On February 14, 2021, I nearly choked to death.

I was preparing to grill some gorgeous rib eye steak and had made a drink for my daughter. That’s the last thing I remember. The next three hours are a complete blackout. (Remember the blackout part because it’s important.) 

I know now that somehow while grilling, I choked on a piece of steak. I must have made my way to the bathroom because I returned to the kitchen with my hand on my throat.

My daughter’s boyfriend jumped into action. The Heimlich maneuver didn’t work, and I lost consciousness. He began CPR on the spot.

It’s important to understand that choking is like putting a cork in your respiratory system. Your oxygen supply is cut off, and eventually, everything stops—including your heart.

I had no pulse when paramedics arrived. I was in a state of nonshockable cardiac arrest and was possibly moments away from being gone for good. The first responders acted quickly. They managed to locate and remove the deeply lodged piece of steak and open my airway. Miraculously, my heart rebooted, and I was rushed to the local hospital’s emergency room.

I spent the next eight days in the hospital (the first four in the ICU) being monitored 24/7, breathing supplemental oxygen, hugging a pillow, coughing up red sludge, and receiving around-the-clock respiratory treatments. In the early evening of February 22, I was released and actually walked out of the hospital.

I mentioned that the entire traumatic event is a blackout for me. There’s a three-hour window of nothing. It turns out that, even when you don’t remember a specific incident, your subconscious sometimes recalls everything. It now seems that some part of my brain remembered and kept replaying my struggle over and over again. But I didn’t know or understand this at the time.

I started having terrible nightmares coupled with vivid, violent, and nerve-racking daydreams. My pulse would race over ninety beats per minute—nonstop for days on end.

I was anxious and afraid. I struggled to focus. I also felt constant worry and hopelessness. Everything was hard. Just hard. I truly believed that I was crazy, I was alone, and that no one could possibly understand what I was going through.

Through all of this, I kept wondering, “What’s wrong with me?” Was it a moral or character defect? If I cared enough, if my faith was strong enough, if it tried hard enough, and if my attitude was positive enough, I should be getting better. Right?

I don’t know if I had a single rock-bottom moment. I had dozens of rock bottoms. Finally, roughly six months after the Valentine’s Day Miracle, I reached out for help. By October I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

It was sometime during this period that a friend recommended a book titled Upside by Jim Rendon. The book is about a newer body of research called Post Traumatic Growth (PTG).

PTG is the idea that people can TRANSFORM and GROW as a result of trauma, tragedy, and adversity. They can be different and even better than they were before. PTG doesn’t mean survivors don’t struggle. PTG means that struggle can result in positive change.

A quote by researcher Richard G. Tedeschi stopped me dead in my tracks.

“In the aftermath of an earthquake, why not build something better?” suggests Dr. Tedeschi. “Don’t just live beneath the rubble, don’t just build the same crappy building that you had before.”

In the aftermath of my earthquake, the idea of post-traumatic growth gave me incredible hope. Through the lens of PTG, I began to see my struggle as an opportunity—the opportunity to change and grow!