How Almost Gone Offers Hope Through Survival and Recovery
Updated: Sep 4
When I decided to tell my story in Almost Gone, I knew there would be difficult parts to write.
There was pain.
Prescription medication dependence.
Choices I wish I had made differently.
A near-fatal medical crisis.
Approximately three and a half weeks in a coma.
Rehabilitation.
Physical limitations that changed my life.
But I didn't write Almost Gone simply to tell people how close I came to dying.
I wrote it because I lived.
And what happened after I survived became just as important as what nearly took my life.
That's where I believe the hope in this story begins.
Hope Doesn't Mean Pretending Everything Is Fine
I've learned that hope and reality can exist at the same time.
My recovery wasn't easy.
Waking from the coma didn't suddenly restore my health or return my life to normal.
My body had been through tremendous trauma.
My left side had been severely affected.
I had wounds and physical challenges.
I eventually spent about eight weeks in rehabilitation at the VA working to regain abilities and independence.
Some things improved.
Some things changed permanently.
Hope didn't mean pretending those problems weren't real.
Hope meant believing my life still had value despite them.
Survival Was Only the First Step
People naturally focus on the dramatic part of my story—the night I nearly died and the weeks I spent unconscious.
I understand why.
But surviving the immediate crisis was only the beginning.
Afterward came the work.
Rehabilitation.
Learning to adapt.
Returning home.
Going back to work.
Rebuilding independence.
Learning how to live in a body that wasn't exactly the same as before.
And confronting the decisions and circumstances that had brought me to that point.
Recovery wasn't a single moment.
It was thousands of smaller moments.
That's something I wanted readers of Almost Gone to understand.
Recovery Doesn't Have to Look Perfect
One reason I wanted to tell my story honestly is because real recovery doesn't always look inspirational while you're living through it.
Sometimes progress is obvious.
Other times it's frustratingly slow.
There are good days.
There are setbacks.
There are things you regain and things you have to learn to live without.
I didn't wake up from a coma and immediately become a completely different person with everything figured out.
I had to rebuild.
That's why I believe there's hope in an imperfect recovery.
You don't have to have everything solved before you can begin moving forward.
Sometimes progress is simply doing something today that you couldn't do yesterday.
Family Gave Me Something Worth Fighting For
Almost Gone is my memoir, but family is at the center of much of it.
My mother knew something was wrong 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.
While I spent weeks unconscious, my family experienced something I couldn't see or remember.
They waited.
They worried.
They didn't know what the outcome would be.
When I woke up, I wasn't the only person affected by what had happened.
Recovery reminded me how deeply our lives are connected to the people who love us.
Family couldn't do the rehabilitation for me.
They couldn't undo what had happened.
But knowing I still had people in my life gave me another reason to keep going.
One Tiny Sign of Life
There is one detail from the night I nearly died that has stayed with me.
At one point, there was only a tiny sign of life—a faint pulse detected in my right foot.
Think about how small that is.
A pulse.
One tiny indication that I wasn't completely gone.
Today, that moment means much more to me than a medical detail.
It represents possibility.
There wasn't much to work with.
But there was something.
And sometimes that's what hope looks like.
Not certainty.
Not a guarantee.
Just enough to keep going.
Accountability Became Part of Recovery
Hope also requires honesty.
There were circumstances surrounding my prescription medication use that deserve discussion.
There were also choices that belonged to me.
I've become much more comfortable acknowledging both.
If I told my story as though everything happened to me and none of my own decisions mattered, I wouldn't be telling the whole story.
Recovery required me to look backward honestly.
What warning signs did I miss?
What did I ignore?
What decisions would I make differently today?
Accountability didn't take hope away from me.
It gave me more control over what happened next.
I couldn't change yesterday.
But I could learn from it.
Faith Helped Me Understand My Second Chance
Faith became another important part of my recovery.
I still can't explain exactly why I survived.
I don't know why that tiny pulse remained.
I don't know why I eventually woke up after approximately three and a half weeks.
But I believe I was given a second chance.
That belief gave survival a different meaning.
Instead of only asking why this happened, I began thinking about what I was going to do with the life I still had.
Faith didn't eliminate rehabilitation.
It didn't remove my physical limitations.
It didn't erase my mistakes.
But it helped me believe there was still purpose ahead.
Finding Strength in a Changed Life
Before my medical crisis, independence meant something different to me.
Afterward, I had to redefine it.
There were things I had to relearn.
There were things I had to adapt.
And there were times I had to accept help.
That wasn't always easy.
But eventually I realized something:
A changed life can still be a meaningful life.
That lesson extends far beyond my particular experience.
Many people eventually face something that divides life into a “before” and an “after.”
An illness.
An accident.
A loss.
A mistake.
A relationship ending.
A career changing.
A medical diagnosis.
A moment that permanently alters what comes next.
You may not be able to return to exactly who you were before.
That doesn't mean there is nothing ahead.
Why I Put the Difficult Parts in the Book
It would have been easier to write only about survival.
The uplifting parts.
The comeback.
The second chance.
But hope means more when readers understand what came before it.
That's why Almost Gone includes the mistakes and difficult periods too.
I wanted readers to see the whole journey.
The person I was before the crisis.
The decisions and circumstances that led me toward it.
The night everything changed.
The coma.
The rehabilitation.
And the life I eventually rebuilt.
If you only tell the ending, people don't understand how difficult it was to get there.
Hope Can Begin Very Small
One thing my experience taught me is that hope doesn't always arrive as some enormous breakthrough.
Sometimes it's much smaller.
One movement during rehabilitation.
One successful task.
One encouraging conversation.
One person showing up.
One day back at work.
One decision made differently.
One more morning.
Or, in my case, one tiny pulse.
Small things can become the beginning of something much larger.
Finding Hope Through Survival and Recovery
Finding hope through survival and recovery became one of the most important lessons of my second chance at life.
I don't expect every reader to have lived through what I did.
Most haven't.
But you don't need to have survived a coma to understand what it feels like when life doesn't go according to plan.
You don't need my medical history to understand regret.
Fear.
Family.
Faith.
Mistakes.
Loss.
Recovery.
Or the desire for another chance.
Those experiences are human.
That's why I believe my story can reach people whose circumstances are completely different from mine.
The details may be different.
The question may be the same:
What do I do now?
My answer was to keep moving.
Your Worst Chapter Doesn't Have to Be Your Last
That's one of the messages I hope readers carry away from Almost Gone: A True Story of Survival, Coma, and a Second Chance.
There was a point when my future was anything but certain.
Today, I'm here telling the story.
I'm still working.
I'm still learning.
I'm still dealing with some of the consequences of what happened.
I'm still appreciating things I once took for granted.
And I'm still trying to make something worthwhile out of the second chance I received.
My story isn't about a perfect recovery.
It's about continuing.
You can make mistakes and still change.
You can lose part of the life you knew and still build another one.
You can go through something terrible and still find meaning afterward.
And sometimes, even when almost everything seems lost, a tiny sign of life is enough to begin again.
That's the hope behind Almost Gone.
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