Cool little video OF MY SPINE showing how my backbones got squished (compressed) on my belly side (anterior) after my paragliding accident. The 3-D animation in this is way cool. Technology is amazing.

I got a CD of all my X-rays, my MRI, and my CT from the hospital for $8.62. There is are some things to love about Korea!

Thanks again to all of you who have allowed me to walk again. Hugs!

It’s been a little over a month since my surgery and things are going great.  A quick update: Lara and I flew to New Zealand.  I purchased the ticket back in October and didn’t know if I’d be able to fly or not.  The people at Malaysian Airlines were nice enough to upgrade me to business class, so the ride to New Zealand was absolutely totally comfortable.  I got to lay flat on my back pretty much the whole trip.

There was a five hour layover in Kuala Lumpur so I laid flat on my back for those five hours and then another ten hours on the airplane to New Zealand.  It really wasn’t bad at all.

When I got to New Zealand, the car was outfitted with a mattress in the back.  So I just climbed into the back of the car, laid flat on my back, held onto the seats, and away we went.

I’ve been here a few days now, most of that time spent in some strangers’ house. Long story, but we broke down over the holiday and were rescued by a couple who let us stay with them for 4 days until our car got fixed. Always an adventure.

Back to Korea and the hospital.

One thing I’ve been meaning to tell you about is the way hospitals are set up in Korea.  There are no such thing as visiting hours. You can have as many visitors as you want and they can stay there as long as they want. Also, each patient has a bed that slides under their main bed for company. So, my private nurse (And later Lara) would sleep on there at night. And other patients had wives, mothers, fathers, and children who slept on their tuck-away beds.

So besides the hospital nurses, everyone had someone looking after them full-time. But, the place was still swarming with hospital nurses. Seriously, I don’t think I went 3 or 40 minutes the whole time I was there without a nurse either checking up on me, poking me with a needle, taking my blood pressure, or sticking a thermometer in my ear.

I thought it was really cool how they let people stay with us all the time. And it was great how everyone got along. I didn’t know it for over a week when I was finally able to walk around, but we had the most social room on our floor. (Oh, and I didn’t say it, but you can sort of see from the pictures that there are a bunch of people in one room. We had 8 in ours.) I think in part because all of us except one guy were in the process of healing and the worst of our pain was over.

Whatever the reason, we actually had fun in our room. The assistants, or whatever you want to call the people who slept on the tuck-away beds, all got along great and seemed to be having a contest to see who could bring in the best food. Every 3 or 4 hours of every day someone would bring in oranges or grapes or ginseng juice or cookies or crackers or watermelon. It was great once my system started digesting things.

I’m not sure what my point in all that was. Other than to say it was really neat to have everyone there like that. And we all got to sort of know, understand, and support each other.

And they were really supportive of me. Even though no one spoke English and I only speak broken Korean, they were really attentive to me and Lara. They loved Lara. She was always helping the other women peel the fruit for everyone, carrying stuff in and out, and pushing beds around. When I finally stood for the first time in 9 days, everyone clapped. I just hugged Lara and cried. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy. It was a moment I will never forget. Given the accident I had, I really shouldn’t have been standing or walking. I was unbelievably lucky. But, there I was out of bed after only 9 days. Unreal. It is amazing the things I took for granted.

And it’s amazing how wonderful it is to be able to walk. Ever since then there is not a day that goes by where I don’t feel grateful that I’m able to stand up and walk. A strange thing about that though… it seems strange for me to give thanks for walking. Like I SHOULD take it for granted or something. But I don’t anymore.

I sure can go on tangents… Back to the hospital. One other thing about that first day I was able to walk in the hospital:  the walk got my system moving and when I got back from my stroll around the hospital wing, I laid down on the bed and farted.

Now you have to understand that all of us in that room are used to such noises, and in fact a lot of attention is paid to who is, and who isn’t farting. If you aren’t (and me and two other guys weren’t) then everyone is sort of waiting in anticipation. It seems strange, but having your digestive tract working is sort of a milestone for your healing. Yes, farting is a benchmark we all strived for.

