Death Knocked: I Didn't Answer
I have frequently talked about grace and serendipity and how I often feel “protected” by a power outside of myself. I felt the power of this protective essence on at least five occasions when I came close to death, three times inside an automobile and two times in a hospital.
I believe each experience was a miracle.
The first of three roadway-oriented miracles took place during my mid-twenties past midnight on a darkened winding road in Kona, Hawaii. The second happened during my late twenties on a major freeway in Phoenix, Arizona. The third roadway miracle occurred when I was 40 traveling somewhere in Utah. The two hospitalizations happened at 32 and at 36, during 13 years of my life in Las Vegas. All five relate strongly to my growth as a human being and my spiritual awareness.
I’m currently 2.5 months closer to 70. There have been several other brushes with death of a much less serious nature. Three were health misfortunes: a serious hernia complication; an evasive kidney stone; and a strange, misdiagnosed case of diverticulitis in which my blood levels suddenly went askew for no apparent reason and then unanticipatedly normalized after a few days. The other: an auto mishap when I was 17 packed in a car of alcohol-infused teenagers. A car coming from behind slammed hard into the back of our vehicle while stopped at an intersection. The impact pushed the entire trunk of the car up to the lower edge of the back window. None of us were hurt in the least.
The three significant roadway miracles I’m about to describe came very close to making me a tragic statistic. I think most of us know someone or a family member of someone who died tragically and unexpectedly in an automobile accident. The National Safety Council estimates your odds of dying in a car accident are about one in 101, much more likely than the one in 221 chance of dying from a gunshot.
The first roadway miracle happened on a beautiful breezy Hawaiian night with clear skies magnified by a visibly unhampered constellation of stars. At the time, I was a milk-toast-white Haole transplant who had moved from one of the snowiest cities in the U.S., Buffalo, NY, to the Big Island. My relocation transpired through a Buffalo friend (David, now Kawika) whose mother happened to be an Hawaiian native. Kawika moved to his maternal Hawaiian roots during his young adult years.
After the great Buffalo blizzard of 1977 at the age of 24, I moved there too.
My eyes wandered upwards. My ears tuned into the wonderful Hawaiian music emitting from my car radio. I was happily driving along by myself. Life was good. I had become a bona-fide Hawaiian resident, landed a room-service waiter job at an ocean-side resort and moved into an affordable apartment that I shared with an amenable ex-convict roommate named Smokey who had a sunken face aged beyond his actual years and a mouth that sported two remaining front teeth.
Like Kawika, I adopted the Hawaiian name for George, Keoki.
There were no street lights, only a streaming moonbeam and the single-working headlight guiding my puttering $500 Toyota Corolla illuminating the frequently curved roadway in front of me. As is customary from anywhere you drove on the Big Island, I had a clear view of the ocean, the waves moving in sync with a slack key guitar melody.
Suddenly coming from no conceivable source, my calm demeanor turned unexpectedly disrupted. Taken aback, I attempted to discern the reason for this dramatic change in my demeanor but came up empty. My face abruptly metamorphosed into a stern look of apprehension; a strong unavoidable foreboding sense took hold. My two hands tightened around the steering wheel; my eyes peered deep into the road in front of me. Within several seconds after traversing around a blind curve, a previously unseen car with bright headlights surged straight into my path. It seemed I expected it, able to swiftly swerve to the roadside and escape, by inches, what would have been a tragic head-on crash. I turned around. The car that nearly killed me kept going as if nothing happened, and that was the end of it. I vaguely recall the face of the driver. He looked elderly with a sad and sunken drunkenly countenance.
I felt a surging spiritual presence like no other I had ever felt before. That feeling became the base for a strong belief I have to this day – one that recognizes how extraordinarily lucky I am to have a protective spirit or spirits who intervene on my behalf in times of extreme need.
The second roadway miracle had me cramped in the back seat of a then-popular Datsun 280Z compact automobile. There were four of us kibitzing pleasantly and cruising on a wide freeway that had a concrete midway dividing two-way traffic. We were heading to some nightclub on a Friday night suggested by my cousin, whom I was visiting. I had moved to Phoenix after living in Hawaii for two years.
