Vol 48: Over the moutaintop
The last speech ever delivered by civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took place on April 3, 1968 and was entitled ‘I’ve been to the mountaintop’. The speech was in support of economic justice for striking sanitation workers at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee but Dr. King Jr. also spoke about having personally faced difficult days. It would end up being the final and most memorable of his words. The man who tried to change the world through peace died by violence. He was assassinated the following day.
Prophetically, Dr. King Jr. said that when looking over the mountaintop, he’d seen the Promised Land and even though he might not get there, he wasn’t afraid. Fear, after all, only cripples us from moving forward and in life, under the harshest of circumstance, you have to be strong to survive.
My friend and patient, hereafter referred to as John, has listened to that speech often over the years, wondering what went through Dr. King Jr’s mind while writing it. It has been a constant source of inspiration for John and thinking about it gives him an opportunity to reflect upon his own challenges.
John was born in 1975, four months premature and weighing less than three pounds. For the first six weeks of his life he lived in an incubator in the neonatal ICU at the Princess Margaret Hospital because of his poorly developed organs. Initially, doctors gave him a low probability for survival but each day John became stronger and stronger.
Eventually he was released, his life entrusted to the care of his loving parents, but within hours, his parents had to rush him back to the hospital when he wouldn’t stop vomiting. It was shortly after being breast fed that his stomach shook and his jaws trembled violently. It was the choking noise that he made, as if he could barely catch his breath that frightened his mother the most. Because of his small, fragile size, she panicked immediately and cried and screamed when she arrived at the hospital for the on-call doctors and nurses to save her newborn baby. John’s mother had never been so afraid in her entire life. She desperately and repeatedly prayed for a miracle.
John had a birth defect known as esophageal atresia, where the esophagus is split into two sections making it impossible for food to pass from the mouth to the stomach. It initially went undetected because he was previously fed intravenously. His situation was critical and required emergent surgical intervention.
Operating on a newborn is incredibly challenging and his surgeons initially struggled. John’s atresia was complicated by a blockage or fistula that connected his esophagus to his windpipe, which is why his breathing had become so precarious. It took hours to surgically reconnect the two ends of his esophagus but ultimately the surgery was a success and John was able to breathe and feed without any further obstruction.
From then straight through to his teenage years, however, John was plagued by recurrent bronchial infections. He recalls constantly being sick as a child and his parents were always on guard, overly cautious about letting him play outside, getting wet when it rained and being amongst other kids that had even a minor cough or fever. But it was his parents’ protective, heavy-handed approach that kept him alive and it would be years before he faced another serious, life threatening medical event.
In 2012, during the Christmas holidays when John, then 36, was on a break from law school, he took a young woman he had just started dating to the carnival. They were joined by a few family members. They went on multiple rides, played games, laughed and enjoyed the typical carnival food offerings like hot dogs, pizza and soft serve ice cream. But approximately 30 minutes before they were getting ready to leave John began to cough and suddenly felt ill. He assumed it was from something he ate so he slept that night but the next morning, he felt even worse.
He had a fever, a persistently brutal cough, chest pain especially during inhalation and intense fatigue. After three days of no improvement, despite taking over-the-counter flu medication and only consuming soup and ginger-ale, John went to see his family physician and was prescribed oral antibiotics. A day later, his chest and stomach pain intensified. By this time, John was struggling to breathe. His family was mortified by how quickly and without warning his symptoms went from mild to severe. He was rushed to the emergency room at the same hospital where his life had been saved as an infant.
Though nurses immediately transported John who was sweating profusely and in physical distress, to the most critical section of the emergency room, it took three hours for x-rays to be taken. Ultimately, the x-rays were inconclusive and only showed a cloudy mass on the left side of his chest cavity. John was admitted and transported to the floor as soon as a bed became available. At this point his whole body ached.
A CT scan of his chest was ordered revealing three remarkably large infected abscesses within his lung cavity that had to be surgically drained. John’s lungs had collapsed and had he not been operated on during that time frame, he in all likelihood would have died. He remained in the hospital for two weeks following his surgery. Since then, he fortunately hasn’t experienced any similar symptoms and to this day, John has no idea what caused the abscesses to form.
The take home message that John wanted to share with readers is the importance of getting medical insurance, paying attention to your health and giving thanks and appreciation to the people around you. He married his girlfriend who diligently saw him through his health crises and they now have a beautiful young daughter.
As a father, with a deeper insight that one can only obtain after becoming a parent, he also has immense gratitude for his mother for always comforting, protecting and taking care of him as a child and as an adult. He couldn’t return to law school for two months and when he did, he walked with a cane so his classmates rallied around him and helped him catch up on all of the classes that he missed. He is forevermore grateful to them and to God for all of his life’s blessings.
It’s easy to give up and lose heart when bad things happen to us but there’s a reason why we climb mountains. The long, unyielding stretches of hardship challenges our perseverance by pushing us to the brink of collapse. But for those able to summon the strength and endurance required to push forward, the gifts of hard work lie in wait on the other side of the mountaintop. There, in plain sight, are the fruits of our labor.
My patient was baptized as John because no one believed that he’d live beyond a few days so it wasn’t until he was released from the hospital following his surgery that he was finally given his real (undisclosed) name.
John has been battle-tested from childhood and is prepared for anything that life throws at him. He now knows that his wife and daughter, successful career as a lawyer and the love and appreciation of his friends and family were the reward for his climb. And just as Dr. King Jr declared, this breath-taking promised land awaits anyone who’s facing overwhelming trials but remains bold enough to keep the faith and courageous enough to survive.
This is The KDK Report.
