The First Time I Died -Part 1

I was a high school senior. It was the first football game of the year. I was fortunate to be my team’s starting tailback. After a pretty good half (65 yards rushing and two sacks as a DE), my muscles started cramping up. I always had problems with cramping while playing sports. Staying hydrated was always a major focus of mine. There were two times before this incident when the cramps got the best of me. Once, the summer after 8^th grade, I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance because of severe muscle cramps and the inability to hold down any liquid (I was outside working on a house renovation in the heat of summer without any water. I know. How brilliant of me.) And also when I was visiting my father over one summer in San Antonio, I started severely cramping after a game of flag football. I was rushed by ambulance again to the hospital and luckily my dad (a military hospital administrator) was able to get his friend (a doctor) to meet me at the hospital doors and begin treating me right away. After blood and urine tests (in which my urine looked like Root Beer) the doctor said that he felt I was just minutes away from some of my organs shutting down. Both times was quite a shock to the system and even more of a shock to my parents.

Well, back to my senior year. This episode of cramps was like nothing I had ever felt before. We’re talking here about muscles cramping in areas that I had no idea contained muscles. They started during the game, but I was able to stretch them out. By the time half time hit, they were all over my body. There I was on the sideline, lying on the ground with trainers surrounding me trying to stretch what seemed like every part of my body. We soon realized that they were not going to stop. So now the question was, do we call an ambulance or do we just go to the ER? We decided to just go to the ER. Bad decision. My uncle carried me to the awaiting minivan and off we went. The whole time to the hospital he was rubbing and stretching all of my leg muscles. To try and describe the pain would do the pain an injustice. All I can say is, picture a “Charlie horse”. Now picture a bunch of Charlie horses all over your body. When I (or my uncle) would try to get rid of a cramp in my quad, it would move to my hamstring. Work on my cramping bicep and it would move to by tricep. I’m telling you, every muscle in my body was cramping in differing strengths for different lengths of time. There was a time during this episode that my eyelids cramped open. I couldn’t close my eyes. Never knew that could happen.

We arrived to the ER and my uncle ran in and got a gurney and a staff member. This is when we realized it was a mistake to not call an ambulance. In a move I can still not explain, they determined that I was not an emergency. There I was sitting, or more accurately laying, in the emergency room with every muscle in my body cramping. My mom and my uncle were diligently rubbing the various parts of my body that were affected as I was writhing in pain. We told everybody working there the situation. I had Cystic Fibrosis and this had happened twice before but not as bad. I pleaded with them to please just get me started on IV fluids. At one point, I banged on the glass partition and said, “You really don’t get it, I need help right now!” I felt helpless. Over the years I have learned to gage when I’m really in trouble and when it was something I could work through. I knew I was in trouble. I needed to be seen and I needed to be seen right away. Nothing seemed to get their attention.

That all changed when I started to hyperventilate and get tunnel vision. I had always heard about tunnel vision but I had never experienced it. I remember trying to catch my breath and just not being able to. I was looking at the ceiling and a dark circle seemed to be closing in around me. It got to the point that I could only see probably a foot or two of the ceiling. It was if I was looking through a scope. With this new development, they rushed me to the back.

When I got into the room, I was pretty much out of it. I don’t remember much in between the tunnel vision and actually getting back into the room. When I got back to the room, I do remember feeling a sense of relief. Finally I was going to get “better”. Boy was I wrong. It only got worse. They had started an IV on me and there were more and more people coming into my room. I remember looking to my mom and she was such a calming force. I thought to myself that something must be going on because there are now a lot of people around. I could not catch my breath and I started to panic. The last thing I remember was taking a ton of short and shallow breaths one after the other and a doctor saying, “Ron, you need to calm down and try to take deep breaths”. When she said this, the medical staff was in the process of sitting me up. That’s when it happened. I had respiratory arrest. My eyes rolled into the back of my head, I stopped breathing.

To be continued....

Part 2 coming next Friday

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