When you're told you have an aneurysm in your brain, you can be confident that it will be a day you will never forget. You don't expect, however, for the days to come to be even more memorable, and for entirely different reasons.
Monday morning, after Lauren had dropped me off at work, leaving me for the first time since the diagnosis, I reached my nadir. I felt scared, confused, and alone; aware that I had to find the strength to start moving forward, but doubtful that I could.
I started to call some hospitals in the Denver area, blindly searching for a neurosurgeon, and the response on the other end only confirmed just how alone I really was.
"You mean to tell me you were diagnosed with an aneurysm in your brain, and your neurologist didn't set up a follow-up appointment with a surgeon for you?"
Uhhh...yeah. Is that bad?
By noon I wasn't getting far, so I took a break and walked over to a client's office. I figured I owed it to them to let them know what was going on, so we could both plan accordingly should I miss significant time at work.
As I sat down with my client, Tony, and explained to him what had happened over the weekend, I anticipated, and maybe on some level even craved, the sympathy that was sure to come. Only it never came.
Instead, Tony gave me the kick in the ass I so desperately needed. Instead of "I'm so sorry" I got "What are you doing to fix this?" If he didn't agree with my approach, he let me know it. If he thought I wasn't doing enough, he told me so. By the time I left him, I had my first real plan, the first step of which was to take advantage of working for a large firm on the east coast, and see if our network of clients and contacts could yield some breaks.
Back at my desk, I fired off an email to most of my firm, explaining what had happened and warning of my impending absence. At the same time, I called one of the firm's partners, Scott, who had made his mark working with the health care industry. Within minutes Scott had contacted a neurosurgery group in New Jersey, and they had graciously agreed to review my films if I'd overnight them over.
While this was going on, something even more amazing happened. In response to my email to coworkers, my inbox started to fill up with words of encouragement, promises of prayers and assurances that everything was going to turn out OK. While some of these responses came from good friends, the majority were from people I barely worked with, or in some cases had never met.
These people will never, can never, understand how meaningful their words were. Not simply for the message itself, but for what it meant as part of the bigger picture: I wasn't alone anymore.
Soon after, I received a call from another partner at my firm, Steve. A great friend as well, I knew Steve would be there for me, but what he had to say was completely unexpected.
"Steve Antico wants you to call him right away."
Now, Steve Antico is a friend of the firm, and by all accounts a great guy, but I couldn't imagine what interest he had in my plight. I had literally worked with Steve for one hour in my entire career, and much of that was spent arguing over the interpretation of the "service partner" exception to IRC Section 736(b). Thrilling stuff, sure, but not the type of conversation that typically builds a life-long bond.
I called Steve, and in his typical fashion, he hit the ground running from the second he picked up the phone. He was good friends with one of the top neurologists in the country, and he wanted to get me in touch with him asap. Steve even asked me to overnight my films to him, so he could get them over to his surgeon buddy as soon as feasible.
Within hours, I received a call from an unknown number, answered it, and on the other end was one of the nation's foremost aneurysm experts, all courtesy of some attorney that barely knew me. That conversation was the turning point in this whole process, as it was the first time a neurosurgeon heard my story yet assured me: you can beat this. And I owe it all to a collection of people who had no reason to give a shit, but chose to anyway. How do you repay people like that?
And then it just kept coming. Another partner at my firm, who had experienced his own adversity, called me and recommend a surgeon. But not just any surgeon, the guy. Perhaps the most respected neurosurgeon in the country.
So now I had a name, but how does a guy like me get a meeting with a top surgeon on short notice? Well, he doesn't, unless it turns out a family friend happens to be a hospital administrator at the same facility, and good friend of the surgeon. And that's where Huey Lavery came in, offering up his services to a kid 10 years his junior, who he knew mostly from flying past me during open-water swims off the 9th Street dock in Surf City.
Three miles away, my wife was experiencing the same phenomenon. More caring, more crying, more sharing, more inspiring.
I'll be honest: I've never cared much for humanity. I've always been that way; jaded, bitter, and cynical, I've lived much of my life by the mantra that the only way people won't let you down is if you don't expect anything from them.
The problem was, of course, that I had never experienced the inherent goodness of mankind first hand. I had only read the papers, watched the news, and as tends to happen, become numb to the evils people are capable of.
But that's the easy way out. Anybody can scour the headlines and write humanity off as a lost cause. But the things I witnessed on that Monday, the actions of people like Tony and Steve and Scott and Len and Huey and Dean and everyone that let me know they're thinking about me, these are things that don't end up in the papers or on the news. They are, however, the very best of what people are capable of, and I am genuinely ashamed that I needed to benefit from it in order to know that it existed.
Thank you all,
Tony and Lauren