So when I let out my gas, I got my second ovation of the day. This time accompanied by a few whoops and some good natured laughing in that congratulatory sort of way. And even though I really hadn’t done much except taken a lap around the ward and let a big one go, I felt like I’d just climbed Everest. Life is good.

Oh, and my plan is to add some pictures to the side of the blog in those 125 x 125 px boxes so you can link to them and I can tell the stories that go with them. Or if I can figure out how to do it, I’ll post them on a blog post and tell you about them.

Okay, rather than bore everyone with all the stuff that happened, I decided it would be a lot more fun, and a lot more like me, to tell you all the crazy things about the whole stay.

But first, a lot of people have asked the same kinds of questions, so I thought I’d write the answers here in case others were curious as well.

I think the healing process time-line looks like this, and understand that we are dealing with a language barrier here, so I’m not sure I have this all perfect (and more on the language barrier in a second). I have to wear a brace (it’s a super tight hard plastic and Velcro girdle thing that looks like a chastity belt for my nipples) for 3 months anytime I stand up. I am only supposed to stand up between 30 and 40 minutes a day.

The other 23 hours and 20 minutes I have to be flat on my back. And that is really important. My back has to stay flat and there can be no twisting. It’s not hard to follow those instructions since it hurts if I stand up or walk too long, and turning is way too painful.

I’m not allowed sit, and again, no problems with that one. It hurts my lower back after about 2 minutes in a seated position.

The great news is I only have to be like this for 3 months. After that I don’t have to wear the brace and I can sit down like normal. At 3 months I also start a rehab thing where I can walk and swim and stretch. No impact like running and no way I can fight, but that’s okay. After 6 months or a year I’m as good as new! I go to the doctor and they take the rods out of my back and I’m on my way.

Did I mention they put them in? Yeah, I have 4 rods in my back holding 3 vertebrae together. The scar where they operated is really cool looking.

side view of one set of four that are in my back.

My paraglider is fine, and that is important because it’s the most expensive thing I own in this world at $2,500. I might fly again after all this. Although I got sick to my stomach when I looked up at the take off site when I returned home. We’ll see. I have plenty of time to think about it. No more acrobatic maneuvers under 100 meters though, ever.

So, all in all, it’s been a great experience.  Life always blesses me. I am supposed to be dead or at least not walking. Instead I’m going to be as good as new in less than a year!!! That’s insane.  I am the luckiest man alive.

Also, I’ve written a bunch of “thank you’s” and people have asked how I stay so positive…how to think like this and have it manifest. I think it’s about belief and action. I try to think the best of people and situations. I focus on the positive. I expect the best, I work toward the best. I think all of that makes me have the life I have and be blessed the way I am. I don’t think it’s an accident. Also, it helps that I actively look for all the good things in my life, and lo-and-behold, good things show up. Maybe it’s an attitude. I don’t know, but it works.

Two quotes come to mind. “This too shall pass.” And “Nothing is as good as it seems, and nothing is as bad as it seems.”

Anyway, you know what? The bottom line is that I KNOW I am blessed. I know that if this broken back thing happened to me, then it’s a blessing. Because I’m SURE that it is.

My guess is that I was supposed to die… and to only have a broken back is a gift. Or if I hadn’t broken my back, then I was destined to have a worse accident a different time. Or maybe it’s simply that if I hadn’t been taken away in an ambulance, I would have packed up my car and got in a car accident that would have killed me.

Or maybe if my friends wouldn’t have gone to the hospital with me, one of them would have had an accident that would have hurt them worse than I was. But since they were with me and not driving home, that accident was avoided.

I don’t really know the specifics, but I know for sure that something a lot worse than me breaking my back and being inconvenienced for a year would have happened if I hadn’t been blessed with this broken back.

Now, enough of all that. Take a look at the 3 pictures on this page. There is a story about each of those pictures, and the one in the middle has a couple since those are the people I spent 2 weeks with. And I can tell you that I have NEVER seen anything like what I saw in that hospital.

