When Hope Is Your Only Option: One Man's Brave Journey Through Life's Adversity
By Jim Stavis
()
About this ebook
Diagnosed with juvenile type 1 diabetes at age 17, Jim Stavis was told to expect a shortened lifespan filled with medical difficulties along the way. While some would choose to spend their time asking, "Why me?" and focusing on the very real possibility that their life would end before it even began, Stavis chose to tackle his medical issues hea
Related to When Hope Is Your Only Option
Related ebooks
A Twist of Lyme: Battling a Disease That “Doesn’T Exist” Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedside Manners: The Art of Practicing Medicine Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Cure the Causes: Live the Life you want, not the one prescribed Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beyond Happiness: The 6 Secrets of Lifetime Satisfaction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen Kidneys Fail: A Story of Faith Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStroke Runner: My Story of Stroke, Survival, Recovery and Advocacy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI'm An Open Shirt Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen Your Doctor Has Bad News: Simple Steps to Strength, Healing, and Hope Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Up for the Fight: How to Advocate for Yourself as You Battle Cancer—from a Five-Time Survivor Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRunning Wild: More Than Scars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNourishing Resilience: The Thriver's Guidebook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGuerilla Guide to Brain Tumors: Shameless Dirty Tricks to Beat the System and Stay Alive! Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving with Cancer Without Fears Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen Your Doctor Says, "It's Cancer": Breaking the Cycle of Fear-- Never, Never Giving Up Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConquer Thyself: Everything I Need To Remember To Maintain Total Well-Being Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChemolicious: Getting to Your Best Self: A Guide for Breast Cancer Patients Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSurprised by Tragedy: Finding Hope When Your Days Are Dark Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGetting Better: Healing Prescriptions for Patients, Families And Friends Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Power of Energy Medicine: Your Natural Prescription for Resilient Health Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCancer: A Personal Challenge Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCancer: Exploring YOUR Path Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAngela's Decision: Outsmarting My Cancer Genes and Determining My Fate Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLive Younger, Live Wiser Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConfessions of a Cancer Survivor - My Victory over Cancer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Magic in the Tin: From the author of the critically acclaimed THE BOY ON THE SHED Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Trial of Stage IV Prostate Cancer: A Wife's Case For Faith, Hope, And Help Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGod Is in Control!: Cancer from a Patient/Social Worker Perspective Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnrevealed Revelation: A Remarkable Story of Prostate-Cancer Survival Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRewired: An Unlikely Doctor, a Brave Amputee, and the Medical Miracle That Made History Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Self-Improvement For You
Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Self-Care for People with ADHD: 100+ Ways to Recharge, De-Stress, and Prioritize You! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Big Book of 30-Day Challenges: 60 Habit-Forming Programs to Live an Infinitely Better Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Stolen Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wild at Heart Expanded Edition: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Less Fret, More Faith: An 11-Week Action Plan to Overcome Anxiety Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How May I Serve Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Four Loves Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Think and Grow Rich (Illustrated Edition): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Win Friends and Influence People: Updated For the Next Generation of Leaders Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Grief Observed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Child Called It: One Child's Courage to Survive Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You're Not Dying You're Just Waking Up Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Don't Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table: It's Time to Win the Battle of Your Mind... Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related categories
Reviews for When Hope Is Your Only Option
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
When Hope Is Your Only Option - Jim Stavis
Chapter
1
BRUIN WOODS
The splintered wood of the telephone pole was hot and rough between my hands. I clung desperately to the pole, buckled into an obstacle course harness, wondering if it would hold me. I held tight, my body tingling with fear and anxiety. Sweat slid like wet sheets, not droplets, down the sides of my cheeks.
What was I doing? How did I get here? What would happen to me now?
The day started with challenge and excitement. My wife Renee, daughters Jessica and Ashley, and son Brian and I were enjoying a retreat in the mountains of Lake Arrowhead, California, at a camp called Bruin Woods. It’s a camp for alumni of UCLA (I’m a proud graduate, class of 1977). John Heil (my childhood best friend), his wife, and their children joined us for good times as well. The camp had all the typical activities, like hikes, campfires, talent shows, and a ropes course for some thrills and adventure, too.
