A True Story of Survival and Faith
Updated: Sep 4
There was a point when my life came down to something incredibly small.
A tiny pulse.
After a near-fatal medical crisis, I spent approximately three and a half weeks in a coma. My family didn't know what the outcome would be.
I don't remember those weeks.
But I know what happened afterward.
I woke up.
And waking up turned out to be only the beginning.
What followed became a true story of survival and faith—not because everything suddenly became easier, but because I had to find a way forward in a life that had changed dramatically.
Survival Wasn't the End of the Story
When people hear that someone survived a coma, it's natural to focus on the moment they woke up.
That's the miracle.
That's the happy ending.
Except it wasn't the ending for me.
My body had been through tremendous trauma. My left side had been severely affected, and I faced physical limitations I had never imagined.
Eventually, I spent about eight weeks in rehabilitation at the VA.
Things I once did automatically required effort.
Independence became something I had to fight to regain.
There were wounds and medical complications.
There were good days and difficult ones.
I had survived.
Now I had to learn how to live again.
Recovery Required More Than Motivation
People talk about motivation as though you can simply decide to feel strong every morning.
That's not how my recovery worked.
Some days I felt determined.
Other days I was frustrated.
What mattered was continuing even when I didn't feel particularly motivated.
Rehabilitation taught me that progress often comes from repetition.
Try.
Fail.
Try again.
Make a little progress.
Come back tomorrow.
There wasn't always some dramatic breakthrough.
Sometimes success was simply doing something I couldn't do before.
That's where I learned a different definition of strength.
Strength isn't always feeling powerful. Sometimes it's continuing when you don't.
Faith Became Part of the Journey
Physical determination could only answer so many questions.
It couldn't tell me why I survived.
It couldn't explain why there was still that tiny pulse.
It couldn't tell me what I was supposed to do with another chance at life.
That's where faith became increasingly important to me.
I don't claim to understand why some people survive terrible circumstances and others don't.
I would never pretend to have that answer.
But I believe I was given a second chance.
And if I was given another chance, I believed I had a responsibility to do something with it.
Faith Didn't Mean Everything Became Easy
My faith didn't erase the physical consequences of what happened.
It didn't make rehabilitation painless.
It didn't eliminate setbacks.
It didn't remove the need for doctors, nurses, therapists, rehabilitation professionals, or appropriate medical care.
Faith and medical care weren't competitors in my recovery.
I needed professional help.
I needed family.
I needed friends.
I needed hard work.
And I needed something inside me that believed the life I still had was worth fighting for.
For me, faith became part of that foundation.
Facing My Own Choices
Survival also forced me to look backward.
Before the coma, pain and prescription medication had become an increasingly dangerous part of my life.
My medication use escalated into dependence.
There were warning signs.
There were circumstances outside my control.
There were also decisions that belonged to me.
That's an important part of my story today.
Faith didn't give me an excuse to blame everyone else.
It helped me confront my own choices.
I can't change what happened.
I can decide what I learn from it.
That distinction became important in my recovery and in the way I eventually chose to tell my story.
Family Gave Me Another Reason to Fight
While I was unconscious, my family lived through something I couldn't remember.
My mother became concerned when she couldn't reach me.
My daughter Cynthia and my former brother-in-law Steve went looking for me.
They found me unresponsive.
Cynthia called 911.
Then came the uncertainty.
I was unconscious while the people who loved me waited.
When I eventually woke up, my second chance wasn't only about me.
I had been given more time with my family.
More conversations.
More ordinary days.
More opportunities to be a father, son, friend, and part of the lives of people I cared about.
You don't realize how valuable an ordinary day is until you nearly lose every one you had left.
Learning to Live in a Changed Body
Recovery also meant accepting something I didn't particularly want to accept:
My life wasn't going back exactly to the way it had been.
Some physical effects remained.
There were things I had to do differently.
For someone accustomed to independence, accepting those changes could be difficult.
But eventually I realized I had a choice.
I could spend the rest of my life measuring myself against the person I used to be.
Or I could build the best life possible with the person I was now.
That didn't mean giving up.
It meant adapting.
And adaptation became another form of strength.
The Meaning of the Tiny Pulse
Of all the details surrounding my medical crisis, the tiny pulse detected in my right foot has stayed with me.
I wasn't conscious of it at the time.
But today it has become a symbol of my entire story.
There wasn't much.
But there was something.
There was still life.
There was still possibility.
There was still a chance.
That's what faith sometimes looks like to me.
Not having every answer.
Not knowing exactly what comes next.
Just believing there's enough there to keep moving.
Why I Wrote Almost Gone
Eventually, I realized I didn't want this story to exist only in my memory and in the memories of my family.
I wrote Almost Gone: A True Story of Survival, Coma, and a Second Chance because I wanted to tell the entire journey.
Not just the night I almost died.
The life before it.
My Kentucky childhood.
My family.
My Navy service.
Work and business.
Successes and mistakes.
Pain.
Prescription medication dependence.
The coma.
Rehabilitation.
Faith.
And the life I was fortunate enough to build afterward.
The difficult parts matter because they make the second chance real.
Every Day Became Part of the Second Chance
I don't wake up every morning thinking dramatically about the fact that I almost died.
Life eventually becomes life again.
There are responsibilities.
Work.
Family.
Appointments.
Problems.
Bills.
Good days.
Bad days.
But underneath those ordinary things is an awareness I didn't have before.
I almost didn't get any of them.
That's why I've come to appreciate the ordinary.
Another morning isn't ordinary when you nearly didn't have one.
Another birthday isn't automatic.
Another conversation with someone you love isn't guaranteed.
Those are pieces of the second chance.
A Story of Survival and Faith: What My Second Chance Means
I can't tell another person exactly what they should believe.
Faith is personal.
I can only tell you what it has meant in my life.
I survived something that could have ended my story.
Recovery required medical care, rehabilitation, family, determination, accountability, and time.
But faith helped me decide what that survival meant.
It helped me believe there was still purpose in a life that looked very different from the one I had before.
And it helped me understand something I carry with me today:
A second chance isn't about erasing your past.
It's about deciding what you're going to do with the time you still have.
I was almost gone.
But there was still a tiny pulse.
And because of that tiny pulse, I'm still here.
Still living.
Still learning.
Still grateful.
And still trying to make the second chance count.
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