(preliminary)
Memoirs - Brushes With Death
(preliminary)
Well, I think some of these are a bit over dramatized, although, my most recent was very real and very close.
Near Deadly Hospital Experience
I forget in what year (recent and here in California probably around 2002), I went for a routine colonoscopy. The result was that a rather large polyp was taken out. It was not even pre-cancerous but it was the proper thing to do.
After the procedure and having starved myself for days (it took two sessions - one over a weekend - during which I was not allowed to eat) I was so starved, I brought a meal with me for the second session.
As soon as I got out of recovery and felt pretty normal I ate right in the waiting room. I stuffed myself with half a chicken. (I asked the technician in the recovery room if it was OK to eat after - he said yes). Then I went home.
In about an hour I started to feel very ill. I called 911 and was rushed back to the hospital where it was discovered that my colon had ruptured at the place where the polyp had been removed. I had obviously made a mistake in the amount I ate and the technician who advised me about eating was not careful to explain that I should take it easy).
In a short time I had a severe case of peritonitis. I was pretty lucky as they cleared the peritonitis but then I came down with what I think was drug resistant pneumonia. That is what very nearly killed me. Apparently I was put into an induced coma (for 4 months) while they labored to save me. I know my kidneys failed, my heart may have stopped or at least I had a small heart attack, maybe a small stroke, etc. etc. When they woke me up I had survived. At one point however my family was told I had less than a 20% chance to survive. So I beat those odds.
After another 2 or so months in intensive care I was sent to a nursing home where I finally fully recovered. My body was so devastated that I remained wheelchair bound for months after I was allowed to go home. I am greatly indebted to my nieces Julie and Naomi and I also think to my cousin Mitch Spaiser for helping manage my finances, and keeping my apartment for me.
Eventually I recovered as much a I could with the residual effects of some numbness in only the left side of my left hand an a serious loss of hearing in my left ear of what I estimate to be about 80 - 90%. I also only recovered about 50% of my kidney function.
I have to accept that as "pretty good" all things considered.
Car Crashes
(These were in New England before 1970)
I have also survived two auto crashes (actually three). I am a pretty good driver, but sometimes push my self too hard. I got out of all of them in pretty good shape, only in one case involving another car. That one was the fault of the other driver, although somewhat indirectly. He had crashed into a small truck up ahead and I was not able to see his car stalled ahead of me until it was too late to even hit the brakes. That was the end of delightful little Acura Integra - a wonderful little car. In that collision, because I did not have my shoulder belt fastened (but did have my lap belt on), my face hit the dashboard, but only the lower part of my mouth. The impact absorbing dashboard prevented my teeth from going through my lower lip but did require a bunch of stitches inside my mouth to fix it.
The previous time also had to do with driving tired (actually too early in the morning) and involved accidentally drifting onto the wet morning grass of the divider on an interstate highway. Unfortunately the Acura, having front wheel drive but no traction control immediately swerved towards the guard rail. There was enough time to counter the swerve and swing the other way still out of control. What I did not do was to hit the brake (as is correct) but nor did I remember that my cruise control was on so that the car did not slow down. I took one more swerve, back toward the fence and decided it was best to aim for the rail and try to stop the car in a controlled fashion that way. I did that quite OK shearing off most of the sheet metal on my side. Unfortunately on of the posts holding the steel guard rail was not level with the ground so before I was stopped by the friction of the screeching metal, the left front wheel rammed the guardrail post and did severe damage to the car. I however walked away, uninjured.
The car should have been totaled but a crooked body shop along with a crooked Acura dealer patched it up. It was never the same since it was no longer a perfect rectangle. I hired a lawyer but she broke down under the stresses put on her by the dealers and by my insurance company, one of the largest, and whose agent had obviously been bribed to accept the deficient repair.
The Flying Circus
While I was desperate for work while I was living in Framingham MA, I saw a small ad for a job with a research firm. It turned out to be a very small outfit, essentially a one man company run by someone I would characterize as an extremely eccentric scientist. He was so eccentric he could not get a regular job at a university or other company so he set up his own. He had a PhD in Physics, I believe but nobody called him Dr. We just called him Roger (not his real name).
Roger was married to a lovely woman and had a lovely daughter. He himself was a nice man too, but he did qualify as a "mad scientist." His true passion in life was flying - piloting airplanes, and he (or rather his company) had two small planes. One was not that small, having two big engines and originally having been a corporate passenger plane with seating for six. The second plane was a very old single engine plane that was actually made of wood! However it was very stable and was well known for it's airborne capabilities, as old a model as it was.
These two planes were hangered at a local airport. A hanger of course is a metal shed with no other insulation but the corrugated steel metal it is made of. The company had contracts with the air force to do atmospheric research that the larger and much faster air force jets could not do nearly as accurately as we could. Each aircraft was modified to be a flying laboratory. The twin engine plane was of course metal but as I mentioned the other plane was wood.
My job was to install and fit custom atmospheric sensors in and onto the wings. This did not bother me too much concerning the twin engine (metal) plane but eventually I realized the modifications to the wooden plane were (in my opinion) weakening the wings.
