat regular. You may be right about not many people abilities though. One reason of course why they use 7. How far can you go before screwing up, what is your demeanor like when that happens…..
Villago Delenda Est
What a story! But it’s not a story…it’s reality. I’m so happy for Drew, not only that he survives and thrives, but he shares this with us and some of the comments (particularly the ones about pediatric stroke victims) are a barrage of cut onions.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: That’s almost a big a crime as shoddy email management.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
I had a friend, passed now, she had sickle cell. She’d get an attack as she called them and have to hospitalized. If she went to a different hospital they always accused her of being a drug addict looking for a high. The docs/hospitals that knew her wouldn’t ever question her needs, they’d seen her often enough. I visited her in ICU a couple of times. Not all that much fun.
Ruckus
Saw this story yesterday and couldn’t stop reading the whole thing. That’s probably about as close to anyone knowing what it’s like without going through it.
Jay Noble
This so parallels what I went through 7 years ago at 51 with heart attack/pulmunary edema/high blood sugar. Drove myself to the ER because I had trouble breathing> Thinking I was having a bout of bronchitis, I thought I might get by with just a breathing treatment or 2. Breathing got worse and worse they were going to admit me when the doc came in “His blood sugar is 422. He’s having a heart attack. Prep him for Loveland”. Fade to black. I woke up a week later from a medically induced coma. That week is a complete blank even though I communicated by hand squeezes to my family and staff.
My ICU paranoia episode was that the JFK conspirators were coming to get me. Oh, and that one nurse had stolen my brand new Uggs!
When I got tired of the “Do you know how you got here?” I answered “Helicopter.”
This fella’s got a harder road to go than I have had but I can tell him that those feelings remorse for putting others thru all that will always be there
Mary G
He”s lucky he isn’t black. The ER wouldn’t consider not sending him home. Glad we still have a good writer around.
Citizen_X
@Bonnie:
That is a wonderful name!
Ohio Mom
@boatboy_srq: There are many, many people disabled first by severe chronic pain, and second by the establishment’s resistance to properly treating their pain. Sorry to hear your friend is among them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but under-treated chronic pain is a cause of suicide. The disability community was up in arms when Gillibrand proposed restricting opioid prescriptions to seven days. Running that gauntlet every week would end up killing people.
(I have other reasons why she’s not my first choice but would crawl on broken glass, etc.)
Steppy
I read Deadspin and Drew nearly as religiously as Balloon Juice. He is an amazing writer. Last December, the editor in chief of Deadspin posted a “Note about Drew” that was horribly troubling. Eventually, we heard dribs and drabs about his condition and at some point, he started posting again. He seemed to be his old self, to judge from his writing. We, his fans, knew that he would post this post someday, and that we would simultaneously laugh, cry, cringe and marvel. I thank the God that created him that he saw fit to spare Drew to tell us about his experience.
boatboy_srq
@Ohio Mom: Chronic pain seems to rank up there with mental illness as far as the West is concerned. “It can’t really be that bad.” “Are you sure all this is for you? You couldn’t possibly need all of this.” “Have you tried Motrin?” “Perhaps we should set you up for substance abuse counseling.” The unthinking, misunderstanding, condescending platitudes are endless – and they’re coming from the healthcare community.
I hadn’t put that particular bit together with Gillibrand. The “opioid crisis” may indeed be real, and there are likely plenty of people selling their scrips or morphing them into something more exotically toxic; that’s no reason to make genuine sufferers – sufferers who are likely being turned into addicts just because Western medicine has no other pain management regimen – have to jump through hoops just to prove they’re not dealers in their spare time. She can take her “Because no one needs a month’s supply for a wisdom tooth extraction” and shove it.
texasdoc
Even though my experience was much less serious, Drew Magary’s story resonates some with mine. I got hit by a truck while riding my bike, resulting in a concussion, multiple broken bones and bruised lungs. I don’t remember the accident because you also lose any memories prior to the trauma that aren’t “fixed” yet. I don’t remember anything for eight hours after that-no lights, no hovering over myself watching what was going on. I woke hearing I was on my way to the ICU. Not knowing the extent of my injuries yet, I thought to myself “Well, that’s overkill.” It’s amazing how much deconditioning and muscle loss happens after a couple of weeks in bed. Thanks goodness for PT/OT. But I know I’m at higher risk of dementia now, more worrisome than any physical deficit.
