Chapter Two:

Falling off a Cliff and Other Near-Death Experiences

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

-Dread Pirate Roberts, aka Westley, Princess Bride, 1987

There’s one in every family. A kid who spends every summer in a sling or a cast from a fall out of a tree or one of several bike wrecks. A kid who is on a first name basis with the receptionist at the doctor’s office, a kid known internally at that office as a “frequent flyer.” A kid who, before their tenth birthday, has to use the back side of the form and a blank sheet of paper to complete their medical history. A kid who averages 2.5 bloody noses a week and has a designated puke pail under their bed. In our family, that kid was me.

It pretty much started at birth. I came into the world kicking and screaming with no doctor around to deliver me at 3:00 AM. My older brother, who weighed over 10 pounds at birth, had been a picture of health. I was the baby with colic, and I was inconsolable. My mom tells me that I pretty much cried all day and all night long. My folks tried every baby formula known to man in an effort to calm me down, but nothing worked. In an act of desperation, and defying conventional medical practices, my mom finally put me on whole milk, straight from the cow to my bottle. It worked! Still, growing up, I was a walking insurance claim.

I don’t remember how old I was, but my many ailments led me to become somewhat obsessed with dying at an early age. I had convinced myself I would be one of those poor unfortunate souls to never reach adulthood. The only question was, “How would I die?” Would it be quicksand? I felt like lots of people in the movies and on television shows I was watching during that time were being sucked under by quicksand. If not quicksand, I was sure I would succumb to cancer. Movies like Love Story and Brian’s Song haunted me, even though it was adults dying of cancer in those movies. My cancer self-diagnosis stemmed from how skinny and puny I was for my entire childhood and even into my early adult years. For the record, I did not weigh 100 pounds until after high school. I was scary thin, and I could tell family members and friends were very concerned about me.

“How skinny were you?” Thanks for asking. I was so skinny people in developing countries had pictures of me on their refrigerators. I was so skinny I kept getting Care Packages from UNICEF. I was so skinny UN helicopters would air drop food crates on my basketball court. I was so skinny I could hula hoop with a Cheerio. I was so skinny I could hide behind a fishing pole. And since all the pictures and movies of people I had seen dying of cancer were skinny, I was sure my time on earth would be short.

Eventually, my fear of dying from cancer diminished as someone suggested I might be living with a tapeworm in my intestine and explained how it could be coiled up as much as four feet long. To most people this would have been a horror, but for someone who was sure they were dying of cancer it became a beacon of hope. I named the tapeworm “Charlie” and enjoyed my new lease on life.

As I continued to lose weight, I was taken to a doctor who I distinctly remember saying to me, “I don’t tell any of my patients this, but I want you to eat nothing but fat foods. I’m talking hamburgers, French fries, milkshakes, candy bars, ice cream, potato chips and all the stuff that makes other people fat.” I always liked that doctor, and I wonder if he still has a practice. At the news of my new diet, tapeworm Charlie celebrated by doing backflips and, yes, the Worm Dance.

Turns out I did not have cancer or a tapeworm, but there were still many other ways I could die which had yet to be eliminated and needed my attention.

Influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, I mused over the very real possibility the sparrows in my backyard would organize themselves and land on me and peck my eyes out, leaving me on the grass to die a slow death.

Recalling Bible stories and scenes from the movie, Ben-Hur, I entertained the thought of succumbing to leprosy. I didn’t know anyone who had leprosy or ever died from it, but it didn’t matter: I knew I would be the first in my family to contract it.

Somewhere along the line, I picked up another probable cause of death. Here’s how it played out: a foreign and Communist government would invade our country and an evil soldier would put a gun to my head and ask, “Do you believe in God?” At which point I was supposed to say, with courage, “Yes I do.” A single shot would be fired, and I would get my free ticket to heaven.

For a brief time, I was afraid of hippies, who I imagined belonged to an evil cult, would find their way to my hillbilly town, kidnap me, and then inject me with LSD. I would be found dead in an abandoned hippie van somewhere in California.

These and other myriad imagined maladies do not indicate a lack of real, unimagined ailments in my real life. My colic which had been cured by cow’s milk was only the beginning of a series of health challenges. It started with chronic ear infections. I can still remember the excruciating and nonstop pain I endured for what seemed like my entire childhood. I can still feel my head resting on my mom’s lap as she dripped ice cold drops from a medicine bottle into my ears. The cool liquid drops provided temporary relief, but I remember constantly scratching and digging at my ears in an effort to comfort myself. I recall the resultant bloody scabs and my mom’s stern warnings: “You HAVE TO STOP digging at your ears or it’s going to get WORSE!” And then one night I believe I was the beneficiary of a miracle. A man, who did not reveal is face, came to my bedside and put his fingers in my ears and removed the scabs. And then he left. When I woke up the next day I excitedly tried to describe to mom and dad how a strange man had visited me in the night, removed my scabs and healed my ear infection. While I am sure I had more ear infections after the miraculous visitation, I can honestly say I don’t remember my ears being an issue after what happened that night.

At about this same time in my life, I was playing with some of my mom’s jewelry, which I had spread over her bed. While chewing on the top portion of a hat pin, I somehow managed to swallow it whole. Mom rushed me to the doctor’s office where we were assured “everything would come out in the end.” Two days later I pooped out the hat pin, but it would not have taken much for there to have been a much different outcome.

At the age of eight I was playing “cops and robbers” with my brother and some friends. Because my wrists were the size of candlesticks, they secured both of my hands in one handcuff, attached the other to my belt loop and ran away as fast as they could. The binding limited my movement to an awkward run, and in my effort to catch them, I fell to the ground and broke my collarbone. Only it didn’t feel like a collarbone: it felt like I had broken my neck. I ran home screaming like a madman, “Oh my God, I broke my neck!” (You’ve probably already concluded I can be a little dramatic at times.) In my surgery, doctors placed a pin to join the broken bones but less than two months later while wrestling around with my brother I snapped the pin loose. The floating pin manifested itself as a lump near the top of my shoulder and when I was taken to the family doctor, instead of ordering an X-ray, he sent me home saying I had a post operation cyst which would go away in time. I spent a painful summer in a sling and on the day the doctor was to remove the “cyst” which had not gone away, he decided to do an X-ray which revealed the pin, which by now was almost pushing through my skin.

Some things just go together: chocolate and peanut butter, popcorn and movies, and, most relevantly to my childhood, bike wrecks and boys. For whatever reasons (maybe I was afraid I would die) I was a late bloomer in learning to ride a bike. Not being able to ride placed great limitations on adventures my brother and others my age could have during the summer months, so they simply went on without me. I was becoming a spectator to other people’s fun.

Behind our house in a field where horses and cows ate grass was a huge and steep hill which was a blast to ride bikes down, or so it appeared. My brother and visiting boys would start at the top and, letting gravity do the work, pick up remarkable speed as they rode the bike to the foot of the hill. My brother even put ramps at the bottom of the hill which allowed cool stunts and serious “airtime.”

I remember the fateful day my cousins were over to ride bikes down our hill. As I was watching them speed down the hill, enjoying a life I was sure to never experience, I got called out. “Hey, don’t you know how to ride a bike yet?” This was the gravest insult a twelve-year-old boy can get, no matter how true its implication.

Before I could get out a shameful response, my brother rescued me. “He can ride with someone on the back!” This was not a true statement, but with the only ounce of pride I could muster I walked up the hill as if I were a decorated army general preparing to plant a victory flag on top of a conquered battle hill. My fear of being shamed had caused my pride to override common sense, and...