So, click on the pictures above and I’ll try to make them open bigger in another window and tell you the stories!! It’s already 11:00pm here though, so maybe I’ll only get to one tonight. If so, more to follow.

Oh, wait. I mentioned a story about the language barrier being a problem.

So I hired a private nurse at $60/day right after my surgery- at that point I couldn’t move much. Three or four days flat on my back. Only rolling over on my side once each day in the morning when the doctor checked the stitches. I had a catheter in and my stomach and intestines pretty much shut down so no need to use the bathroom.

The nurse was great. She fed me and moved the pillows around to change the angle of my legs once in awhile. And she got me drugs. She understood “pain control” and would come back with a real nurse who would shoot me up. Bless her.

Anyway, one morning I asked the doctor to take a picture of my back so I could see what was what. It took a few tries before he knew what I wanted, but he took the picture, it’s on this page. (The red tube is the drain tube for the wound. I had to drain less than 100ml/day before they would fit me with the brace and let me move off my back.)

I was worried because after 3 days of 3 meals a day I still hadn’t gone to the bathroom. The guy next to me was in the same boat, and we’d been trading prune juice and date bars for a day and half. It’s kinda funny how things become currency in different places. We see on TV that cigarettes are like money in jail, and I found that laxatives were as good as gold in a hospital room with 8 guys who can’t walk… The guy next to me finally got things moving in his intestines but, I still hadn’t and his nurse was bragging to my nurse.

I guess my nurse had about enough of that and she decided to take things in her own hands. She gave me some drugs that were supposed to make me poop. Then she sets about getting prepared. I figure she’s just going to wheel my whole bed to the big shower room and be done with it. But no…

Instead she puts me on my side and builds a tent around my bottom! I’m thinking, “you gotta be kidding me?!?” Nope, she uses the pillows and support cushions like gigantic legos and builds a two walls, one on either side of my butt. She packs an adult diaper under me and to top it off she drapes a sheet across the two cushion walls—essentially making a tent that leads up to my butt. She is quite proud f her work. Happy day.

And I’m thinking there is no way, no way, no way that I will ever have anything so ridiculous happen to me ever again. No way that I will be lying crippled on a bed and some lady will make a tent that leads to my butt ever again… it isn’t possible.

So, I want a picture of me lying on the bed packed up with lego cushion walls and a sheet tent that was so carefully built. Pain be damned, I know a good story when I’m in one. So I get my nurse to figure out that I want a picture and show her how to use the camera.

She goes behind me, I sort of arch back and smile at the camera while making the “V” sign that is mandatory when being photographed in Korea, and wait for her to snap the picture. No picture being taken. I wait some more. Nothing. I arch back a little more so I can see her. She looks baffled. She says something in Korean, I motion for her to push the button as I smile my best smile and say “kimchi”, which is like saying “cheese” in the U.S..

She nodded as though she understood completely, but the language barrier kicked in. She lifts the sheet and from the entrance of her perfect tent she takes a picture of my bare ass!! I can’t believe it!! Why does she think I smiled, said “kimchi,” and held up the “V” sign if I wanted a picture of just my butt? Unreal. Maybe she thought her tent was so perfect that it deserved a picture. Maybe since the doctor took a picture of my bare back that morning, she thought I wanted one of my bare butt that afternoon. Whatever the case, I now have a perfectly focused photo of my own bottom. Happy day.

And it’s now 11:50pm. I’m going to upload this and get to bed. More later. Good nite! Thanks for your love and support.

Hugs– John

Please help by donating now!

Okay, I’m going to try my own little experiment here. I’m going to test my theories about the way the world works, really put it on the line and see what happens.

I believe that if we want something in the world, we have to take action, we have to ask, we have to be prepared for the best, and we have to be grateful for the results.

See, I think that people want to help people out. I think that the reason we live, that our purpose in life, is to love. I think that people have a desire, no a need, to make a significant difference in the world, to contribute.

And I would really appreciate some help about now. I would be eternally grateful, because what I’m asking for is for my friends to help pay for the surgery that now allows me to walk.