I surrendered to what the locals call “Island Fever,” a foolish capitulation that I still regret in my older adulthood. Also called “Rock Fever,” it’s a feeling of being stuck on a lava flow. The isolation of living on an island in the middle of the Pacific starts to psychologically wear you out, generated by feelings of extreme FOMO (fear of missing out). I developed a strong desire to go back to the mainland, harboring thoughts of enrolling in college, but my cast-your-fate-to-the-wind spirit gave me no solid plans.
At the time I had relocated into a basement studio apartment near a sprawling banana grove. No longer room-service waiting, I moved up the career ladder to a night auditor job, working the graveyard shift at the most exclusive ocean-side resort on the Big Island. This was a great job with unique amenities I would never again experience, including a private employee beach. Each night I would drive across another curving pathway, on the alert for wild donkeys that often unexpectedly crossed the road. The drive went for about two miles until I reached a beautiful secluded all-inclusive resort populated by individual thatched-roofed bungalows with fabulous ocean-view lanais rented by the rich and famous. I checked out Farrah Fawcett one morning, and I’m pretty sure I once checked out Steve Jobs as well (he was not yet famous at the time and was known to be a frequent guest).
Myself and a security guard “braddah,” Pierre, a Tahiti transplant who was formerly head of police for its capital Papeete, had the entire place to ourselves from midnight until 8 am. As a native Buffalonian I never imagined I could be placed in such an environment where peacocks roamed freely among a lush tropical landscape with a beach that glowed a stupendous morning sunrise that I watched each morning in complete equanimity.
Pierre and I would invade the kitchen and cook up 4 am dinners loaded with fresh seafood pilfered from the kitchen freezer. The cool evening air brushed across us as we sat on the restaurant balcony together laughing like island kings observing the ocean waves splash quietly on the shoreline before us.
One thing about working in the resort industry, you are always around attractive scenery, even though it’s not completely natural beauty. In Phoenix I wound up in another night auditor position at a popular golf resort in a wealthy suburb that stretched across acres of a reconstructed desert landscape lined with cacti and non-desert-like flowers and greenery. I stayed for about three months before moving to Las Vegas where another neighborhood friend lived and happened to be seeking a new roommate.
The astonishingly random roadway incident in Phoenix – the second miracle - can definitely be considered a much more pronounced phenomenon than what happened in Hawaii. We were in the left lane bordering the concrete meridian. An out-of-control car coming from the opposite direction smashed into the meridian, knocking a huge slab of concrete directly in front of us. I clearly saw it from the back driver’s-side seat, like a haunting bad-dream image.
We all screamed and moaned upon impact, and I unconsciously muttered “Mom” as we slid across the freeway upside down. The sliding seemed to go on forever. How we avoided getting hit again by the traffic surrounding us – all going about 60 to 65 miles per hour – was a miracle in and of itself.
When we finally stopped sliding, I saw an opening to get out through the small back window that was now half its original size. I managed to stick my legs out first but saw flames shooting toward me emanating from the front of the car. I quickly pulled myself back in. The passenger next to me had already escaped through the passenger side door of this two-door. I maneuvered over. My cousin, who had also escaped, grabbed my outstretched arm and pulled me out. The driver had also somehow escaped, and we were all now looking down at a car that was squished into an almost flat metal heap, amazed that we were still on the planet. I recall spitting out small amounts of glass. We all hugged each other and waited for the rescue workers who were there in minutes. Next thing I remember is sitting in an ambulance with my cousin, intact, adrenaline-surged and dumfounded.
Later, after nursing a bruised back for some time, I heard that the state troopers who arrived on the scene were also dumfounded – they had never seen a wrecked car of this magnitude that had four survivors, all relatively unscathed. And that was the end of that. My cousin and I still reminisce about it when we occasionally see each other. I never again saw the other two passengers after the accident. It seems strange that we never met up after going through such a harrowing experience together.
Internally I repeatedly thanked my spiritual protectors for many days while my back healed, and life eventually went back to its normal routines.
The third roadway miracle happened on a mountain pass somewhere in Utah I do not remember where exactly. My life was dramatically different by now – married with two beautiful kids, blessed with a boy of six weeks and a girl aged three. I had been in Las Vegas for more than a decade, had earned a bachelor’s degree in English (self-funded by working as a graveyard auditor by night and a student by day), had worked at a good job in the entertainment industry as a communications professional for several years, and eventually started a successful one-person graphic design and public relations business.
