I worked an entire half a day with a collapsed lung because I was too afraid to let anyone know I needed help. I didn’t want to be someone else’s problem. I didn’t want to let anyone down. I didn’t want to get yelled at, and I certainly didn’t want to get fired. I’d never taken a sick day, or vacation. No matter what I had done to my body the night before, how sick I was, or what kind of shape I was in when I woke up, I always made it in to work. My body could take an incredible amount of punishment. I knew this about myself, and nobody ever saw anything I didn’t want them to see.
This was 1995 or ’96, and I was now producing two radio shows and working at a video store in the evenings, living roach-free with my brother in a condo we were now renting in the financial district. My friend Alex, who I’d met in college and had moved to New York with, was having a rough time finding a radio job after graduation, so his father bought him a video store to run. His parents were loaded. Alex hired me right away, which meant I could quit telemarketing and instead spend my evenings watching movies and bullshitting with customers. Because of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, video store jobs were now the shit. Everybody wanted one.
My days always started at 5.30 a.m. I’d leave the condo and walk two blocks to pick up the daily newspapers for the show and coffee for everyone who started the same time I did. Even though I was the lowest-paid person on staff, I was the one who did the coffee run every day. And I’d still eat shit if I got an order wrong, even on the mornings when I paid. I’d work a full day, until about five, then hop a subway and a bus uptown to be at the video store for six. I’d work there until closing, which was usually around eleven, then head back downtown and drink hard until last call, which at this point was still 1 a.m. I’d find my way home, do my best to not throw up when I got in, pass out in my clothes, and wake up at 4:46 to start the entire cycle all over again. I’d pound back as much water as my body could handle and take whatever pills I thought would help—vitamin C, extra-strength Tylenol or Advil, and two or three Daytime Cold and Flu capsules, which always kept me from falling asleep at my desk. I’d spend the first hour in the office piecing together the night before. Every day.
I think, for the most part, we take breathing for granted. Like actually breathing. We just do it. It just happens. But if I think about breathing, it’s almost like I forget how. If I sit and try to concentrate on my breathing, my heart starts racing, my face gets flush, and I’ll have to throw my head back to force air down my throat just to catch a breath. Even today, after I got heavy into Transcendental Meditation, if I focus on my breathing, I immediately panic. It’s irrational, I know, but I can’t help it.
One unusually warm but rainy mid-September morning, it was still dark when I left the condo to go grab the papers. I was more than used to feeling like absolute death on this walk, but this day was different. Every step I took came with crushing pain. It felt like I’d been shot or harpooned. My chest was heavy, I was out of breath, and I started to black out.
There was a small park near the St. Lawrence Market that I’d sometimes cut through so I could sit on one of the benches and watch the sun come up before walking to the station. It was my favourite spot, but I didn’t make it to my bench that day—I couldn’t. So I sat on the curb of the road, my shoes in a puddle and my head between my knees, trying to force myself to get it together.
I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always did—lit a cigarette and tried to calm the fuck down. I was convinced this was just a side effect of one bad night. One bad night that followed a hundred other bad nights. I thought I’d finally done too much.
I thought I was dying.
I managed to pick myself up, grab the coffee and the papers, and make it to the office. I sat through two meetings, produced an entire show, and made it to lunch without anyone knowing what I was going through. I had an hour for lunch, which I rarely used, but I figured I could make it to the emergency room, see a doctor, get fixed up, and make it back to the station without anyone asking questions. That was the plan, anyway.
“Hi, how can we help?” the ER nurse asked me.
“I can’t breathe,” I replied.
Everything after that is a blur. I was rushed though processing, X-rayed, and wound up on my side on a bed in a hallway while a doctor tried to explain to me what a chest tube was, how it worked, and why I needed one—immediately. She sliced a little hole in between two of my ribs on my right side and pushed what seemed like two feet of clear hose into my body. Quickly feeding it, hand over hand, all the way in.
I remember the popping sound it made, followed by incredible relief when my lungs drained into a clear plastic container hooked to the end of the bed. The doctors told me later that all but 10 percent of my right lung had collapsed. A nurse put me in a wheelchair, took me over to a bank of phones, and asked if I wanted to call anyone to let them know that I needed surgery.
The first call I made was to work. The second was to my mom.
Piece of advice, here. If you’re ever in the hospital, not dead, and have to call your mother, the first words out of your mouth should always be “Mom, everything is okay. I’m going to be fine.” Then tell her what happened. Never start the story at the very beginning. Don’t make your mom wait.
I never did make it back to work that day. In fact, I never made it back to work that fall.
The doctors explained I had something called spontaneous pneumothorax and that my lungs were filled with these tiny little air blisters that all decided to burst at the exact same time. Two days later I went in for surgery to fix my right lung, and five hours after that, while still in recovery, my left lung collapsed. All the way.
My parents were with me, at my bedside, as much as they could be. My mom was great with everything, but this was really tough on my dad. Even being as out of my mind on morphine as I was, I could still tell he’d just stopped crying every single time he walked into my room. I felt guilty. Like I’d somehow let him down. I’d never made my dad cry before—I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad cry—but here we were.
When he was in the room with me, he was great. He told me jokes and sneaked in food I wasn’t allowed to have. He held my hand, slid his chair in, and rested his head on the side of the bed until he fell asleep watching TV with me. My mom was pretty much living with my brother at this point, sleeping in my bed, so she could visit me most days. I didn’t have a ton of friends, so besides my family, the only other visitors I had were when Alex showed up with two strippers from the Zanzibar we’d met the week before I went in. He thought this was hilarious and would cheer me up. He wasn’t wrong.
