The Role Faith Played in My Recovery and Second Chance
Updated: Sep 4
There are parts of my story I can explain.
I can tell you about the pain that came before my prescription medication dependence.
I can tell you about the choices I made.
I can tell you what my family told me about the night they found me.
I can tell you about the hospital, the coma, rehabilitation, and the physical challenges that followed.
But there's one question I can't answer completely:
Why am I still here?
I spent approximately three and a half weeks in a coma after a near-fatal medical crisis.
At one point, there was only a tiny sign of life—a faint pulse detected in my right foot.
Yet somehow, I survived.
For me, faith became part of understanding what survival meant.
I don't claim to know why I was given another chance.
But I believe I was.
And that belief changed the way I chose to live afterward.
Faith Wasn't a Substitute for Medicine
I want to make something clear.
Faith didn't replace medical care in my recovery.
Doctors, nurses, rehabilitation professionals, and many others played important roles in keeping me alive and helping me regain function.
After waking from the coma, I eventually spent about eight weeks in rehabilitation at the VA.
Recovery required work.
A lot of it.
I had to learn how to function in a body that had changed dramatically.
There were wounds.
There were physical limitations.
There were things I once did automatically that suddenly required concentration and effort.
I believe in faith.
I also believe in accepting appropriate medical care, asking questions, participating in your treatment, and working with qualified healthcare professionals.
For me, those things aren't in conflict.
Why Did I Survive?
That's the question that stayed with me.
Why me?
Why was there still that tiny pulse?
Why did I wake up?
Why did I get another opportunity when so many people don't?
I don't have a scientific answer for those questions.
And I don't pretend that faith gives me one.
What faith gave me was a way to think about what came next.
Instead of spending the rest of my life asking:
“Why did I survive?”
I gradually began asking:
“What am I supposed to do with the life I still have?”
That question changed everything.
Faith Gave My Second Chance Meaning
Surviving and living are not necessarily the same thing.
I survived the medical crisis.
Then I had to learn how to live again.
That meant rehabilitation.
It meant adapting to physical limitations.
It meant returning to work.
It meant rebuilding independence.
It meant examining the decisions that had brought me to such a dangerous place.
And it meant accepting that my life wasn't going to look exactly the way it had before.
Faith helped me see that changed life as something valuable rather than simply something diminished.
I was still here.
That mattered.
Every additional day was something I had almost lost.
Faith Didn't Remove Accountability
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that faith doesn't mean avoiding responsibility for your own decisions.
There were circumstances surrounding my prescription medication use that I believe deserve serious discussion.
But there were also choices that belonged to me.
Both can be true.
For a long time, it would have been easier to focus exclusively on what everyone else could have done differently.
Eventually, I had to look at myself too.
What warning signs did I ignore?
What choices did I make?
What could I have done differently?
What could I do differently now?
Faith didn't give me permission to avoid those questions.
It gave me the strength to face them.
I Don't Believe I Survived to Stay the Same
A second chance doesn't mean much if you don't do anything with it.
That's something I've thought about many times since the coma.
I could never erase what happened.
I couldn't undo the decisions that came before it.
I couldn't make my body exactly what it had been.
But I could decide what kind of person I wanted to be afterward.
I could return to my family.
I could work.
I could rebuild.
I could try to help other people.
And eventually, I could tell my story.
That's one of the reasons Almost Gone exists.
Faith During the Hard Parts
Recovery isn't one dramatic moment when everything suddenly becomes better.
At least mine wasn't.
There were difficult days.
There were setbacks.
There were medical complications.
There were moments when progress seemed painfully slow.
There were reminders that some effects of what happened to me weren't going away.
Faith didn't magically remove those problems.
What it gave me was another reason to continue through them.
Sometimes faith wasn't a grand revelation.
Sometimes it was simply believing tomorrow was still worth reaching.
Family Was Part of My Faith Journey
My recovery also reinforced how much family matters.
My daughter Cynthia was there during one of the worst moments imaginable.
My mother knew something was wrong when she couldn't reach me.
My family waited while I remained unconscious.
Their experience became part of my story even though I couldn't remember those weeks myself.
When I think about being given a second chance, I don't think only about what I received.
I think about what I was given back.
More time with my family.
More conversations.
More ordinary days.
More opportunities to say things that might otherwise have gone unsaid.
Those things mean more to me now.
Faith and the Question of Purpose
For years, I had measured life in familiar ways.
Work.
Business.
Accomplishments.
Providing for my family.
Competition.
Independence.
Those things still mattered after my recovery.
But survival added another question:
What is the purpose of the time I've been given?
Writing Almost Gone became part of my answer.
I'm not sharing my story because I believe everyone should interpret what happened to me exactly as I do.
Faith is deeply personal.
Some readers will share my beliefs.
Others won't.
That's okay.
I'm telling you what faith meant in my recovery.
It helped me transform survival into responsibility.
If I had been given another chance, I wanted to do something worthwhile with it.
Why I Wrote Almost Gone
I didn't write Almost Gone: A True Story of Survival, Coma, and a Second Chance because I had all the answers.
I wrote it because I had a story.
A story about family.
Pain.
Prescription medication dependence.
Mistakes.
Consequences.
A near-fatal medical crisis.
A coma.
Rehabilitation.
Faith.
Recovery.
And another chance at life.
Writing the book forced me to look at the entire journey—not only the parts that were easy to explain.
It also forced me to recognize something important:
My worst decisions are part of my story, but they don't have to define the rest of it.
What a Second Chance Means to Me
I used to think of a second chance as another opportunity to get something right.
Today, it means more than that.
It's another morning.
Another conversation with someone you love.
Another opportunity to help somebody.
Another chance to make a better decision.
Another day to appreciate something you once took for granted.
I nearly lost all of those things.
That's why the phrase second chance isn't marketing language to me.
It's personal.
If You're Going Through Your Own Difficult Season
I would never tell another person that faith alone will solve a medical problem, medication dependence, trauma, depression, or any other serious condition.
Seek appropriate professional help when you need it.
Talk honestly with people you trust.
Ask questions about your healthcare.
Don't abruptly discontinue prescription medication without appropriate medical guidance.
And if you're experiencing a medical or mental-health emergency, get immediate professional help.
But I can tell you what faith did for me.
It gave me hope when my future looked very different from the life I once knew.
It gave meaning to survival.
It helped me accept responsibility without believing my life was permanently defined by my mistakes.
And it gave me a reason to believe there was still something worthwhile ahead.
Why I'm Still Here
I may never know exactly why I survived.
Maybe that's a question I'm not supposed to be able to answer.
What I do know is that I did survive.
There was a tiny pulse.
Then there was another day.
And another.
Eventually those days became years.
Years I almost didn't have.
I don't want to waste them.
That's the role faith played in my recovery.
It didn't erase the past.
It didn't make rehabilitation easy.
It didn't restore everything I lost.
It helped me believe that the life I still had was worth rebuilding.
And every day since has been part of that second chance.
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