Silicon Valley Exit Event: Aftermath

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it. — Lou Holtz

A raft of snags

High on drugs, I was day dreaming when my phone rang. With difficulty caused by my impaired hearing, I slowly located the direction of the sound. I turned my eyes and I saw my black iPhone 5 laying on a small tray table. The little table was placed very close to my body, hanging in the air, supported by an adjustable arm attached to my bed. Out of habit, I tried to pick up the phone with my right hand and, to my confusion, I couldn’t lift it. The phone stopped ringing but, puzzled, I tried to grab it again to see who was calling. Even with more care and intention, I couldn’t push my fingers against iPhone’s body to grab it. I finally realized I was too weak to do it. I had to call Claire, my nurse, to help me with the phone. When she came to my bed, the phone rang again, she picked it up for me and placed next to my ear.

My parents just woke up in Europe, learnt what happened and called me immediately. It was 7am on Sunday for them in Poland and 10pm on Saturday for me in California. Naturally, both my mom and dad were very worried for me; I later learnt that my dad almost fainted when he has heard the news about me. They both sounded relieved once my beaten voice reached them over phone. I explained briefly that I crashed into a tree while skiing but my condition wasn’t too bad. I told them I was airlifted to the hospital and I was looked after at the Intensive Care Unit. Speaking slowly, I listed my injuries and I explained that none of them were life-threatening or causing a disability. Then, I apologized for being very tired and I promised I’ll call them back the following day.

Only the next morning, I processed the significance of my trouble from last night. It was the first sign I entered the new reality where every day tasks like grabbing a phone or eating food elevated themselves into major life challenges. Even though I got a little anxious of newly discovered limitations, I maintained my serenity. To the extent that drugs didn’t make me completely numb, I understood I just had a major accident and I’ll need to deal with the consequences. In accord with the American spirit, I felt staying positive is the only attitude I should consider. There was no reason to dig the hole I got into any deeper. On top of that, my imagination wasn’t practiced in picturing physical injury ramifications. I have never had any major trauma in my life before and I was simply unaware of the monsters that lurked ahead. I had to uncover them one by one.

Later on Sunday two of my coworkers, Adriaan and Paul, visited me. Adriaan is a friend of mine I’ve met at EPFL during my student exchange in Switzerland. We moved to California together to work for Typesafe and he became my boss. It was a bit unusual setup to have a friend as a supervisor but it worked very well for us. Paul is a cofounder of Typesafe and he worked on the Scala team with Adriaan and me. If I was asked to describe Paul with one word, I would pick “character”. We shared a tendency to adopt strong views which would lead to occasional clashes. Nonetheless, I felt we liked each other. Adriaan and Paul chatted with me a little bit but I don’t recall details of our conversation. I think they asked me what happened, how do I feel and what do I need. Adriaan reminded me of two issues that I blissfully passed over. The first one was about my apartment in San Francisco that I would have to move out in less than two weeks. Even when I recieved the reminder, I didn’t have the energy or the mental capacity to think about it. That problem was just too big for me to handle at the time and Adriaan offered to help. The other issue was doing the paperwork related to the health insurance. I needed to provide details of my health insurance so the hospital and Trauma crew would know where to send bills.

We also touched on my upcoming surgery where I would get my jaw wired shut. A surgeon was about to install a fairly complicated system of wires that would block any motion of my jaw for 5–6 weeks to let broken bones heal. I was duly transitioning to a liquid diet for the same period of time. Paul offered to get me a food blender that I would definitely need. He asked his wife to search for one and they got the best blender money could find. When I left the hospital, the Vitamix blender became my best friend. Paul’s gift was decidedly the most spot on thing I got in a long time.

I remember how I shared other people’s line of thinking that went like this “Oh, wired shut jaw. It’s not that bad. You just eat with a straw”. However, and you know there was a “however” coming, I was startled to examine the wires once I finally got them. The only thing I could somewhat hope to intake with a straw was water. Any liquid more dense than water, something that carries calories, had no chance of passing through a close-packed organization of my teeth and steel wires. To my surprise, the way to eat when you have a wired shut jaw is to inject food down to the back of your mouth with a syringe and a piece of rubber pipe attached to it. The reason to pass food to the back of your mouth is that there’s more space between rows of upper and lower teeth in the back compared to closely clenched teeth in the front. I was truly puzzled how I’m going to use a syringe with both of my wrists broken and forearms wrapped by orthopedic casts. And it was as difficult as it sounds.

