Miracle Story #16 (Part 3 of 5)

“I was staying with my sister Gabby here in Hutchinson. I was still drinking, but trying to hide it from her. I didn’t see my life as a wreck yet.

I had my own business since I had gotten out of prison in 2005. I met up with a friend of mine from high school, Kenny Reno, and he had found God in his life. He had started an online business and he showed me how to do it, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I still do. That’s my main source of income, working online selling informational products and building websites and selling them, stuff like that.

So I felt like because I still had money coming in, that I was good. Even though I was homeless and living with my sister and I had a severe addiction and I’d been in prison, I just didn’t clearly see any of that stuff, you know?

I couldn’t understand why my family was always on my ass because I was only hurting me…right? I was the one doing it.

I didn’t understand how it was affecting them.

I met this girl, Jessica, online. She happened to be friends with my sister, but I met her on Facebook. We went out on a date on December 30th, 2011. We went to Wichita and it was great.

We drank, and I was a black-out drinker a lot of the time, but I actually remember this whole night. We had a good time. We went to a few clubs. We went walking in downtown Wichita. It was great. I slept on her couch that night, and she slept in her bed.

The next day was New Year’s Eve and so I called my sister Gabby and asked her if she wanted to deejay because this girl lived in Hutch and she wanted to have a party. And so we did. Just some close friends of hers that I didn’t really know, and some we mutually knew, and some of my friends.

We just had a little soiree, drinking a lot. We had a good time and I passed out on the couch, she passed out in the bed.

I woke up on New Year’s Day 2012 to a knock at the front door. It was an old-school friend of mine, Jamie Craig, and he had known Jessica too. He had two big half gallons of vodka and one of bourbon.

And he was like, “You ready to get this party started?”

“Yeah.”

So we started drinking at her house. A few other people showed up. And I remember this one guy who showed up…

I had been drinking bourbon and coke and he told me that he had access to a new kind of drug. He told me it was called Curious George or something. And he showed it to me and it looked like a magnet of the actual Curious George figure. You know, like a magnet you’d put on your fridge.

I told him I was good.

I was still buzzed when I woke up at nine o’clock that morning when I opened the door, and I had continued drinking. I knew that I shouldn’t do anything else. Plus, I didn’t know what it was and he was kind of a shady dude.

And so I didn’t mess with it.

And somewhere in the progression of that day, we were drinking at Jessica’s house but we ended up at my friend Jamie’s house.

The last thing I remember was dancing.

And the next thing I remember…I was waking up in a hospital bed.

I was told later that while I was dancing, standing up, I just fell over and passed out.

But that’s not how people pass out. You know what I mean?

They sit down or they lay down, and then they pass out. You don’t stop what you’re doing in the middle of it and just fall over passed out.

So they kept dancing.

And then finally, Jessica decided to cuddle up next to me on the floor. And that’s when she realized that I was ice cold.

They turned the lights on and realized that I was purple.

I was gone at that point.

They were worried about the drugs they might have had in the house and so they didn’t call the cops and they didn’t call an ambulance. They decided to get me in the car and take me to the hospital.

And they were just about as messed up as I was, so nobody even tried to perform CPR on me.

What happened in that process though was that at some point in the day, from the time we left and got over to Jamie’s house, the guy that showed me that drug had put it in my drink without my knowledge. Because apparently he was interested in Jessica.

That drug, in combination with all the alcohol I had in my system…is what killed me.

Come to find out later on, that little monkey was a new drug that had hit the street. It was a combination of methamphetamines, heroin, PCP, cocaine, dilaudid….all these drugs that they crush up and mix and make a palette out of. And then they cut these cutouts and printouts, which is extremely scary and dangerous because they look like little magnets.

And what do little kids do with those magnets? They put them in their mouths, you know what I mean?

I don’t think he had intention to kill me by any means, but I think he was trying to get me out of the way so he could holler at Jessica.

Again, God was at work.

Because Jessica’s house was in a place called Caryville, which is a suburb of Hutchinson, and is a lot further from the hospital than Jamie’s house. Jamie’s house is like four blocks from the hospital.

So they drove me to the hospital, which was only about five minutes from there. But the real problem was that nobody had ever dealt with a limp, dead body before and they were having difficulty picking me up and getting me into the vehicle. They said that’s where the most time was lost.

So I ended up dead. But they got me to the hospital.

And I don’t know how long it was from the time they realized that I wasn’t breathing anymore to the time that the doctors started working on me, but if I were to take a guess from what I’ve been told, it was about thirty minutes.

The doctors revived me. But I was in a coma.