My clients included the Tropicana, the now extinct Desert Inn, the University of Nevada, a bank, a few real estate companies, and several small businesses. I worked out of a small executive suite on the top floor of a new office building that gave me an astounding view of the magnificent nighttime city lights. Life was pretty good.
We were living in a condo away from the glittering Strip where people lived typical urban-American lives. Las Vegas has this two-city aura. One where all the tourists and crazy immoral activities happen daily and the other as normal as any other American city except for the slot machines that greet you at grocery store check outs and the risqué billboards with near naked women clearly visible from the freeways.
As a new family of four with the birth of our son, my wife and I decided to move from our now overly cramped space and raise our kids close to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who all lived more than 2,000 miles away in my hometown of Buffalo, NY.
My wife, daughter and son were put on a plane to stay with my parents while I remained in Vegas for about a month, closing the sale of our condo and some work I had left over on my business plate while also overseeing the moving company that took our possessions across country.
We had a new 1993 four-door, compact Chevy Sundance that I packed my workstation in for the drive home. I was traveling through a mountain pass in Utah, feeling overly excited and anxious to hug my wife and kids again when another random incident took my breath away – this time in the form of a sudden, dilemma-inducing snowstorm that I drove right into.
Having grown up in Buffalo, I was used to driving in snow storms, but this was quite different, unlike any I had experience before. For one I was driving along a narrow mountain pass with narrow road shoulders, and number two I could not see more than a foot or two in front of the Sundance even with my headlights on high beam. I reduced my speed to a crawl and started to sweat.
What if a truck came barreling behind me? What if I veered off the road and plummeted down into a ravine full of snow? Should I stop and stand in this blizzard, even though I did not have any winter-appropriate clothes or shoes in toe - wait for the snow to stop while watching my car get bulldozed by some other vehicle that happened to come into the area? My mind was reeling with thoughts of doom. “I’m never gonna see my family again. I’m gonna die here and not be found for who knows how long.”
My eyes remained glued to the hazy two short feet in front of me, the Sundance inching slowly into the hands of some absurd fate. I felt completely helpless. My eyes teared up. It was inevitable. My end was drawing near. This went on for at least an hour that felt like an eternity. Then, totally unexpected and seemingly out of nowhere, light appeared in the form of a convoy of vehicles led by a long-hauler followed by a string of about eight cars, all with their headlights blaring – a clear vision of the road moving forward slowly and surely paving its way through the falling snow until we all moved out of this horrendous snow ban into a suddenly unblemished sky and unobstructed roadway.
Thank you, God. I was saved once again by a spiritual presence looking out for me during a dramatic time of need.
A road exit appeared, and the string of vehicles all moved to get off. I did not, deciding to keep going. In hindsight, I should have exited too - an unconscious decision I regretted as soon as I passed the exit. I’m sure there must have been an interesting life celebration of sorts among strangers brought together by a near-tragic fate.
The two other times when my life came close to finality happened during two major life transitions, one in the course of the last semester of my senior year before graduating from college and the other three years later, several months before getting married.
The pre-college-graduation experience started with a sharp pain in my side that felt temporary, so I just went about my business as if nothing was wrong.
Reaching this time when I was very close to graduating was a gigantic milestone. I would not accept any kind of delay. I felt an excited anticipation for that last day of classes that loomed a short time ahead but fate had other plans.
I was enrolled in 20 credits. The year before, I became editor-in-chief of my college newspaper, was awarded a journalism scholarship, and interned between semesters as a feature writer for a major metropolitan newspaper. In between, I night audited part-time for a small hotel on the Strip.
It did not strike me that I was burning out from doing too much since I entered college as a self-supporting freshman filled with determination. The pain in my side - that in a few days started to feel like something awful - might have been the result of this unhealthy point in my life. Plus, I was a smoker since 15. By my college years I had progressed to two-packs a day of Camel non-filters.
The pain grew so severe that I could not even get out of bed. I was living alone and able to make a call to my neighbor from my bedside nightstand. He came right over and helped me into his car for a ride to the nearest emergency room. I was quickly x-rayed and placed in a waiting room. A young doctor greeted me and in a gravely serious tone said, “You have a mass near your lung the size of a grapefruit, and we don’t know what it is. We need to admit you for further examination.”