The first few days I spent at the Intensive Care Unit were mostly transquil. I got my jaw shut with steel wires and I was under constant supply of pain killers. Days passed with me just laying in bed sleeping and waking up occasionally to “eat” with a syringe and chat a little bit with Claire, my nurse. The great thing about the intensive care is that a single nurse is looking after at most two patients at the same time. Claire could spend as much time with me as I needed. Our little conversations were highlights of my awake moments. She was accommodating when I struggled with saying every single word. She would listen attentively and we would even joke together.

Shortly after my accident the news started spreading. My friends and relatives from around the world flooded me with with a burst of messages, emails and texts. Many of the people, who decided to reach out now, I haven’t been in touch for a long time. I’ve read every single note out of hundreds I received, but I responded just to a small fraction — it was too hard for me to type on a phone. I must admit that, before my crash, I used to be a bit cynical about the value of such a sudden attention rush of other people. “Does it really help to have a collection of hundred of similarly looking messages to go through?” — I was theorizing to myself. Having been on the receiving end of this question, I have no doubts anymore. If you have one of your friends going through a trauma, send them kind words. It’s less about what you say exactly but more about showing you care. Your message will bring good memories and will motivate your friend to not fall apart into pieces, because you care and nobody wants to fail other people.

During my stay in the hospital, Claire had a day off. A guy in his forties came to take care of me for that one day and I almost immediately felt he’s not the right person to be a nurse. We didn’t talk much during the day. I called for help late in the evening when I realized I didn’t get anything to eat for lunch and for dinner I got a standard meal that required chewing. My new nurse responded to me pressing the alert button, half listened to what I had to say and just walked away. He came back twenty minutes later saying that there was a mistake and people who deliver food didn’t get the note I’m on a liquid diet. He said the kitchen is closed now and there’s nothing he could do. A little anxious I responded “But I’m really hungry”. He left again and came back a few minutes later carrying a carton box of orange juice in his hand that he just got from a vending machine. He told me to have some orange juice and that’ll have do it for my dinner. I was thirsty so I drunk my little orange juice and quietly hated the guts of that guy. It was his mistake that I didn’t get a proper dinner and he didn’t have courage to admit it and apologize. He was so insensitive that I couldn’t believe he worked as a nurse. The feeling of anger slowly gave to feeling of sadness. I realized how dependent on others’ people good will I became. Dizzy from hunger and resigned, I fell asleep shortly after.

A few days after his hospital visit, Adriaan had good news for me. My problem with not having a place to live found its solution. Typesafe, the company I worked for, offered me to stay in one of bedrooms of the corporate apartment rented in San Francisco. I was really relieved to hear the news. The corporate apartment was very modern, suited in an easily accessible building. I didn’t think about it earlier but given my two broken wrists, any type of friction or malfunction presented itself as a mountainous hurdle. For example, an old door knob slightly resistant to motion, one you can frequently see in San Francisco, was an obstacle impossible for me to overcome. Only when I moved in, I appreciated how lucky I was to have been offered a modern place to stay and heal my injuries. The adjustments I was going through were reseting my expectations — what used to be comfortable became necessary, and what used to be fun was now impossible.

I got released from the hospital on Friday, 6 days after I got airlifted from a slope in Kirkwood. When I first heard I would get released so soon I was surprised especially that I would get discharged almost immediately after leaving the Intensive Care Unit. Quick discharges are there by design of US health care system. The idea is that you stay in a hospital only when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you’re sent home as soon as possible. Initially, I thought this practice is motivated by cost savings. US health care system is one of the most expensive in the world and hospital stays are their own category of “expensive”. Later on, I learnt the policy of quick discharges is not only about saving money. The medical research studies show clearly that patients recover faster and feel better when surrounded by familiar environment and people (family).

