Too close for comfort

Every month in The Sun they have a section called Readers Write, where readers can submit their nonfiction thoughts. They get hundreds of submissions and print about 30 of them. The broad topic for the Dec. 1st deadline, to be published in the March issue, is "Too Close for Comfort." I was overcome last night to submit some thoughts.

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I walked away from my music scholarship in late 1997. By the spring of 1999, I found myself working in a busy casino kitchen, where I met him - also a musician, chef, and lover of all things outdoors. We spent one summer day on the river with our co-workers, finishing our canoe trip with a half-empty vodka bottle and an empty case of beer.

That's how I found myself crawling out of the car, lying in a swamp with seven broken bones and a dislocated spine, watching my kindred spirit die.

Seven years later, I've been working for a suburban ambulance service almost five years – after the doctors told me I'd never work again. People say I've done miraculously well for myself: I speak of him to only a close few. I no longer need medication to get out of bed in the morning. After losing 123 pounds, my disability hardly bothers me anymore. I've learned that a lot of love, and just a tenuous thread of faith, could pull me through an unimaginable hell.

But then there are those calls, when that desperate, bloodied patient reaches up, searching my face for the truth as she asks if she's going to die. I loom over memory's ledge. We load her into the helicopter; the vibration of the rotors sets my body trembling.

I wish you knew how I see myself in your eyes. I want to tell you how I know your terror.

I sit with a patient who has tried to commit suicide. She tells me of her own overwhelming tragedies, the anti-depressants that don't work, and the numerous doctors and therapists who haven't helped her.

There I am again - what separates you and I? Thanks to my own wonderful clinicians, rare is the occasion when I don't control the intrusive memories of that fatal day. Do I deserve the credit that so many give me? Or did I merely get lucky?

Home, I stand naked in front of the mirror and inspect my many scars. I wonder if recovery is only a fragile illusion.

Name Withheld