Our turn at the ropes course seemed uneventful at first. I felt tired, more tired than usual, but in my usual way of doing things I kept moving forward. The type I diabetes diagnosis I’d received decades before was a constant annoyance to my active and busy life, and always loomed large in the background as a source of foreboding and ill health. But, I persevered no matter what—I ran, I ate, I worked, I parented, type I diabetes be damned.
That is, until I was introduced to that telephone pole near the top of a mountain. Deep in the woods, high in the mountains at a high altitude, I found it harder and harder to breathe. The thermometer outside was ticking up as the summer day warmed. The sun beat down on our heads and backs as we watched the ropes course instructor. He and his assistant, a young woman and a UCLA college student, got harnesses, then buckled and secured each of us in place. Man,
I thought, August in southern California is hot.
We took turns, our families chatting and watching us as, one after another, we scaled this obstacle—this 20foot telephone pole climb towards an ever-hotter sky.
My turn finally came. I mustered up my courage as I gathered the rope (tightly) around my waist. I would climb that pole like everyone else—heat, fear, and diabetes be damned. Inch by inch, I crept up the pole.
Hotter, hotter. Sweating and swearing a bit under my breath, going higher and higher.
As I neared the top of the pole, I gazed out atop the tree line. It was beautiful. We were so high, our mountain peak was above the clouds. Breathtaking! And I only had a few breaths to spare.
In the distance, I could see the calm deep-blue mountain lake. The colors of the trees were a beautiful array of early autumnal green, orange, and golden tones. I was content for the moment to just enjoy the peacefulness and beauty of where I was. I forgot the task at hand, forgot the heat, forgot my fear, and forgot the diabetes that made the climb so demanding.
I must have paused a little longer than expected. My family called out from the base below, You okay, Jim?
I yelled down to them how beautiful everything was up there. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen!
I exclaimed in awe.
But then … then it changed. The beautiful colors slipped to black and white, like an old television screen that moves from clarity to snowy fuzz. The chirping of birds and the constant summer breeze slowly died down, as if everything was growing more distant, then remote, then completely silent.
What was I doing? How did I get here? What would happen next?
My brain fought valiantly for those last few moments of consciousness. Black and white, silence, sweat, shaking, fear, no—wait—hold on—Renee—the kids … then I was out.
Friends told me later they thought I was simply horsing around until my body tumbled loose from the telephone pole twenty feet up in the air. I appeared lifeless, limp, dangling, and at the mercy of a few loops of rope and bandoliers. The people in our group below screamed. My family watched the unfolding scene in horror. Everyone ran to help quickly lower me down to the ground.
The rest of the story was conveyed to me later by my best friend, John Heil. As I mentioned, we were close, and our families were even closer. John’s friendship was always a good steady one, as we both married, built successful careers, and raised our families. Yet, that day it would be different. That day our friendship became a lifesaving one.
John and I had been the best of friends ever since junior high. Here we were, thirty years later, and I was unconscious, laying on the ground. He rushed into action. The others in the group gratefully let him take the lead. He stripped me of the harness and forcefully began CPR. An older man in the group, a radiologist, started chest compressions.
They worked in tandem, determined to bring me back. Pumping my chest, my best friend working to fill my lungs with air, my family watching and waiting, terrified at the scene. I still think of Renee and my children, seeing me laying helpless on the ground, hoping against hope that John could breathe life back into my body. The instructor’s assistant, Michelle, who I was talking with before climbing the pole, dissolved into tears. She’d lost her father only the year before to a tragic heart attack, and my circumstances brought all her grief back up again.
The paramedics were called and on their way. However, being up this high in the mountains and this far away from town, they could be minutes or an hour away.
Everyone standing there knew I did not have many minutes, and I certainly did not have an entire hour. It was all up to John. He pushed air into my lungs.
I did not push back.
He thrust another big breath into my chest.
My body did not respond, still appearing lifeless. While most people never experience a moment like this in their lifetime, as you get to know me, you will discover I have had a handful of hanging-on-by-a-thread moments over the years.
Twenty long minutes John breathed tirelessly for me, and nothing seemed to work. My chest did not rise. I was not breathing on my own. He kept going.
Eventually, he shook his head in despair. His wife Nancy tried to comfort my wife Renee, who was inconsolable. She said, If anyone can save Jim, John can do it.
Hope slowly waned, and despair loomed ominous and heavy. John told me later he could not believe this was how my life would end. No—no, not now. Please God! No!