Even more snags

Adriaan came in early afternoon to pick me up from the hospital. After dealing with the discharge paperwork, we got into his Mini Cooper and set off to drive to San Francisco. I was struck by the beautiful weather and bright sunshine. It was the first time I saw sun in 6 days and it was a bit disorienting. The two-hour drive came out as rather uneventful, although I noticed how oversensitive to noise, bright light or any other stimuli I became. Once we reached Berry Street in SoMa district of San Francisco, we got off the car and went to the familiar apartment. When I found this nice condo and used it as a temporary base from which I was looking for my own apartment a few months ago, I had never imagined I would ever return to it again. And here I was standing in its kitchen, looking at the stock of Campbell’s canned soups and the Vitamix blender prepared for my arrival. Once it looked like I was settled in the apartment, Adriaan told me he had dinner plans and he left.

During my entire stay in the hospital I didn’t get a shower. I’m not sure even why; it just happened. In any case, when I was sitting in the Mini Cooper on a way to SF the dream of jumping under a running water was at the top of my list of things I wanted to do. As soon as Adriaan left, I eagerly went to bathroom and started undressing. Suddenly, I noticed that I don’t know how to take off my t-shirt. The orthopedic casts and the pain in my wrists made it impossible for me to pull the fabric off my body. I tried grabbing the t-shirt from different angles and then I tried to use door handles as hooks. Nothing was working, I couldn’t get that damn t-shirt off me. After five minutes of wrestling, I leaned back against the wall, I bend my knees, slid down on the floor and I shed a tear. I finally understood that pure positivity won’t do it, toiling and pains are here to stay with me.

Once I shook the low feelings off, I got a new idea. I went to the kitchen and I found a knife. I cut awkwardly the t-shirt scrap by scrap off myself. When I got into the shower, I discovered that my hands were too weak for me to lift a big bottle of shampoo above my head to spill it on my hair. Both of my hands were wrapped in plastic arm protectors that were there to keep my cast and splint dry. I considered putting a dab of shampoo simply on one of my hands. However, there was no way for me to grab the bottle in one hand and have another one free. I know I’m explaining the very obvious and boring detail of how everyone showers. However, the boring and obvious was now the battlefield of creativity. I went to the kitchen again and picked a tiny Ikea plastic food container from a drawer. I poured, with two hands, a big drop of shampoo into the container and then finally I was ready to wash my hair. Everything about that shower was slow: putting on cast protectors, preparing for going into shower, taking off protectors in a way to not tear them. Overall, I think my first shower took over an hour to complete. With practice over the next few days, I managed to cut down that time by half.

I spent my first week at the apartment mostly learning how to deal with my limitations. Over time, I found my new rhythm. I would get up, get a shower, inject a bowl of blended Cheerios cereal mixed with milk into my mouth followed by injecting a bottle of Ensure, a type of nutritional shake. It was prescribed by my doctors to make sure I get enough nutrition and calories. Ensure was meant to slow down the inevitable loss of my weight. I’m not sure if it succeeded because I lost over 7 kilograms in less than two months. After breakfast I had to wash both the blender and the syringe. Of course, due to my broken hands it was a slow and difficult task. Overall, eating breakfast took up to two hours. Then I would get ready to get out and walk for twenty minutes from Berry Street to 4th & Harrison St where a slick, organic shop called Wholefoods Market was located. Even the affluent San Francisco is readily snarking Wholefoods’s real name should be “Whole Paycheck” due to its eye-popping prices.

Attracted by Wholefood’s section of fresh soups, I was going there every day. I would get a large cup and carry it home in a little reusable plastic bag with a green bird on its side that resembled the Twitter logo in shape. The large soup, I would blend before eating, was my lunch and it was really good. I truly loved the fact Wholefoods existed with their tasty chicken soup, carrot soup or onion soup. Often, if I wanted to buy milk, cereal, maybe some fruits to blend with yogurt and my soup, I had to walk to Wholefoods twice. It turned out, that carrying both a cup of soup and a bottle of milk was too heavy for my fragile hands.

In total, I spent between 5 and 6 hours a day on feeding myself which included blending food, injecting it, cleaning the blender and the syringe and walking to Wholefoods. It was a lot of time but I weirdly enjoyed it. I had something to do in those long, lonely days. It was especially fulfilling because I couldn’t really speak much with other people due to my wired shut jaw.

