I don't know if you can hear me, but I'm trying to reach you in the only way that I can. You see, I'm on the other side. I'm dead, but somehow still conscious and able to direct my thoughts in your direction. If you're reading this, then I have succeeded. Please heed my words. If you do and post it on all your blogs, tweet it, and make viral emails to all your friends, and, finally, create petitions for all the medical practitioners and politicians, they will finally get it right, and misery like mine and countless others, will be ended.

 

Please take the time to read my story. It won't be long.… But it is longer than it should have been. Hence Is life… and death, the longest of all.

 

I'm a famous football player. Well… I wasn't yesterday, I was just one of those linemen who you see every Sunday on a mediocre team playing in his heart out so that someday that magical Super Bowl ring could eventually be on my finger. But that didn't happen and I was barely making enough to make it through the off-season. What with all the expenses incurred when everyone of your family and friends thinks because you are an NFL player that you're a sure bet to fund some harebrained scheme that loses money or have to put on the dog to show that you are one of the elite in the sports world. Not to mention my college loans, so I won't.

 

Yesterday… Well I'm not sure, because days don't matter anymore when it's one endless agony. I had the chance of a lifetime that comes to lineman, and that was, to pick up a fumble and run it to the end zone so I could prance around like the stars do. And maybe, get my name in the papers and on TV where they talk about such stuff to make sure that I make the team in the next season, and maybe even a raise. Well, slammed boy dropped that ball and I saw it right in front of me. It took a bounce and landed right in my arms. I was headed that way already and the end zone was only 40 yards or so, so I ran for daylight until it closed in and everything became dark. I guess I was hit with a crack back block from the side from an offensive tackle that snapped my neck and, when my head hit the frozen ground, my brain made a sudden stop inside my helmet, making sure that it was a clean knockout. One thing about being unconscious, you don't feel pain… At least not yet.

 

Well, they thought I was so serious, they had LifeFlight land right on the field. Before that, the game doc and the trainers were working on me with CPR and all that stuff, keeping me alive until the helicopter took me away. With all its high tech stuff, the chopper kept my blood pressure up and all my vitals still working through modern medical science. Of course I didn't know any of this, but the news people kept playing the videos over and over, and when it got on YouTube it went viral, so I became famous… like, overnight. Never thought it would be that way. Would have much rather preferred that unnatural touchdown. But we don't get to choose.

 

So here I am in intensive care… the best care money can buy 24/7. I really don't know how long because it really seemed like it totally happened yesterday, but I came to. I came to, but no one knew. Oh, I went through that tunnel with that bright light, but eventually that light dimmed and I was left in solitary confinement, kind of like being in the hole, from what I heard from guys out of prison. Almost a claustrophobic confinement, all-black, but with an intense feeling of everything happening to your body that you can no longer see, only feel. And, oh what a feeling it is… the pain of countless hours of muscles not moving, but wanting to, the pain of an itch that grows and grows and cannot be reached or scratched, a hunger deep within that cannot be fed and the raw rubbing of tubes down your nostrils and throat choking you and choking off all means of possible communication as your eyes burn and you can't rub them and the hours drag by like they were years because there is no clock in this purgatory, this place between death and life that they have put me. Why don't they know that I want to be released? Haven't they read my directive? Who do they think they are! Torturous bastards!

 

Are they following the Hippocratic oath? Or are they hypocrites? I think they are keeping me alive so they can rack up a huge hospital bill for the insurance company to pay. After all, they have to keep this, state-of-the-art, place going and all of its high-priced help. Got a keep it at 100% occupancy while I suffer the unmentionable and unconscionable while they are raking in the daily stipend. Who told my widow that they were trying to save me? Who gave her hope? Who ignored my directive, clearly on my driver's license, "not to resuscitate and to donate my organs (at least those that were still good) to some worthy recipients." I know, my wallet is back in my locked locker at the stadium. They forgot it in all their effort to save me. I'm screaming for them to find it, so that I can go on to that place that I know that I will end up, without all this pain and misery that's going on. It will take a miracle for them to figure out, and the wife, bless her heart, doesn't have a clue about what I arranged in my directive. She probably signed those papers that they handed her without reading when she came to the hospital, grief stricken. Now, she's sitting there thinking that I will come out of it and be okay. She's in for a surprise, because I know I'm not.

 

How long has it been now? Days? Weeks? Months? I don't know. It just goes on continuously. In this place time doesn't matter. This must be what they call hell, because all the pain I took being a lineman in football is no comparison to this torture chamber… Will it ever end… Will it ever… Hey, I'm fading to black…

 

 

Copyright 2014 © Ronald W. Hull

 

11/21/14