Triage lessons learned from death and dying stirred up by Blind Brook & P.C. graduations
July 10, 2024 at 11:33 p.m.
In matters of life and death, friendship matters even when you haven't seen those friends in more years than you can remember going all the way back to high school. And that is something the month of June always reminds me of even as the calendar has turned into July.
Here's why:
June was Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness Month, but it is a month I will never forget. June is the month that I "died" in the clinical sense until triage surgeons in Alaska restarted my heart during lifesaving, leg-saving surgery after I was hit by a falling cottonwood tree that melted loose from its glacial anchor while I was shooting the rapids going down the Whiting River.
It happened in the final half-hour of a 10-day adventure travel writing assignment for a major New York newspaper that gave me more adventure than I'd signed on for on that long ago summer solstice day that was the longest day of the year in more ways than one.
Death and dying lessons
This is a story about that day more than 40 years ago and what I learned about living from that near death and dying experience from that moment on.
Those memories surfaced from my subconscious following the recent high school graduations at Blind Brook and Port Chester High School.
Those local graduations reminded me of my own graduation from Fordham Prep in 1954 on a similarly hot June day more than 70 years ago.
When I couldn't ever imagine that someday I would die on an operating table in Juneau, Alaska, on a very different kind of June day, June 21, 1982 to be specific, June 21 coincidentally being the day of this year’s Blind Brook graduation.
That coincidence reminded me of how seven of my high school friends—fellow college athletic track scholarship athletes who I hadn't seen in years—would appear seemingly out of nowhere to help me put my life back together in ways we could never have expected.
Nor could we have ever expected how our lives would turn out in later life.
Message for local grads
And that is something the recent grads from Blind Brook and Port Chester may want to think about, maybe even learn from as well.
Because now is the time when they start shedding the last vestiges of their younger selves, parting ways with high school friendships with college and work beckoning, graduation bringing them—as it did us—one step closer to the adults they (and we) would become.
Que sera sera
And while there is no telling what their futures will be, I know what our post Fordham Prep futures brought us once we ran into the closing stages of the race against time that no one can ever win, que sera sera time as in what will be will be.
Michael Iachetta runs the re-creation of the original marathon in Athens, Greece, in a Fordham track uniform.Courtesy of Michael Iachetta
Which is why I am writing about the lasting value of high school friendships, me in my later years, vulnerable to the aging process, wondering how I got here, knowing I couldn't, wouldn't be here without those boys of summer that I once ran with at Fordham in the days when we thought we would never grow old until the ravages of time taught us otherwise.
Here's what happened to us on the way from there to here.
Or at least those of us who ran together on the track team at Fordham Prep, home of the Rams, our athletic teams sharing the same nickname as the Port Chester Rams.
All seven of us won college scholarships, and we all went our separate ways until my "death" brought us back together.
The way it was
I dodged my head and shoulders out of the way of that falling tree, but not my leg which took the hit that left a hole where the front part of my left leg used to be from the knee down. Somehow the wilderness guides got me to shore. Tourniqueted my leg. And radioed our location ahead to the seaplanes who were already coming to get us or else I would have died in the wild. Fast forward from there to the ambulance rushing me to the hospital in Juneau, a priest giving me the last rites of the Catholic church before I went into surgery, me begging the triage surgeons not to amputate my leg no matter what happened. And they didn't. Even though they had to restart my heart and close me up before they got me off the table. But not before I walked through that tunnel into the afterlife, at least in my subconscious, my deceased ancestors beckoning me towards them through light beyond light, a loving presence giving me the choice of whether I wanted to stay there in a state of grace or come back to earth and never be without pain. I chose a second chance at life because there was so much I had to make up for to my family. I returned to earth and woke up shivering, saying "I'm cold. So cold."
Several operations later, I was shot full of morphine and flown from Alaska to New York's LaGuardia Airport and ambulanced from there to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City for still more surgeries, followed by rehabilitation there as well as at world-renowned rehabs like Rusk in NYC and Burke in White Plains. I learned how to walk again, more or less, first with crutches, then with a cane, never without pain. Doctors explained that, in layman's terms, that Alaskan tree had basically rebounded my knee down to my ankle, severing my arteries, paralyzing the lifting mechanism and leaving a hole where the front of my leg used to be. That wound had to be filled with pigskin flown in from Buffalo that was covered with skin grafted from my upper thigh. It wasn't pretty. But at least my leg was still attached. And I was no longer a legalized, hospitalized, middle class junkie who went through pain-killing drug withdrawal before I returned home to my wife and kids. But the person who returned was a shell of my former self. I was a mess physically, mentally and spiritually.
