*Warning: This is RJ Wiechecki’s honest discussion of his life leading up to and recovering from brain surgery. At times, strong and emotional language is used, including discussion of suicide.
I had lunch on December 29th, 2021 with two friends from church, Steve and Sue, to catch up and celebrate my resumed life driving again. The married couple asked me where I would like to travel across the world with my tiny home now so close to completion. I told them I had dreams of going down to Tennessee up in Appalachia to study Hillbilly culture for a while. There’s little difference between the recitation of Shakespeare and the comprehension of the local dialect. The isolated community helped preserve the language over the past four hundred years. I wanted to learn that. The second place I wanted to go is Puerto Rico to study Spanish. I have friends, I told them, who live in mountains where I could park for the winter months. Then I said I’d take my truck and trailer on the open road across the continental United States. My grandfather, dad and I took a similar road trip between the summer of my freshman and sophomore year of college. Lo and behold! That would be my last trip with my grandfather. He died in hospice at our house six months later from a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit pressing up against either side of his lobes. Emotionally he was not doing so well the last three years of his life. My Pop-Pop suffered the loss of his daughter, my paternal aunt, from a brain aneurysm when she was twenty-three. He didn’t talk to my grandmother for the last three years of their marriage. By day, he was a workaholic at his local scrap yard seven days a week, and for those last few years at night he was an alcoholic: often he walked into the house drunk from the bar where he worked and drank Southern Comfort until he snored himself to sleep. He swore off alcohol over my aunt’s grave. He started to drink again once the tumor reached a certain size, my guess, smaller than an orange but bigger than a golf ball. Yet I’m speculating well after the fact.
My other aunt too had a brain tumor, two in fact, ten years removed from one another on the mom’s side of the family. I watched her come home after her first surgery. I remember her swollen eyes. The surgeons had to pull back the layers of skin off of her face to penetrate the tumor and remove it. People at the hospital confused her as a battered domestic abuse victim. Those bruises around her eyes and blood clot knotted in her hair haunted me so much that about three and a half years ago, I began working on a novel concerning a missing-pastor-in-action. He too had a brain tumor. I was writing it as a tragedy. Spoiler Alert: he remains in coma after surgery and he dies in act III.
June 19th, 2021. I was at home. I was working at the kitchen counter sitting up on a high stool. I had been working on a Google Analytics course for a mobile small business editing others’ work in their preparations for their own publication. I had been getting some headaches a few months prior. I blamed it on the coffee I quit back in January of that year. I started to feel my body getting weaker. I could barely do twenty push ups without my one arm giving way at times. I went to a chiropractor and practiced meditation. I even hired a yoga instructor! I looked for any alternative treatment available. If anyone could reign this minor problem into control, it would be me, I thought. Just a kink in my alignment I rationalized. Also, just a month before, I had stepped out of my prior job working machinery to take on my editing business full time. I was making some dumb and obvious mistakes on the machines I know I shouldn’t have made with the skill sets I had. I interpreted it as my subconscious mind trying to sabotage myself. It was time to branch out. Something was trying to tell me to make a career switch. So I did. I stepped out of that role and took on more entrepreneurial pursuits. Also, close to three years ago, I moved in with my parents to build a tiny home. At the time of June 19th, the structure was 80% complete. My life was a solid 80% complete. A few months more to go, and I would have a mobile business and living debt free in a tiny home. Life went according to my plan as I saw fit. I was in control. On that same day, a close friend of mine, Jonathan and I were heading out to the beach, but we pushed forward our plans, not that Saturday but the following Saturday. I offered to drive. Thank God I wasn’t driving on the road that day with him.
It was afternoon then. In the midst of taking my notes in my journal indexed as book 11 and page 67, I found myself trying to talk to myself. It was at that moment I was unable to speak. All I could say was ba- ba- ba- ba- b- b-. The harder I gripped for control, the worse this rocking back and forth. There was loud ringing in my ears. The noise screamed in my eardrums. It had a pulse similar to a seizure I wrote in a fictional scene a year or so prior. I rocked back and forth. Why can’t I control this!!!!! The journal and the table blurred out of focus. Bam!