The doctors took me off morphine and started me on what became a long run of Percocet. In the ’90s nobody ever talked about opioid addiction. These were miracle pills. Nobody really thought about addiction at all. And if you did bring it up, because of course my mother did, what you were told was, “As long as you’re dealing with pain, there’s no chance of addiction, dependency, or side effects.” But as we all know now, and they knew then, this was total and complete bullshit.
I was drugged for months. My body was in horrid shape, and I wasn’t healing nearly as fast as the doctors had hoped. I lost thirty pounds and I didn’t even look like me anymore. For months I didn’t know what day it was.
My life was built around the small windows of time between pills. I didn’t know if it was morning or late afternoon, but I sure as hell knew when I was three minutes late for my next Perc. I also knew that I had fallen totally and completely in love with the night nurse. It was nothing she did—she wasn’t flirty or anything—she was just kind, great at her job, and had this way about her that made me think everything was going to be okay. She was beautiful, funny, and always called me by my first name when everyone else used “Mr. Weston.” She was also the only nurse who was never late with my pills. I remember being so high and telling my mom that I wanted to marry that nurse. I asked my mom—sorry, insisted—she go to the gift shop to get me flowers that I could give to the nurse. She did, and I gave them to her. I’m not sure what my nurse did with them, but she never made me feel like a loser for shooting my shot.
About a week before I was discharged, that same nurse came into my room. It was late, so she woke me up. She explained that there was a virus ripping through the hospital, and they needed to make sure I didn’t have it. “Okay,” I said. “Do whatever you have to do.” At this point I’d had so many needles, tubes, and hands stuffed in me, nothing mattered anymore.
“Can you roll over for me?” she asked while pulling my blankets down to my ankles. “Yeah, just roll over real quick for me.”
I rolled over onto my side and she opened up the back of my hospital gown. I’d never felt more exposed, or unattractive. Ever. I was in love with this woman, and up to this point I’d always tried to look my best with what I had going on—which wasn’t much. And here she was about to swab the inside of my ass. An ass that had been lying in a bed for two months. An ass that hadn’t seen the sun in even longer. The ass of her future husband.
The whole process took about three seconds, then she covered me up, rolled me back over, pulled up my blankets, and said, “All right, all set. I’ll have someone come up tomorrow and take a look at that hemorrhoid for you. It’s a big one.”
Fucking kill me.
The only word to describe what it’s like having a chest tube removed, two chest tubes actually, is “violent.” It’s a brutal process that can’t be done gently. A nurse stands beside your bed with all their weight on their back foot like they’re about to throw a punch, then they put one hand on your ribs to hold you still and with the other hand they rip. They yank that thing out of you like they’re starting a chainsaw. You can feel every inch of it leaving your body. It’s almost demonic. Like an exorcism.
It was snowing when I finally got home from the hospital. That’s how long I’d been there.
I was home. In my own bed. But at that point, I was still dealing with a slight infection, which quickly became a severe infection. My mom sat with me all night with a cold cloth on my forehead as I begged her not to take me back to the hospital. To get me through the worst of it, they sent me home with antibiotics and enough Percocet to start a business. I’d never seen a pill bottle that big before, and I still haven’t. It was about an inch shorter than a beer can, but just as wide. Hundreds of them. But now there was no nurse to make sure I took them on time, or with any sort of regularity. There were no rules.
I walked with a cane for a few weeks and started back at work mid-November. I’d also figured out how to get the most out of the pills I had left. Which was a shit ton. I knew the times of day I was at my best, and when I felt my worst. I managed the actual pain naturally, fought through it, and saved the pills for when I wasn’t in agony—almost like a reward for going through so much shit. I always felt as good as I was going to get in the morning, right after a shower, so that’s when I’d take two. By three in the afternoon, I’d be in actual hell, sweating and dizzy, and I’d ride it out with nothing. I had built a routine, a system, that kept me high for most of the day. Nothing mattered. I was in an impenetrable fog. Work stress became non-existent.
But I wasn’t addicted. That was impossible.
The pills ran out after about a month and a half, but I wasn’t pissed. They were a way to get me through the day. Nothing more than that, really. I looked at them like a gift, or a fun ride that was now over. I really didn’t think too much about it. But when the pills ran out, I got sick. Really fucking sick. I had dealt with so much that year, and it had been months since I actually felt normal, so being sick was something that I was used to. But this was a different kind of sick. And I was a different kind of person now. I took another two weeks off work and called my doctor to get more antibiotics because I was sure the infection was back.
None of that was true. I was kicking an opioid addiction I didn’t know I had. Alone in my room with Gravol and fucking Gatorade.
It was years before I understood what had actually happened.
Early that spring, I had an appointment with a specialist who wanted to test me for Marfan syndrome. A doctor had recommended this, months before, because I was a tall young male and “skeletal.” Apparently, I was the poster child for Marfan’s. I didn’t know much about Marfan’s, which was fine, because I didn’t have Marfan’s, but after three appointments with three different doctors, I was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome.
The diagnosis explained everything, especially all those years my brother called me Twitchy. But the thing I never thought was a thing was now a thing, and I hated that. I took the diagnosis and walked out of that room and never talked about it again. I never even went back for my follow-up appointment, and I certainly wasn’t interested in being medicated.
When I was sick, alone, and high in that hospital bed, thinking I was going to die, I spent a lot of time in my own head. In the brief moments of clarity in between pills, I made the decision to chase opportunity. Money became secondary. From that point on, I promised myself I would become an opportunity hunter, and I was going to make damn sure I was ready when it came. I needed to educate myself, and I needed to learn from the best no matter what. No matter how I was treated, no matter how much shit I ate, no matter how much it killed me inside. Learn from the smartest people. That was my rule.