Faith healing experience
In her desperation, my long-suffering wife took me to a faith-healing service at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Scarsdale. There a faith-healer prayed over me in tongues, mysterious sounds that bypass the mind and come straight from the heart, as she laid her healing hands on my destroyed knee, only to pause after a few minutes to say: "The Holy Spirit is telling me to get something." She went into the sacristy and came back with what looked like a rolled up scroll that had been in her purse. I was dressed in my faded old track sweats and remember thinking it looks like a relay stick as I reached up to take that scroll like a baton. And began to read the words written on it, smiling cynically at first thinking this is spiritual pablum. Only to find an eerie calm coming over me as I read on. I gave the words the supreme writer's tribute by looking up to the top to see who had written those words. The byline said Rev. Peter McCall.
"Did McCall ever run for Fordham?" I asked the angelic-looking blonde faith healer who had been praying over me.
"I don't know," she said.
"Is he blond, tall and does he stutter?" I asked.
"How could you know that?" she responded.
"Because I used to run the anchor leg for Fordham and Pete McCall used to run the third leg and pass the relay stick off to me," I said.
And when she told me that Rev. McCall headed a faith-healing ministry that conducted Masses and healing services on the first Saturday of each month at a church on the Yonkers/Mount Vernon border, I decided to attend. The services took place in a small church located across the street from the emergency room of a hospital. And the church was packed as was the altar which was filled with a group of silent nuns whose lives were devoted to praying for people who no longer believed in God. And the lead speaker was a faith-healing spiritual priestess named Maryanne Lacy who began the service by saying the Holy Spirit was telling her there was a wavering Catholic in the congregation who had lost his faith after a crippling leg injury and whoever that was should come forward to be prayed over. I listened unbelievingly as she spoke, kneeling in the last row in the back of the church wondering how she could have known what she did about my leg injury. I was relieved when someone else stepped forward.
Brain tumor and legs
"What happened to you?" Ms. Lacy asked.
"I have a brain tumor," the supplicant responded.
"No brain tumors now," she replied. "We will pray over you later. But first the Spirit is telling me we are called to heal the leg injury. Whoever that is, please come forward."
And slowly, hesitatingly, I made my way up to the altar where the priestess was joined by Rev. McCall, the same Pete McCall I used to run with at Fordham, older, wiser, now a nationally renowned author, speaker and faith healer but still the same stuttering Pete.
"Mike, what happened to you?" he wanted to know.
Michael Iachetta on one of his travel writing assignments in Petra, Jordan.Courtesy of Michael Iachetta
I told him. And a look of indescribable sadness came over his face "We will pray over you," he said. And he made the sign of the cross on my forehead and he and the priestess began praying in tongues over me until an irresistible force began pulling me backwards and I was falling into the arms of what I later learned were called faith catchers. They gently lowered me to the ground where I gazed upwards to a ceiling filled with a fresco depicting angels and saints hovering over me. I was filled with a calm I hadn't felt since that tree hit me. Or ever before. And for the first time I was able to accept what had happened to me in Alaska as a call for change for the better in my life. And I was grateful for the gift of life that had almost ended shortly after taking my last run before taking off on the last leg of that fated adventure. Pete and his priestess prayed over me many times since. And Pete got the word out to our Fordham teammates about what had happened to me and the friends I hadn't seen since high school stepped up like we were still running together only in a different kind of race.
During the intervening years that dated back from when we started winning age-group weight-class midget and sub-midget (under 108 pounds) relays as freshmen running at Madison Square Garden, grew up to become varsity college scholarship caliber runners as seniors and graduated into varying degrees of success in later life.
The 7 ups and downs
1) John Hand went through pre-med at Fordham U as an outstanding scholarship half-miler, became a Navy doctor, graduated from the War College in Newport, R.I., rose to near admiral status, retired to Rhode Island, and had a son killed in an automobile accident there after pulling out onto a highway in a family car bearing the license plates Running Doc. Johnny gave me valuable advice as to what to do regarding all my surgeries. And never charged me a dime.