I have about 400 friends that I think will help out, if I know you the way I think I do, and I’m asking you to contribute some money to help me pay my hospital and surgery bills. If everyone puts in $12.83, that would cover all my expenses. Please give at least that much and then read the story below.

About three weeks ago, on December 6, I had a paragliding accident and broke my back. It was totally my fault and I was an idiot.

What happened was that a paraglider pilot crashed into the trees in front of me. And they crashed were no one but me knew where they were.

So, I circled around them, got a GPS bearing on their location, told them to wait (like they had a choice as they hung in the trees), and tried to get down fast to get help.

Well, to lose altitude quickly I did wingovers, which are acrobatic maneuvers. I’ve done thousands of them, but never so low, and I came out of my last one too low. My glider pitched up, I dropped straight down about 30 feet (10 meters), and landed on my butt.

I’ve rolled cars, been in the ring with Olympians, sparred with World Champions, gone over a waterfall, been bitten by a brown recluse spider… but I’ve never felt such pain before. There was this insane searing pain all down my lower back. It was red and hot and screaming  bloody murder.

I knew I was in trouble. I’ve read enough on the internet and seen enough DVD’s to know that the accident I just had usually results in either death or paralysis. Obviously, I wasn’t dead, but I wasn’t sure I could move or if I wanted to risk moving in case my back was broken but not cutting into my spinal cord yet.

I laid there screaming for help and a few Koreans came who didn’t speak any English. Then my best friends, all Korean, started showing up. One of them held my hand, one of them called an ambulance.

I asked my third friend to touch my leg, I wanted to know if I could feel anything in my legs. I could. Then I told my brain to move my feet and asked him if they were really moving. He said they were.

I can’t tell you how I felt at that moment. To know that I was probably going to be able to walk. It wasn’t really bliss, or relief, or happiness. It was something like all those. I might have been hurting worse than I ever had before, but I was probably more grateful in that moment than I have been at any time in my life. I could move my legs and I could feel pressure on them!

I figured I was golden, but wow was I wrong.

We got the hospital and took X-rays. The doctors said there were no problems at all, and I could just stay at their clinic taking pain killers and if I didn’t get better in a few days, they’d send me to a bigger hospital at that time. Thank God my friends didn’t believe them.

Instead we took another ambulance ride to a bigger hospital where they had better equipment and I assume more experienced doctors. They took X-rays there too, except this time they found a compression fracture in my first lumbar vertebrae and wanted to do an MRI the next day to see how much damage there was to my soft tissue.

Then, depending on the MRI, I might have to have surgery.

Well, you know that I don’t like stuff like surgery. And I was scared shitless. And in denial. So I did one of the stupidest things I think I’ve ever done.

To “prove” that my back wasn’t really broken and that the doctors and the X-rays were all wrong, I decided that I would stand up and pee in one of those container/bucket things they give you.

Not a good idea. I didn’t know it at the time, but not only was my back broken, but the soft tissue in the middle of my back was trashed, there wasn’t much holding everything in place. It wouldn’t have taken much to have my spine move just a bit and make it so my legs never moved again.

But, my guardian angel was still watching over me. Besides a lot of pain, I made it up and back down again. I put that in here so that if you or anyone you know has a back injury and they can still move, THEY SHOULDN’T. Even if the y think they can. Make them lie still. Especially if it hurts to move. Their spine could be hanging on by a thread, ready to twist into their spinal cord.

Okay, it’s getting late in Korea, I’ll write more tomorrow. There were some really funny things that happened in the hospital. And overall, though it was pure hell, it was also a lot of fun and makes for some good stories. Especially now that the whole hospital thing is over.

I do want to say before I go to bed that I really appreciate your help with the hospital bill. I have said for a long time that I have the best friends in the world. And I expect that almost everyone will donate.

Maybe it’s not even so much to have the money, but to know that I am love. That we live in a world of hope. A world of friends helping friends, of people helping people. It makes me feel good knowing that I am loved so much that you took the time to address and envelope or click on Papal. Thank you. More tomorrow. Thanks for your donation.

Hugs—John

My spinal cord before surgery.