Chapter
2
MIRACLE IN THE MOUNTAINS
It was a desperate moment. Nothing was working as my best friend and a doctor performed CPR, trying heroically to save my life.
John stopped doing CPR for a moment.
He was losing hope, fearing the worst. It was okay that he stopped for a moment, because that was the moment everything changed.
He gazed up to the sky, as if asking for divine intervention. It was then his prayers were instantly answered. As he gazed upward, he heard his mother’s familiar soft voice. She had died just a few years before. He heard her say, Do not stop, John. You can save him. Do not stop, John. You can save him.
John shot back to me with one more forced breath of borrowed air, and I suddenly gasped and sputtered back to life. John sat on the ground in amazement, stunned by what had just happened. He is not a religious man, but as he told us later, it was akin to a religious experience. Finally, I was alive again, when just moments before it seemed as if I would not return to the living.
In a complete reversal of what happened high up in the air on the telephone pole when the ambient sounds grew softer as I faded out of consciousness, the volume in my ears clicked back on. First, I could hear again. Then, I could see.
What was I doing? How did I get here? What just happened to me?
I was lying on the ground with everyone huddled around me, afraid tragedy had struck on the mountaintop at Bruin Woods. The past thirty minutes were completely blank to me. People told me, You stopped breathing.
John’s face was ruddy from exertion. He told me he performed CPR for over twenty minutes after they lowered me from the ropes and got me out of the harness.
Renee was in shock. My wife was still stunned that I almost left her.
The paramedics finally arrived and whisked me off to a small mountaintop clinic. A doctor confirmed I indeed had a cardiac event, but was uncertain what caused it. Then an ambulance came and took me down the mountain to a hospital in San Bernardino, California, and it was there I learned that one coronary artery was 95 percent blocked. The condition of my heart would have typically led to sudden death.
There usually is no warning when such events occur. How lucky was I?
I had passed out while strapped into a harness twenty feet in the air. Friends on the ground watched my brush with death, then had seen my life saved. I could, however, have easily lost my life in the solitude the day before as I ran the trails up the mountain alone. There, I would have also seen the colors of nature deepen, the sky darken, and fuzz. There would have been a fade to silence without a hero and CPR. I would have been without breath or my life, period.
The doctors had more to tell me at the hospital. It was not just that I had a bad heart—I was also experiencing the complications of my long ongoing battle with type 1 diabetes.
At age 42, on that hot summer day, I was lucky that I did not die strapped in a harness at the top of a hot splintery telephone pole.
When I was diagnosed in 1971, diabetics could not afford to be romantics. We were told our lives would likely be filled with kidney and heart disease, blindness, and possibly limb amputations. It was a bleak future that greeted me, and anyone else who received a similar diagnosis back then.
I decided as a young man that each day would be a good day if I woke up in the morning. Everything else would come, and life was best lived in the moment and not in anticipation of a gory unknown future. As an adult, I used my diabetes as a motivator to keep me healthy, eager, and moving. Between running up mountains, getting married, having kids, starting a steel business, and even doing high ropes courses on the hottest summer day, I vowed that type 1 diabetes would not stop me until it did. That day in Bruin Woods, diabetes finally stopped me—or at least slowed me down.
Now what did I do? I could write pages about the natural beauty of that view from the top of that pole. Instead, let me share another perspective I gained. It’s not about trees or clouds, but about enlightenment. It was the event that finally forced me to come to grips with my health and mortality. I began understanding the specific changes and shifts I needed to make for my survival. Sometimes, out of darkness comes light. Sometimes, out of a fall comes a rise. That’s how I chose to remember what happened at Bruin Woods that day.
Despite facts to the contrary (such as a chronic or terminal diagnosis), we often ignore warning signs and convince ourselves of an alternate reality. I realized I operated this way for a very long time.
I thought if I could pretend to be normal,
as if I wasn’t sick or afflicted by this disease called type 1 diabetes, I could literally will the effects to not manifest, to not be. You might call this behavior living in denial, and perhaps that is true. However, my coping behavior was always critical to my ability to persevere, to live life resisting doom and gloom, and to wake up each day with a positive sense of hope in my heart. I now understood that the bleak forecast given to me in 1971 was based on the statistics of other diabetics. It was not necessarily a true death