From time-to-time I will publish photo essays, or my poetry, and of my life on this curios planet, Earth. Time on Terra is precious and it is a mark of dignity to record it as much as possible for others to read, or in this case see and read.
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Banner photo: This is a photo of one of my paintings, it if of the church of Notre Dame on the Loing, and the lower photo is of my home church; The First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, in Huntsville, Missouri.
I was never so happy to be home, Lordy! What a relief to be out of the hospital, but I still needed a cane, and walking outdoors in my playground would have to wait. First, I had to recover. For a young man of eighteen, I had never had to go to the hospital, because I was a specimen of health. At most, I would miss two days a year because of illness at school, and one of them was probably a "hooky" day. However, I was a mess physically. I had had a six inch hairline fracture to my skull running from my jaw to the crown on the left side of skull bone, another two inch hairline fracture running from the base of the brain stem and up the occipital bone in the back of my head, and I also had a compound fracture to my left clavicle, snapping it in two pieces. That was the pain I felt on regaining consciousness. My head didn't hurt at all; no headaches, just the pain in my shoulder. I asked the nurse about it when I regained full consciousness, and she said, "That's good, now you know you're alive." Later I asked how they could have missed that broken bone and she replied, "We were too busy keeping you alive," and that they were.
When my mother heard of the accident my grandfather rushed her and my Dad to the hospital, in my brother's hometown, and by the time she arrived I wasn't there. I was rushed to a hospital in Columbia, Missouri that could handle my level of trauma. My mother asked the emergency room doctor if I would live; he was truthful. "Your son has a 50/50 chance to survive the ambulance ride, and if he survives, he will most likely live. My mother was devastated. My brother Walt rode with me in the back of the ambulance having some training in the military as a medic. Along the way I was choking on my own blood; he opened my mouth to clear my breathing passage, and I reflexively chomped down on his finger, and he thought it would sever it. It was so bad they had to stop the ambulance to free his hand. That was my brother for you, sacrificing a part of himself to save me; both of my brothers are that way, they give of themselves until it hurts, but I was home, and the only pain was from my collar bone, and I'd say that was a miracle.
During the end of the stay they put me under, to run a dye through my brain to look for blood clots, they didn't find any, but they did find an anomaly, called an aterio-venous-malformation, of the left carotid artery (AVM), it is a birth defect. In the center of my brain is a walnut sized mess of venous connections. In this area, the brain normally has a simple intersection where the left and right sides of the carotid system connect to fill the brain with blood; mine is a bundled up mess of tiny arteries that flow through a system of tangled yarn. You will watch operations performed on some hospital TV show where it is successful, and sometimes it is not, but they don't operate until you have a brain bleed. I have a thirty percent chance of dying from one if it happens. They say the longer I live, the more stable it is, but if a clot gets there it will never make it through to the other side, because it is so narrow, and that will be all she wrote, BOOM
What now? I was home and couldn't go anywhere, and for six months I laid flat in bed only getting up to eat, and do my exercises. We couldn't afford to take me to physical therapy, so Mom became my therapist. I started out with a one pound weight, and I couldn't even lift it; it was going be a long time before I fully recovered, and I settle in for the long haul, but in three years, at college, I could easily curl 60 lbs., with my right arm.
Back to 1971, while I was recuperating I read the Bible from cover to cover, and I pondered my life. After the accident, I had an extreme thirst for knowledge, and it has not been satiated to this day. I want to know...I want to understand, and I want to appreciate being alive! Somewhere in this rehab my near death experience (NDE) memory came back. I told Mom, and we scoured through the records of the stay to find the event where I came close to death, and we found it, from the moment they flooded my body with Decadron to slow the swelling. I never told a soul about it. It was '71 and people just didn't talk about crossing over; they would just figure you were nuts. Just the experience of the accident was so traumatic I couldn't talk about it without falling apart. I pondered what to do with my life. Before the accident, I never wanted to go to college; now I hunger for it. This is typical for NDE survivors. It is a 180 degree turn in personality. I was not the person I was. You can see it in the two photos in the previous part, "Out of Nothingness," where the demeanor in my face is one seriousness where before I was jovial. My father was confused, "He's changed, he wasn't religious before this accident, now he's a nut case."
"Oh, Walter, don't talk to him like that."
"It's true. You never heard him mention religion once. Now, that's all he talks about." My brain and my emotions were a mess, to be honest. I wasn't ready to travel 2,000 miles west to go to college, but I did, and I'm glad I did. I had to get away from that man, and his negativity, to find the real me, whatever that was.
A crossing over is in startles you by it's vivid detail, so there is no doubt about what you are seeing, if there are questions, there is no doubt you've crossed over. If you wonder, did I cross over, if the vision becomes less vivid, then it didn't happen to you. I suddenly awoke from my coma, was pulled out of my body, and raised out of my hospital bed. A bright light was over me, and a man, much like the common image we're taught is Jesus, stood, but he never said a word. I assume my mind selected this image for a reference, but there he was, as clear as day. It was extremely vivid, everything was crystal clear, and is forever seared in my brain. He then opened a portal that opened to another world, and I could see into it. The grass was vivid greens, they're gates, a lake, and many people were gathered to play, enjoying each other's company, and it was a peek into what was to come after death. I looked up to him and said, "I want to die. I want to crossover, now that I know what awaits me. Why should I go back to that painful world of love, hate, and hurt, when I know this awaits me, and that there is a hereafter?"
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Walt holding my hand while in hospice care about four months before he died, He passed June 21, 2020 from Alzhemier's, and because of COVID-19 that would be the last time I would see him. He gripped my hand tightly the whole two hours I was there, but he was unable to communicate with me other than through touch. Walter W. Smith, Jr., b. 1943 d. 2020.