The biggest problem was that in the springtime (especially) a large amount of morning dew would collect on the roof of the hanger as well as on the airplanes. So until the sun rose high enough everything was dripping wet. This moisture had to be getting into the wing of the wooden plane as our instruments were simply mounted in cutouts in the wings which were then closed off with a metal plate but were not sealed since we opened and modified the boxes often.
Thus (in my opinion) no real concern was taken about moisture seeping into the wood. I myself didn't think about it too much and flew in that plane sometimes but I mostly preferred the large twin prop plane. The twin actually had three seats plus the scientific equipment so it could carry Roger (usually our pilot) and theoretically a co-pilot plus an instrument man in the one rear seat. It really didn't need 3 people on local trips and often I just went along for the ride (I like flying).
Anyway on one assignment we went to Wallops Island in Virginia. We had to do round the clock flying for a few days to get uninterrupted samples. So we set up a system of 4 hours on and 4 hours off. This saved on hotel bills too since the rotating crews also could rotate beds! Obviously we needed another pilot for the twin and a contractor pilot was hired. We got the night shift and away we went.
The procedure was to circle up as high as we could go (the unpressurized twin prop could exceed 30,000 feet, then down as low as we could safely get to the surface of the ocean, then back up and so forth. So we made our ascent then went down. When we started out I expected we would be able to see the ocean surface as we descended but it I became concerned when I felt we were down too far and I saw nothing.
The plane had two altimeters, one the standard barometric kind, the other a radar altimeter that was much more accurate. The standard altimeter might have been accurate to one hundred feet, but probably not. What I had not thought of (and Roger didn't tell the hired pilot) was that the radar altimeter was not working properly and could not be relied on. So I as I began to realize he was relying on the radar altimeter I quickly told him which resulted in an immediate change to maximum climb. After that he never went below 500 feet on the barometric altimeter. That was what I would call a typical "Roger moment" even though "Roger" was not the pilot.
One time Roger received a contract to fly to place in the Artic Circle where research was needed. There is at least one point of land off of Norway that is actually within the Artic Circle. It is called Svalbard and belongs to Norway.
At this point we did have extra pilots available but the trip that far East (almost to Norway), required a huge auxiliary gas tank be installed. The only place for it was on the inside next to the "instrument man." I was supposed to be that man but decided that since I was not required on the trans-Atlantic fight that I would prefer to fly to Norway (via SAS) and that they could come over and pick me up. OK, so I was going to go. In typical style things ran late and the plane did not get going until almost evening. Both Roger, and, I think, the co-pilot were tired.
Also in my final checkout before they left I found that the extra fuel tank has a slight leak and that the gas was dripping into the strobe light compartment (Strobe=Spark). It smelled of gas fumes. I told Roger immediately. I could not believe he would take off in this condition, but emptying the tank, finding the leak and fixing it would have taken weeks and probably have scrubbed the project. Roger, in his typical nonchalant fashion said the fumes in the strobe compartment would be sucked out when the plane was moving. I guess he was right about that - the strobe compartment did not blow up, however . . .
The first stop was not far, in Portland Maine, with the second planned stop at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. Well, they got to Portland and for some "unknown" reason the landing gear did not fully engage (or so it was reported) and this flying bomb (the extra tank in the cabin had 600 gallons of high octane fuel in it) landed on its belly. Thanks only to the skill of the pilot(s) they managed this crash landing without a fireball that would probably have lit up the Portland sky for miles around and walked away unhurt.
The plane was towed back to Massachusetts to the hangar of our special mechanic, (probably one of the few who would work on our planes - given what I told you). The bottom of plane the was something like the side of my Acura after that crash. It was partly sheared clear and the the main aluminum I-beam which is what saved the plane was ground down several inches, perhaps half way through (basically they landed on the I-beam). I don't know how they were able to repair it but they eventually did. The mechanic had an expression for the plane. He called it "a 5 lb. bag carrying 10 lbs. of shit." P.S. - he was the one who installed the 600 gallon in-cabin fuel tank.
After that I stayed on but after thinking about mortality a while one day I walked into Roger's office and said "I am quitting - one day you are going to kill someone - and I don't want it to be me." So I quit and did find another much safer job as an engineer in an office building with a lab to work in.
Unfortunately one or two years later I was in Roger's neighborhood I decided to drop in and say hello. When I walked into the lab (in his house) I was not greeted warmly, in fact everybody was rater cold. After a minute or so the other technician who still worked there said "didn't you hear?" I said "no - what?" The wood plane had crashed in Canada killing the two onboard. I knew both of those men and it was a dull shock. One the pilot (not Roger - who by know I realized had a guardian angel), but another fine man who was a retired airline pilot. More ironically (I guess I too have a guardian angel), the instrument man on that flight had the same first name as me -Leslie.
Apparently one of the wings had broken off! Later I asked Roger about this wondering why he was still in business. He told me that it was found (under investigation) that a number of these very same planes had gone down the same way, meaning it had nothing to do with our "modifications"
Maybe.