I had just finished foaming from the mouth, and I woke up in a pile of my own blood. The high stool chair crashed one into another. Next thing I knew I had my father sitting next to me. The paramedics came knocking at our door. One of them, a man, asked if my father was drunk. No. His tendency is to faint at the sight of blood. Blamed it on my mother giving birth to me. I was surprised he too wasn’t passed out right next to me. I saw my own blood in a towel pressed up against my skull. Did I fall on my head? Must have. It wasn’t the first time. At six years old, I got nine stitches across the bottom of my chin from a bowling ball. No different here I thought. It would be some Urgent-Care-and-stitch-me-up matter. I argued with the paramedic team after the man in particular told me they needed me to go by ambulance to the hospital. I told them, “No, it was just a bad fall. Really! That’s all. Please don’t take me to a doctor to get checked out.”
The first words that ever came out of my mouth, I was four-and-a-half years old. My aunt JoAnn, the one who died from the brain aneurysm, told my mom that RJ will talk when he is ready. She died two weeks after my third birthday. The video camera had me hiding from Barney the big friendly dinosaur. I had three fears at that age: dinosaurs, people wearing matching outfits to me and medical authority. A year and a half later, my mother had me sitting that day around the dining room table. At that point she grew either ever more impatient or ever more persistent with me not talking. She tried a different tactic. She couldn’t bribe me with either macaroni and cheese or ice cream, which my sister very much enjoyed. No, she would use negative reinforcement instead: my mother warned me, “If you don’t start talking now, then you leave with no other choice but to send you to the doctor.”
I blurted out, “No! Not the doctor.”
“Ha! You can talk!” My mother shouted.
And so I could talk; however, much of my early childhood was spent talking to myself around the perimeters of the school yard during recess. I took speech therapy class until I had run my course in the fifth grade. I couldn’t organize and communicate my thoughts to other people. I started one sentence. I started another. And I finished another. I was an organizational mess, but my thoughts were all there conceptualized and stored up somewhere in my head. The ideas were there. The expression was not. I also had grown a great fear for the red line of the page when my mother corrected my writing. She had me read out loud word-for-word every error, spelling mistake as it was written on paper (not how it was conceptualized in my head). I cried a lot during our fourth grade night sessions together, but I did do a lot better in my language arts class.
My first dream when I was either six or seven was to become an artist. Later this dream was transformed into an aspiration to write with the written word as my art, enough so, years later, I would take my editing business in preparation to get on the road with a full on mobile remote editing business and meanwhile working on my own craft in private.
Back to June 19th, I laid waiting in a hospital bed in an ER room. I informed my friend, Jonathan, I might be missing church service the following morning. I also told a SCORE mentor that I would be taking a few days off for some minor personal health concerns. No biggie. First, I was rolled off for a cat scan, and then a few hours later, I was taken for an MRI scan.
The medical doctor came back with a diagnosis. I had a brain tumor on my right frontal lobe the size of a golf ball. It dealt mainly with more creative and abstract higher levels of thinking. The neurosurgeon advised me to go ahead and remove the tumor promising that the symptoms were mild, suffering at most some short term memory loss. I’d be out of the hospital two, maybe three, days tops after the operation. My short term memory would be as sharp if not better a year from now. The man was rather blasé about the procedure and told me that there’s nothing to worry about. He said, “It’s nothing worse than getting a gallbladder removed.” I had a 90% chance of recovery from the operation, and I would be out of the hospital within the next two or three days. That neurosurgeon though he had a cold bedside manner still oversold the sizzle of my expectation for the procedure.
I prayed with Will Stern, my pastor at Hope Church, along with my mother and father. I made fun of his big protruding ears jutting out from either side of his face like an elephant. He read from the book of Isaiah 40:28-31.
28 Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
29 He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
After the pastor did his prayer thing and my parents left the room, I thought I was ready to meet my Maker. Death is only a tragedy for the living I thought. And this was simply another leap of faith. I jumped.
I cracked a couple jokes to the anesthesiologist about going under to Hades, and if there would be anyone in hell she would like to say hi to. She laughed and asked me to count back from 100. I started. 100… 99… 98… 97… I lost count under the glimpse of bright lights.
It was a six-and-a-half-hour procedure. The whole medical staff came out to greet my parents. My mother assumed the worst and presumed that meant I was pronounced dead. The team looked a bit traumatized themselves. They told my parents I had two more seizures during surgery while they were separating the tissue. I just so happened to be an ill-fated patient during a board game of Operation who got zapped in the noggin one too many times.