And Jessica…(pauses) I still have a little bit of resentment toward her because of her actions that night. She told the doctors that I didn’t have any family here, and that I was from out of town…because she was scared to death of consequences if I died.

And like I told you earlier, she was friends with my sister Gabby. They had gone to high school together. She finally got a conscience and ended up messaging Gabby over Facebook saying, ‘Hey, this is what happened….and your brother is at the hospital.’

So when my sister and my mom made it up to the hospital, I was in the coma. I was hooked up to the tubes.

The doctors told them that I had a 50/50 chance of coming out of the coma. And an eighty to ninety percent chance of having severe brain damage if I did come out of it because of how long my brain was without oxygen.

So they were freaking out.

My mom never forced any type of spiritual belief or religion on us but she did instill a belief in God into us early on. We read the kid’s Bible a few times but we also learned and followed Native American stuff. And collectively, eventually we came to our own conclusions, which is cool in a sense.

But again, everything has to happen the way it’s supposed to happen, for a reason.

My mom is really into natural healing and crystals and herbs and different things like that. My sister had a crystal with her and she laid it on my chest, and she and my mom kept their hands on my chest and kept praying over me until I regained consciousness. My sister believes in God and my mom was probably praying to the Great Spirit. She has, like I said, spent a lot of time with the Native American elders, especially after my dad passed on.

They were praying nonetheless.

I was in a coma for four days before I came to.

The lobby was full of people, in and out. And it got to the point where they had to put a note on the door that said ‘Family Only’ because it was difficult for the doctors to get to me in the room.

So I had regained some consciousness and I started freaking out about the tubes in my throat, I guess. I don’t remember that part. But what I do remember is that I had a super dry mouth. And the doctor saying kind of harshly, “What did you put in your system?”

And I remember wondering what he was talking about. When I realized where I was, I thought I was there on an alcohol overdose or something. I remember the doctor getting frustrated with me and walking off.

So I started trying to recount things.

I finally remembered that little monkey and so I said something about it. And a close friend of the family was there, Shannon, and she heard me talk about it. So she went home and did some research. She found out what all was in the drug, and that it was a new one, and when she came back she asked the doctor what he had found in my system…and they all matched.

So that’s how we connected the dots there.

But before all that, I had had this vision. Well two of them, actually.

The first one…

I had seen myself in a car, driving. I was going down Yoder Rd. toward Wichita. I turned left onto Highway 96 and instead of going up a ramp, it was just a straight turn in my vision. And I remember it was night time and there was another car that was going to turn at the same time as I was, but I ended up running into them.

And as I was running into them, my vision went across the top of the car and into the back seat of the car. And there was a little girl. And I remember her to a ‘T.’ She couldn’t have been more than six or seven. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, white dress, black buckled shoes with a brass buckle on them, white leggings. And the car crushed her and her mom.

This was the vision that I had.

So when I came to, that’s what I thought I was in the hospital for at first. I thought I had driven a car and crashed and killed these people.

That’s what I believed.

I must have been coming in and out of consciousness because when I really came to, when I was actually starting to become aware of my surroundings, I think I was having hallucinations too.

I remember when I looked up from the hospital bed, it looked like I was in an old run-down building with holes in the ceiling and the walls had plastic that was blowing in the wind. I could see the moon, things were rusted. And there were machines connected to me pumping stuff into me and I could see tubes sticking out of me, and I freaked out. I thought I was in a chop shop for organs. As crazy as that sounds. (laughs)

So I pulled the tube out of my throat. I pulled the I.V.’s out. Blood was going everywhere. And as painful as it was, I didn’t scream because I was scared for my life. I thought someone was trying to kill me.

I started slipping around on the floor in my own blood and the nurses came in. One of them slipped on the blood and they got me and put me down. They ended up sedating me with Seroquel and put me back under.

And then I came to again the next day, and I could see.

The problem was that when I came to, it was night time and there were no lights on in there, except for the machines. My mind was making all of that other stuff up and it scared the crap out of me.

And then they started to do rehabilitation with me. They helped me learn how to walk again.

Then they moved me to the third floor when they felt like I checked out enough. The third floor is the psych ward at Hutchinson Hospital. They still thought that I had overdosed myself, so they were still trying to keep watch over me and stuff.

I get it.

They had to protect me and themselves. The doctor still wasn’t believing my story, even though my friend had made it all match up and stuff.

I had spent two days or so in the ICU after I had woken up, and I was there on the third floor for another three or four days.

So it was about eight or nine days altogether with this experience.”

Part 3 of 5. To be continued…January 28th.

© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My name is Matt, and I live in Hutchinson, Kansas.

In the midst of addiction, death and recovery, I AM Miracle Story #16.