StringOnAStick
@boatboy_srq: Agreed. My younger sister was severely injured by a truck with failed brakes plowing into her stopped car over 30 years ago. Since then she’s had a knee replacement, and needs a hip and shoulder replacement but the chronic SI Joint pain is something that surgery has a less than 50% chance of helping and is just as likely to make things worse. Her last pain doc gave her tons of narcotics and she got less and less relief, the new doc is starting her towards a pain control implant process, something that drips a drug right at the site of the pain and is refilled with a needle every 3 months. I hope it works, she’s out of options other than this one since the current moral panic over pain meds is making them increasingly harder for chronic pain patients to get because the feds are putting the magnifying glass on all prescribing doctors.
Barb 2
@StringOnAStick:
Constant pain can drive people to suicide. Very few people can comprehend this – well you are such a whimp you are told. Just tough out the pain – mind over matter. Put it out of your mind. Blah blah blah. Fact is taking pain meds for pain doesn’t “cause” addiction. Cutting back on drugs that allow us to function can cause suicide. The docs are nervous about how much they prescribe. “We need to wean you off of the drugs.”
Had hand surgery, two days later ended up in hospital for something else. Nurses would not give me the prescribed dose for my hand. Only every 12 hours, rather than every 6. I am not going to become an addict. My cousin did die of an over dose. But then his drug use was recreational and he used alcohol to boost the opioid effects. I can’t take opioids but to many people any pain killer is considered “bad”. I do have constant pain.
Our health provider mailed out the warning signs of stroke. Awareness is good because there are drugs that it given shortly after a stroke makes recovery more hopeful. Now we need more understanding of chronic pain and how not treating it is not the correct response.
low-tech cyclist
My mom had a subdural hematoma about 5 years ago. I’d been talking to her on the phone, and the words she was saying started to make no sense, seemingly random words strung together in a random order. I made it from my office to her door in record time through the middle of D.C., and politely but firmly told her that she needed to get in my car because we were going to the hospital.
I got her there, she was treated appropriately, and she recovered. It helped that she was in her late 80s at the time: old people’s brains physically shrink somewhat, which means there’s more room for the brain inside the skull when the hematoma is pressing on it. If you have a subdural hematoma when you’re relatively young, there’s no excess room to allow the brain and the hematoma to coexist somewhat, so it pushes right into the brain immediately. Drew Magary is incredibly lucky to be both alive and not a vegetable.
Bookeater (formerly JosieJ)
This resonates so much with me. In Dec 2016, I was in the hospital having had an LVAD implanted. I had Stage IV heart failure and had been placed on the transplant list; the LVAD was to help keep me alive until a transplant came through. One night, I asked the nurse something and it came out as gibberish. I knew exactly what I was trying to say: in my head it made perfect sense, but I could not make it sound coherent coming out of my mouth. Turns out I had a subdural hematoma. I was so lucky I was already in the hospital! They caught it quickly and the aphasia went away after a few days of treatment (no coma, thank God). But I can relate to his anxiety about suffering another brain injury—in my case, this compounded my already-existing anxiety about my cardiac condition. I can also relate to spending Christmas in the hospital, to the 5am bright fluorescent wake-up blood draws, the supervised bathroom visits, and the tendency of the doctors to show up with 47 residents in tow when I was on the commode! I can’t relate to not wanting to shower, though—when I got transplanted last year, I cried tears of joy when they finally let me take a shower!
I’m grateful Drew survived with his humor, among other things, intact!
cynthia ackerman
@spudgun:
Dead thread, but …
I work in EMS. I’ve seen enough brain injuries to say that the attending Emergency Department pros, if accurately reported here, should not be in this line of work.
We are trained to gauge “index of suspicion,” and to rule out more serious potential problems before determining inebriation (for instance) is all that’s going on.
If Drew had been my patient in the field here in rural Oregon, I would have put him on a helicopter.