Like most of my endeavors, I jumped into projects with a lot of blind faith. It was the whole falling to the scene of the crash I didn’t like. What surprised me more was not that I would meet my Heavenly Father, but that I woke up with a breathing tube lodged down my throat. I kept having to remind myself to breathe. Breathe! Damn it, breathe! In the most mechanical way, air was pumped in and out of my lungs. There is a Greek word for breath, wind or spirit πνεύματος (pneumatos). I thought about this word as I choked on my own vomit. My throat was sore and raspy. I struggled not only with the Spirit but battled the pneumatic machine. I could hear my mother’s voice asking me if she could hear me. I open my own swollen eyes. I wasn’t dead. It wasn’t Heaven, I thought. This surely must be Hell.
And Hell it was. Half of my body was paralyzed on my left side including my leg, arm, and hand. My face also drooped over to the left. I was left unconscious in a medically-induced coma for three days. And I had great indignation and unholy rage in the Neuro ICU room. I counted life not by days or hours but seconds of pain. I slurred out “more drugs” unsure whether I meant “no more drugs” or “more drugs.” Before this, I didn’t even take an Advil for a headache. Choosing to not take a pill was something in my control. Even now while writing this, I am unsure how much medication they had me on. Whatever the medication they gave me wasn't enough. The worst drugs I got while at Crozer Medical Hospital were steroids. Roid rage was and is a real condition. Inflation swelling did go down, but the anger I had was borderline demonic. Those inner demons take a hold on the drug-induced body. I had hit a certain pain threshold and tried to kill myself with my good arm by beating as hard as I could against my chest. My mother stopped me. I signaled my mother the middle finger (my good hand of course) and repeated the mantra out loud, “I want to die. Kill me. Give me two bullets in the head. C’mon shoot me.” I imagined smoke coming off of my middle finger gun as I threatened to pull the trigger. Boom! Later my mother reported to me that she had to pull off the side of the road and broke into tears after what I said to her over and over again. I repeated the phrase for hours.
During one of my death chants that evening, my father gave me a choice: get better or get worse. It was my choice and no one else’s. That was just a conversation between me and God. I hadn’t made up my mind until the midnight hour had come to pass. It had been several days since my last bowel movement. Two nurses, one male and another female, went about their casual conversation as they stripped me down naked to perform an enema. I felt raw and exposed to a most Holy God where my right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. I was a babe, a coward, a sinner, a mixture of sorrow and circumstance, filled with a sense of neurological delusion and revelation. There I lay before God as an embarrassed archetypal Adam. Mind you, I also had spent a lot of time watching Naked and Afraid episodes on the rather limited hospital cable television. I laughed as fluid shot up into my rectum and up into my colon. I had an uncontrollable smile on my face, nervous from indecision. I would later refer to this as my retarded smile. The self critic says it. When looking into the mirror the muscle around the left eye is weaker than those on the right. Others might have a hard time noticing the difference until such a feature is mentioned. I noticed things like that because as long as I could remember I have been on a search for control: control in my speech, control in my mannerism, control in my voice. I made a whole aesthetic theory around controlling each and every syllable of my writing. What I lacked most during my helpless state was any control. The thought: if I could describe it, I could control what otherwise is unexplainable. If I could articulate the finer points of theology, for instance, I could dismiss it and fog on how Proverbs is a bunch of generic garbage. (I still think so by the way—neither the opinion nor stance of Hope Church, although I do not question the infallibility of God’s Holy Word, however generic that truth may be.) Nonetheless, I was laying there open and splayed out. Half of me was unable to speak, unable to walk, and unable to move. The idea was there, but the expression was not. All of the adversity I had to overcome as a child flooded back into my present. That evening without the words to describe them, I wished to describe God again in the awe and mystery I once conceived in my mind as a child. I was reminded of the Gospel of John’s introduction: “The Word was God and God was the Word.” Something transcendent happened. Or I was so happy my bowels were relieved. Either way, I would get better. I chose to search not for words but the Word, in other words, a divine purpose.