2) Constantine (Tino) Clemente, a sprinter, won an academic scholarship to Holy Cross, became the multi-million-dollar general counsel for a major corporation, argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, married and had two daughters who died way too young (my goddaughter, an early admittance to Yale, was killed in an automobile accident when she wrapped her new BMW around a tree near Eastchester's Lake Isle while her parents were building their dream home in the Hamptons and their older daughter, named after my wife, who died from unexplained causes in Atlanta). Tino handled all my post-accident legal work pro bono. And died in June of a brain aneurism.
3) George Hunt turned down a scholarship to Fordham U as a middle distance runner to become a Jesuit priest, became editor of America Magazine, a leading Catholic mag, and kept encouraging me to write my way out of my post-accident depression. He wrote the introduction to my wife's book "The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living." And died of a heart attack in his early 60s.
Vanny, Art & Tommy
4) Don Van Stry, the fastest and handsomest of us all, dropped the stick on a fouled up baton exchange between the first and second legs in the finals of the national sprint relay championships when we were one of the six teams to qualify, leaving McCall and me wondering how we would have finished running the third and anchor legs in that title run at Madison Square Garden. Vanny kept reminding me throughout my recovery that if we could overcome his falling to the track in that long ago race in the Nationals at the Garden, we could overcome anything. Vanny would become our most envied classmate, dropping out of college to see the world with the U.S. Army, dating Playboy bunnies (including a long relationship with one who later shot her husband). He played Hollywood bit roles in the movies, became a lounge singer in Carmel, Calif., and is now living in an assisted living home there with borderline dementia after a bout of continuous and near disastrous falls.
5-6) Art Cunningham and Tommy Ward both won distance running scholarships to Fordham U, achieved success in the business world, and kept reminding me how many obstacles we had overcome as runners who never quit on our way to becoming winners with me being the only one who ran either the lead off or anchor leg on every championship relay, from sprint to distance. They kept reminding me that they knew it would take more than getting hit by a tree to slow me down
Pete, me & the tree
7) Pete McCall: Flunked out of Fordham as a freshman and came back to become student government president as a senior as well the NYC Catholic High School quarter mile champion and one of our best runners. Turned down an athletic scholarship to Manhattan College to become a priest, was turned down by the Jesuits and became a Franciscan friar instead as well as one of the outstanding faith healers in the country, a motivational speaker despite never losing his stutter and a best-selling inspirational author. I ran my way through Fordham on a track scholarship, wrote for every newspaper in New York as an undergraduate, and became a globe-trotting, nationally syndicated writer, columnist, arts critic and editor. Pete and I were inducted into the Fordham Track & Field Hall of Fame April 6, 2002, the first simultaneous induction in school history, Pete posthumously (he died of a heart attack in his early 60s reaching for a phone alone in a hotel room in Hawaii where he was conducting a faith healing retreat). I was the first runner in Fordham history (founded 1841) to run the half mile in under two minutes (1:59.2) as well as the only runner to run the re-creation of the original marathon in Athens, Greece, in a Fordham track uniform and run the New York Marathon shortly thereafter. Pete's faith healing priestess was there during the Hall of Fame induction ceremony along with my family (she is now in an assisted living facility in Tarrytown with near dementia).
So those were the days, my friend, we thought they would never end. But they did.
Since that fated tree, my life's journey from wherever to whenever has taken me to Belize to swim with the sharks, Jerusalem where I was raped by a camel in heat on my way to the Dead Sea, India where I rode an elephant to the Taj Mahal, the Bahamas to see exotic birds, Africa on safari to see even more exotic animals in the wild, Jordan to feel less ancient in the ancient city of Petra, and on and on. Even going back to Alaska to once again shoot the rapids and thank the surgeons who saved my life and leg and the priest who gave me the last rites of the Catholic church. I came a long way from growing up in Little Italy off Fordham Road in the Bronx. But the one constant that matters is that through the good and the bad, friends dating back to high school have been there to make it all even more memorable on the way to my graduating ever so much closer to the final trip from whence there is no return.
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