I would like to pause here and explain why none of my relatives came to States to help me with my recovery. Both my sister and my girlfriend at the time offered to come to San Francisco and help me with whatever I needed. I thought about both offers carefully. I concluded that I was in this weird in-between state of not being completely wrecked by the accident to be reliant on other people for survival but I was injured enough to have difficult moments. I thought that, for others to effectively help me, they would have to be with me all the time supporting me in plethora of small life tasks and they would have to stay with me for over a month. My feeling was that I wasn’t in such a bad shape to ask my sister or my girlfriend to drop their lives and fly to the other side of the world to be with me. Also, I wasn’t living in my own apartment and I felt that inviting guests to stay with me for a long time would be taking one step too far. I chose to communicate with them regularly and figure out how to deal with my daily duties on my own.

Speaking of daily duties, one tricky issue was that I couldn’t use my laptop. The problem was that I couldn’t type on a keyboard or use a trackpad with broken wrists. Adriaan suggested me to order an iPad. I did and it was a great advice. The touch interface and the size and format of iPad were all life savers. It was the first time I truly experienced how revolutionary multi-touch interface to computing was. What for many people, including myself before the accident, felt like an incremental improvement, now was a day-and-night difference. While marveling at this discovery, I thought to myself: “If I hope anything good to come out of this accident, the ability to zoom into things I glossed over comes as my first candidate”. I didn’t expect the number of collected life close-ups to grow so large as it later did, though.

Safety net

On my newly bought iPad an email notification popped up. Once the gmail app loaded the email, I saw:

I was completely astonished to read these words. The short note was written by Joe (not his real name) who, to the best of my knowledge, made millions of dollars building a tech company in the past. I knew Joe for some time but we weren’t close friends. I didn’t ask for money nor did I even hint I would need it. I was so amazed by this email that I was repeatedly gliding my index finger over iPad’s screen almost as if I wanted to touch every word of it. I experienced a high of America’s culture that I love dearly: virtually complete strangers often help each other directly in tough times. Culturally, this is unheard of in Poland where I grew up. The American culture of supporting strangers expands beyond millionaires: many people in US tend to be truly helpful, best to their ability. Of course, that’s not a complete picture of the American society but I very much admire the positive aspect I experienced.

I never had to take Joe’s money but his email had a profound effect on me. Not only it made me happy and proud to be stuck in US surrounded by great people but it also gave me a sense of hope and safety. I knew that if something truly horrible happened to me financially, I had an emergency handle to pull. I closed my iPad’s cover and I decided to go for a walk to think more about it. While walking and reflecting on what just happened, I thought to myself: “The company you work saved your ass by giving you a place to stay and almost a stranger offered you a check in case you need money. Things are not that bad and it would be an embarrassment to fail. You must up your game.” My resolution was to complain little and focus on a swift recovery. And I must admit that, sometimes, I wish I had a small check written by Joe for entertaining the fantasy of robbing a stagecoach together.

Around the same time, I received the other news. Typesafe got a letter saying that I don’t qualify for the California State Disability Insurance income replacement. In US, the Disability Insurance is a fund that pays you salary when you’re unable to work temporarily due to a disability. My situation was a perfect example of when the Disability Insurance should kick in: due to my injuries I wasn’t able to work on a computer. However, as it turned out, there’s a rule in California that you have to be employed full time for half a year to become eligible for payouts. When my accident happened, I was employed in California for exactly 5 months and 29 days. I missed the mark by two days. “This sucks and feels wrong” — I stormed to myself and I decided to find if anything can be done about it. I’ve made numerous phone calls trying to see if there’s any way to appeal the decision but there was none. It meant money would only go out of my bank account as long as I was recovering. My heart was chipped: I’ve been paying relatively large taxes in various countries for years now and when it was the time for the social safety net to provide me some life cushion, it wasn’t there for me. My expenses were big enough (especially with medical bills starting to arrive) that my savings would be evaporating pretty fast. Fortunately, people at Typesafe found a way out for me: I had a fair amount of Paid Time Off (PTO) accumulated so formally I was sent on vacation and received my regular salary.

Over time a pattern started to emerge: cells in social safety net were too large to catch me in my unique circumstances again and again. While my long recovery continued, not only in US but also in Switzerland and Poland there were some twisted reasons why a certain kind of social safety mechanism wouldn’t work for me. The experience taught me there two things I can rely on in a life of an international voyager: cash, that is the absolute king, and a tight circle people who are both caring and capable. Nothing else really helps.