I would remain at the Neuro ICU for the next seven days. Friends would call on me and hear my drugged up voice repeat the same three to four phrases. “We are all sinners in the eyes of an angry God” and “Pride before the Folly.” I repeated them because they were one of the few phrases I could remember. I wasn’t stupid or at least I pretend my best not to be. I was lucky to remember what college I spent four years attending, let alone being one up for any semblance of conversation concerning any of my classes, friends, and antidotes. Here I was in complete and utter pain, and it was some of the closest moments I had ever felt to a universal love and compassion for my fellow man. I saw others as lost and helpless like me, fallen from grace each in their own way. I loved them similar to how Christ loved me.
On my last day at Crozer Medical Hospital, I made it to the step down unit. My father sat next to me and handed me a milkshake. It was the first real food they offered me there besides the awful mashed boiled carrots they were starving me on. I dropped 18 lbs that week. All of the drugs in the world could not satiate the comforts of a slurry of ice cream mixed with chocolate syrup. That and I requested my mother make gluten-free fettuccine alfredo. My mother had gone on a hunting spree to numerous stores to find this otherwise obsolete pasta addition. I ate with my good arm.
Eating my meal with my good arm, I confessed to my dad. I told him I didn’t want to live like this anymore. I wanted to write again. I wanted to travel across the US with my home hitched behind. I wanted to even cut the grass in our backyard once more. Freedom. That’s the word I had a three minute delay to say out loud. I wanted to live. God, by the grace of the Great Physician, I wanted to live.
3 AM the following morning, I was shipped from one hospital to another. I would spend the next 21 days at Taylor Hospital for rehabilitation. Due to heavy Covid restrictions, their staff allowed one and only one visitor a day. No coming in the morning and then coming back to visit later in the day. The policy was a One in, one out, and your visitation was done. My parents divided up their days. Three days it was my mom. Three days it was my dad. And I made a special request to see my friend Jonathan on a Saturday. Though it pained my parents, they obliged. Previously, nurse staff banned Jonathan from seeing me despite the fact he had a Bible in his hand. Didn’t matter. Another guy with Dumbo looking ears and thinning hair said he was a Reverent too. They thought, But who’s this guy? So Jonathan was out.
That first Saturday, Jonathan also handed me a milkshake malt. I complained prior to the operation how block-headed it was that he had plans to go out to eat afterwards without any consideration for the guy getting brain surgery the next day. What’s wrong Goofball! I must have blocked that conversation out of my memory (although there was a text message history to prove me wrong otherwise!) He came into my rehab room clean cut and shaved. I had gotten used to his more disheveled hipster trendy look I made fun of him about often. I would tell other congregational members from my church and sometimes to his face, “He’s a schmuck, but he’s my schmuck.” Well my schmuck came here to visit me. I was so happy. He came! It was in that conversation he told me loved me and I told him he was my best friend. (Word to the wise—Solomon might have the courage to even say “Proverb”: don’t wait until someone is in the emergency room to let that inner love shine through or else it might be too late.) Then I asked him to open up to either first or second Philippians and find something about love. (Please forgive my following vulgarities. Note: I was still heaped on a large dosage of drugs far from any sense of a sober mind, let alone a mind recovering from brain surgery. Jonathan flipped through page by page of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and by word association I flipped him the bird until he noticed me making the gesture. Words much like signs or hand signals sometimes have a stigmatization attached to them. As a young child, my mother corrected my pointing at objects with such an innocent finger. Not that I suggest anyone go about making such a derogatory gesture, but the thought behind it counts for something. Instead of representing death, the gesture symbolized life. My outward finger represented a dove of peace and pointed toward my desire to live, to create rather than destroy. I may be projecting here, but he got what I meant to say, and he laughed.
I am reminded of Matthew 18:5 “‘Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” However at the time, my child-like mind thought it was just a crude funny joke. The thought didn’t dig much deeper than that. In retrospect, I found theology comes after the awe and wonder of the divine. Even the apostle Paul described his return from the third heaven a little dumbfounded as we all are in the hands of the Great Physician.
Although I haven’t yet answered (please wait for part two of this series), the best I can offer you is a prayer of preparation for when an emergency strikes:
May our Heavenly Father bless us even when there are things inside our control. Or even more so, may he bless us with what is far beyond our control or even our grasp of understanding. For it is not in man who is in control, but it is in God’s final judgment we stand before Him in our sin and nakedness. He is in control, not us. I need more faith, not so much in jumping, than in the grace of falling into the hands of an Almighty God.
For this I pray. Amen.