I was swiftly placed in a room in the oncology section of the hospital among very sick, cancer-ridden patients. Now utterly confused and worried - the nurses treating me had obvious empathetic concern on their faces and in their voices. My questions were met with vague answers like “the doctor will be in to see you soon.”
In those days, nurses and doctors were not roaming around hospital rooms with computers on carts. Medical records were held in plastic pocket folders attached to the doors of patient rooms. The nurses were pulling my records out and not saying anything about the contents. That troubled me.
Despite all this confusion, I slowly started to feel better - I assume the effects of medication. Once the coast cleared as the nurses helped other patients, I forced myself to get up from my hospital bed in order to check out the charts. “Cancer. Patient May Need to Vent” gazed back at me. Shocked and dismayed, I walked out into the hallway and saw that this oncology floor was filled with deep sadness in every room. A nurse spotted me and shooed me back to my bed.
“So this is it,” I said to myself. “What do I do now? Should I call my parents?” I decided not to, lying there waiting for what would come next, which turned out to be a painful biopsy taken with an elongated slender tube-like device that pierced into the middle of my back where a tiny piece of my inside biology was excised. Being the weekend, the biopsy results would not be ready for several days. I was forced to stay there, ruminating about what surely seemed like a race toward my eventual demise.
Making matters even more foreboding, a kind priest came to visit with me, asking me if there was anything I’d like to get off my chest. Surely, my fate was sealed. The priest said some prayers over me. I sensed from my Catholic upbringing that this was a shortened version of ‘Extreme Unction,’ a sacred sacrament given to the dying. I stewed further in distress and confusion.
Before long, out of the extreme stress I was feeling, I collapsed into a deep sleep. Several hours later upon awakening I felt a mental calmness and peace like I had never before experienced. A voice inside my head said, “No worries, everything is okay, there is no need to be fearful or anxious, just relax and live in this moment of peace that has engulfed you.” Those were my thoughts — a complete turnaround from what I was feeling earlier.
I sensed how the prospect of death was one in which all the suffering would disappear, a rather strange yet soothing thought. I did not want to die, but if it happened, it was out of my control. Better to just go peacefully into it, casting my fate to the spirits again.
There wasn’t anyone in my life who would have made the trip to sit by my side. That calming voice inside me, however, made me feel that I was actually not alone — that there was some guardian angel outside of myself helping me deal with this. I was ready to die with dignity, accepting my fate with my spirituality at ease. I was not afraid.
Fortunately the pain had subsided considerably. I felt good, watching Sunday football. A few days later, the results of my biopsy came back. “You’re healed,” said the doctor under my care. “You have what is known as ‘eosinophilic granuloma.’ You’re not gonna die.”
Another name for this strange and rare disease is Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH), which has various levels of severity, and I had a mild case. The doctor told me I was a “zebra case.” It means that you hear a presumably galloping herd of horses stampeding in the distance, but when they arrive within view, they are not horses but zebras.
I was released from the hospital and given regularly scheduled radiation treatments and medication over a period of a month or two (can’t remember exactly how long), culminating in a complete recovery. I had enough time to make up what I missed in homework assignments and ultimately graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English.
Indeed, it truly felt as if a guardian angel had come to my aid once again.
The second hospitalized brush with death happened about six years later after meeting the woman who would become my wife. This event was more dramatic, painful, and scary.
We took a drive to the California coast for the weekend to attend the Sawdust Art Festival in Newport Beach. This was my first serious weekend date in many years, and we both could not be happier.
Again, it was a sudden, unexpected experience that started while we strolled along the sawdust paths. Another pain to my side struck me like a thunderbolt and nearly knocked me to the ground. The pain grew increasingly worse, and we decided to take the 5-hour drive back home, straight away to a hospital emergency room in Vegas.
“Now, God! This ain’t fair,” I said to myself crumpled in the passenger seat, thinking “Jeez, I finally meet someone, and this is how it ends up.” A dark force enveloped me in frustration, anger, and deep sadness.