Insider’s approach

The medical bills started to get delivered to my mailbox around a week after discharge from the hospital. I believe the first letter was from Calstar and it was an inquiry how to bill my medical insurance for my helicopter ride to the hospital. When I opened the letter my eyeballs almost popped out as I was reading the breakup of the expenses. Just for airlifting, the total amount to be paid was $45,000. Yes, forty five thousand dollars. After a bit of research, I discovered that my medical insurance would pay 80% of this bill and I would have to cover the remaining 20%. It’s easier to see how much money is that if you have absolute amounts: 20% of out $45,000 is $9000. Oooops — even for a guy working in the tech industry that’s a lot of money.

As I was trying to understand why I need to pay 20% of the exorbitant sum, I recalled that I have a double health insurance coverage. One is tied to my employment at Typesafe and the other one I had to pay for myself when I applied for J1 visa. This insurance tied to the visa was covering just accidents and emergencies. I never treated it seriously because I paid $180 for its coverage of the entire 12 months duration of my J1 visa. I was sure it’s a joke. “This $180 insurance is some kind of stupid formal fee you pay when you apply for a J1 visa. I don’t care about understanding why it’s there, I’ll just pay and be done with it” — I thought to myself when I was filling out the visa paperwork and I was asked to pay for this medical insurance. With the help of people at Typesafe, I learnt that the obscure insurance I had was actually a real insurance and it could be asked to take on the burden of covering the remaining $9,000 out of $45,000 the first insurance covered. The same math applied to the second insurance so I would have to pay 20% of $9000 ($1,800) out of my pocket; the final amount I had to spend was well within my reach.

Once the rest of bills arrived, I calculated the cost of my helicopter ride and 6 days of hospital stay to be $235,000. Settling payments for the whole amount is a sad tale with many moments of despair. At its peak, I had 5 different debt collectors on my tail trying to make me pay for bills I didn’t understand and I couldn’t get anyone to explain. The whole story would serve as another testament to how broken American health care system is on the billing and pricing side. However, lots have been written on this subject already and I feel like a long rant on a dehumanizing, months-long struggle with baffling billing structures wouldn’t be interesting to write or read.

Nonetheless, there’s one story that I think is worth sharing. Early on into medical bills drama, I tried to genuinely understand how the system works and why my out of pocket expenses seem to be so high despite the fact that I had medical insurance. I spent hours on a phone, calling numbers I found on the bills. The whole thing was a grotesque — due to my jaw wired shut I sounded as if I was holding a spoon in my mouth while trying to speak. Especially over phone, I was hard to understand. Multiple times the conversation would go nowhere with the person on the other end saying “I’m really sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying. Can you call us again when you have less trouble speaking?”

But if you have bills for $235,000 staring at you and you’re not sure how much is it your share, you don’t quit that easily. So I kept calling. One lady from the billing unit of the hospital got impatient and started asking me questions not directly related to my medical bills. Sara (not her real name) wondered where am I from originally, what brought me to US and what happened to me that led to a pile of large medical bills. I told Sara I came to work to States and I had a ski accident. I explained how I had a broken jaw that was responsible for my disturbed speaking and a head injury prevented me from going home. I shared my confusion about the medical bills — the reason I was calling. Sara listened attentively and, with trembling voice, she broke out “Oh god. I’m really sorry to hear what happened to you. You’re here completely alone and we’re making it harder for you. This is so wrong. I’m ashamed to be part of this broken system.” And then, in a low voice, she offered me help with figuring out what’s going on with my bills. We talked over phone several times over next few months and she got pretty involved in helping me. She had only one condition: I would never reveal her identity and at the time I would not tell anybody she was helping me. Sara was afraid of losing her job.

The lesson I learnt from interacting with Sara was that if a system is broken there’s an effective formula for fighting it. You have to find an insider, who over a long time, have accumulated scorn for the brokenness of the system and expertise of its weak points to be exploited. If you make that kind of a person to become your ally, wonders get sculpted. Even today, I don’t fully understand what Sara did exactly to help me but debt collectors stopped sending their letters. The best about insider’s approach is that both sides win: Sara had a chance to make her feel less bad about being part of repelled bureaucracy and I had my problem solved without going through an emotional breakdown.

