Here I Am

2020 has not been the year that anybody expected but my odyssey may be a bit more bizarre than most... In mid February, I had hernia surgery. There was an anesthesiology mishap and the intubation tube was pushed into the wrong passageway, collapsing my left lung. The error was realized about two and a half minutes later and when the tube was pulled, stomach acid, water and bile filled my lungs giving me acute respiratory distress syndrome and chemical pneumonia. I was put in an induced coma and on life support. My lungs were not clearing and at some junction the ventilator cuff broke and had to be ripped off of the machinery causing facial and scalp lacerations, damaging my throat and teeth and ripping the skin off of part of my tongue.. The doctors told my wife Debbie that they had done everything for me medically that they could do and to gather my family to say their goodbyes. I was on the ventilator for over nine days, in the hospital for over three weeks and contracted C-DIFF and candidiasis while there. When I got out of the hospital, my road to recovery was to be long and arduous, I hurt in every nook and cranny of the human body, as if I had been stampeded by a herd of bison yet just a few months out I had worked incredibly hard to rehabilitate and I am way in front of the curve and have progressed more rapidly than anyone anticipated. When I got home, the COVID-19 crisis hit hard - my escape route, if anything was well-timed. We settled into being sheltered fairly gracefully and like so many others await some return to normalcy. That I live, the doctors say is a miracle. I believe in miracles and that being a relatively young man, I have much more work to do here on planet earth - what that work will be, I do not fully know for all I truly know is this. I am Dan Buell, the man that lived...