We made it to the hospital, where once again I waited for an x-ray result. The doctor tells me that I have a broken rib. “This ain’t no broken rib, Doc,” I said disdainfully. “Get someone else in here who can read an x-ray please.” Not more than 30 minutes passes and another doctor came in and said very factually, “Mr. Lorenzo, your lung has collapsed. We are admitting you to a room immediately.”
How could an emergency-room doctor diagnose a collapsed lung as a broken rib? I never found out. The next major step in this horrific event came with two tubes attached to what’s called a Pleur-evac (or chest drainage system) inserted into my chest. I’m sitting upright in a hospital bed feeling utterly distressed in enormous pain as lightly colored red fluids drained out from my body.
Much of this entire experience is a blur in my mind, lacking in specifics except for the following: I’m wheeled into surgery. A nurse inserts a tube down my throat and puts a mask over my face. I’m anesthetized for what seemed like a blink of an eye, but the surgery was six hours long. This was very disturbing to me. That period of six hours essentially did not exist in my mind. It felt much different than sleeping. It felt more like my existence was turned off for one second and then miraculously turned back on.
I had a lobectomy in which my middle lobe lung was removed. I basically lost about 10% of my breathing capacity. The doctor told me later that it was “ratted out” and therefore had to be expunged. I was rolled into an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Lying there in an utter haze, I’m catheterized and I’m thinking, “okay, this is really it.” This time, however, very much unlike the other near-death experience, I’m not in the least bit feeling any sort of calmness or acceptance. Then, completely out of the blue, I’m stricken by an enormous shooting nerve pain that traveled across the entire right side of my body. It was without a doubt the most severe pain I had ever experienced in my life, so debilitating that it had me screaming at the top of my lungs.
To this day, decades later, I can still remember that pain. It shot through me without any warning for about 30 seconds and then subsided until the next wave came. This happened about a dozen times, and I nearly fainted each time. To make matters even more frustrating, my hospital caretakers were at a loss as to how to help me. Eventually, thank God, the nerve pain disappeared. After two days, I was rolled back to my hospital room for recovery, with a morphine pump and a hand-held button I could press for a time-spaced self-administered shot when pain felt unbearable. I remember hitting that button frequently.
Perhaps it was due to the morphine, but very much unlike the first near-death hospital experience, this time, when I fell into a deep sleep, I had a vivid dream of falling and spiraling out of control into a black tunnel-like hole of complete darkness. There was no sense of calm this time, only a foreboding feeling that I was entering a hellish black void. That dream was just about as scary and menacing as everything else that had happened. To describe it in two words, I was “completely distraught.” I never forgot that dream.
The other significant difference this time around was my wife-to-be. She was there for me, monitoring my progress. As I started to pull out of this experience over the next several weeks, she became my loving support and primary go-to for hospital vending-machine snacks.
These two diametrically opposed near-death experiences taught me some important things. First, I finally quit smoking for good. I must say, however, that I still crave cigarettes more than 30 years later. Every time I see someone smoking, I want to have a smoke with them. That’s the power of addiction that never goes away. It’s always lurking in the background ready to take over.
Next, the calming experience I felt during the first hospital experience strengthened my belief in an inexplicable spiritual presence — an affirmation that I am fortunate to have spiritual help when needed most. The first hospital sleep gave me more anticipatory hope for an afterlife then the second hospital sleep, which removed some of that hope.
I also came to the realization that being alone during a trying time does not have to be incapacitating. You can get through debilitating events though meditations to remain calm. By not getting overly caught up in negativity or pessimism, you can heal yourself.
The big takeaway that came from the lobectomy deals with the existence of pure evil that I felt during that hellish black void dream. Yes, evil does exist, and it is powerful. It brings bleakness and a darkness that has no logical explanation. I think once you realize this in a profound way, you conclude that life is full of suffering. If you are healthy, be thankful. If you can help someone, do so.
Most important of all, coming close to death taught me that being your authentic self makes feeling more joyful about life easier to attain. Obtaining more money or things, or any kind of social acceptance that may be driven by society’s so-called norms, still enter your thoughts, but not as frequently. When death knocked on my door and I survived it, my first order of business entailed focusing more on being myself and striving to live honorably and honestly before my time on Earth ends, and not what the social milieu of my relatively short time may dictate. That kind of thinking can also make life more difficult at times because you typically say what you feel and believe instead of holding back, but it’s all worth it as thankfully the journey continues.