2ndShotBlog.com

I’ve been having a recurring dream.

In the dream, it’s the middle of the night. I’m alone and asleep. Not in my house, though. I’m in a high-rise apartment building. I don’t question this change of residence. I just accept that this is where I live now.

The doorbell rings and wakes me. I’m apprehensive. Who would be at my door at this hour?

I get out of bed, and without turning on a light, I walk out of the bedroom and across the living room toward the front door.

There’s no furniture in the living room. A little bit of blue-ish fluorescent light shines through the windows from the street lamps outside. I can tell that the walls and the ceiling are painted white, and there’s white tile on the floor.

As I approach the front door, which is also white, I can see a bit of yellow incandescent light spilling through the peephole and under the bottom of the door.

I see that the chain lock is unhooked. The steel chain is dangling loose. I quickly grab the chain and slide the end through the chain plate, thinking, “I can’t believe I left that off. I always double-check.”

Then I look through the peephole. Nobody’s there. And I look at the floor. No shadow from someone standing in the hall.

I start to breathe a sigh of relief when I notice that the deadbolt is open. Something is really wrong. I wouldn’t go to bed and leave that unlocked. I turn it and the lock slides into place.

I try the door knob. It turns. That’s unlocked too. I lock it.

I realize that the door was completely unlocked. Anyone could have opened it and let themselves in.

I think, “Did they have enough time to ring the bell and slide inside before I walked into the living room?” The panic I’m feeling wakes me up for real. I sit up in my bed in my little house, my eyes open and my heart pounding.

I know the origin of the dream. My buddy Step came over when I got home from the hospital. He’s a carpenter. He installed peepholes and chain locks on the front and back doors of the house. I make sure that the dead bolts, the knob locks, and the chain locks are all secured at all times. My girlfriend has a key, but she has to wait for me to hobble over and undo the chain lock before she can enter the house.

If you had asked me a month ago, I would have told you that I felt younger than my 54 years. Both in my mind and in my body. I don’t know if I looked younger, but I felt younger. I didn’t think about it, but I was confident. I felt able to take care of myself, able to defend myself.

Today I feel older than my actual age. I’m aware that I’m a gimp. If I was an animal, I wouldn’t last a night in the wild. The injured and the lame are easy prey.

I’m realizing that the kid did more than cause me physical harm and disrupt my business. He changed the way I look at the world. He changed the way I look at myself.

“It was a drug deal gone bad.”

I assumed I was in Sarasota Memorial Hospital. I was listening to two nurses talking about me.

When you lose more than 50% of the blood in your body, everything shuts down. To keep me alive, they had a ventilator forcing air into my lungs. My heart must have been beating. I don’t know whether it was assisted or not. I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t. At that point, the only thing I could do was listen.

I felt my bowels let loose underneath me.

“Oh, gross! He shit himself.”

I could understand their disgust. I’m a big boy, and they would have to clean me up. But I had been shot in the belly. Wouldn’t there be an expectation? Wouldn’t a bowel movement be a sign of something – either positive or negative?

I still don’t know how those hospital employees came to the conclusion that I was shot during a drug deal. That’s not what happened. The police report details what did occur.

When I answered the door that night, I was wearing pants and a shirt, socks and sneakers. I had no ID on me. It’s my habit to empty my pockets when I come home, and put the contents in the same spot on the kitchen counter.

I suppose it’s human nature to assume the worst. Especially when you work the night shift in an Emergency Room.

I found out later that I had been air lifted by helicopter to the Saint Petersburg Bayfront Trauma Center. I don’t know if Sarasota Memorial refused me because I didn’t have a health insurance card, or if the decision was made to move me because Bayfront had trauma surgeons at the ready.

After spending two hours with the Sarasota police at the station house, my girlfriend drove up to Bayfront with my insurance card. When she arrived around 1 a.m., she gave the card to the emergency room receptionist. I was in surgery. The people working on me had no reason to believe I had insurance to cover the cost of the surgery. All they saw was a naked man (the EMTs had cut away my clothes) covered in blood.

My femoral artery had been severed. That’s a 10 to 15 minute bleed out. The Sarasota police were on the scene immediately. An unseen eye witness watched the whole incident and dialed 911 as soon as I dropped to the ground.