The heavyweight gorilla

During the first weeks after leaving the hospital I experienced pain, weakness and impairment. Too often I would get caught by a surprise when something trivial about the personal care turned out to be really difficult. While the obstacles were annoying and discouraging, they were all manageable. The monsters I encountered were small; I could stare directly in their eyes and defeat them one after another. However, there was one time I ran into a heavyweight, growling gorilla with a portal to abyss in its leer.

A few days before the scheduled date of my second jaw surgery, I noticed that the wires in my mouth started to become loose. Feeling concerned, I called my jaw surgeon to discuss the problem. I got connected with his assistant and I explained her how I felt there’s a bit leeway in the ride side of wiring. She quickly went on reassuring me it’s not a big deal since I would get everything removed early next week during anyway. She confirmed the scheduled date of my next surgery and hang up.

Over the weekend, the wires became even more loose on one side but stayed stringent on the other. By Sunday afternoon the imbalance of tension between two sides of my jaw started to feel uncomfortable. I tried calling my surgeon again but only I got to hear a message recorded on a voice machine. During the night the imbalance steadily grew to become really painful. One side was completely loose now and the other was still applying force to keep my teeth clenched as it was designed to do. By four in the morning, the pain grew into an unspeakable agony. I felt like in a scene from a horror movie, where a psycho traps victim’s jaw with pliers and starts twisting it methodologically by applying greater and greater force every few minutes. My plot evolved into a relentless torture.

When I was thinking what to do on Sunday, I decided to survive the night and call my surgeon again on morning next day to ask for help. However, late into the night the extreme pain forced me to change my mind. I ran out of the apartment on a street, luckily found a cab and, with mix of whine and scream, I asked the driver to take me to an emergency room.

On a way out of the apartment I snatched the wire cutters that I had glued to fridge’s door in the kitchen a few weeks earlier. The wire cutters was a gift I received on last consultation, when I was getting discharged from the hospital. I was told that it was a safety tool I should use to cut my wires in case I felt I was about to throw up. The nurse told me about rare instances from the past of people who had their jaw wired shut and choke to death while throwing up unable to open their mouth. She instantly reassured me it’s very unlikely anything like that would happen to me provided I followed basic food safety rules. Then handed me brand new wire cutters wrapped in a green plastic bag and asked me to glue them in a place that’s easily reachable, e.g. a kitchen fridge.

I thought about cutting the wires myself but I didn’t have the confidence I would do it well given dizziness from pain and limited maneuver of my hands due to splints. I was sure that the qualified people of an emergency room would do a better job.

Once I arrived in the emergency room moaning from pain, I was taken in immediately. Momentarily, I noticed the disorientation in stuff’s behavior. They clearly didn’t know what to do with me. Nonetheless, the desperate expression of my whole body hinted what the problem was. I pointed at the wire cutters I brought in with me. A sturdy guy in his late thirties decided to help me. He unwrapped the wire cutters and unsurely approached me mouth. Almost as if he wanted to work up his courage, he started navigating the web of wires more firmly. He pressed his fingers against cutter’s handles hard but the wires didn’t give. He tried pressing multiple times but the wires were twisting and bending; none of them got cut. By buckling my wires, he wrung my jaw even more and heightened the pain to the levels of an agony. It was the worst pain I ever experienced in my life. It was incomparably worse than the pain I got from hitting the tree. Inners of my thighs were shaking uncontrollably from the sensation. I was horrified that this will last forever; nobody had an idea how to help me. Some people in the background were desperately talking about finding a jaw surgeon.

In a moment of sobering, I noticed that the guy who tried to help me was holding the wire cutters I brought in his right hand and I recalled a small conversation I had with a nurse upon my discharge from the hospital. The nurse asked me whether I was left or right handed. When I started investigating why was this relevant that I’m left-handed, she told me the wire cutters weren’t symmetrical by design to make them more effective. She wanted to give me the pair that would work the best for me. Goaded by the sudden realization, I gestured nervously to the person from emergency room to switch hands; he got the message immediately. Miraculously, the cutters started working instantly and my wires were giving one after another. In a couple of seconds I felt an enormous relief — every single wire was split and the twisting force died out.

Feeling guilt, the small crowd that surrounded me in the room apologized. They said they never had anybody with a jaw wired shut come and they were never trained to deal with such case. I was the first person they saw ever with a mouth fixed by something that had a structure of a metal basket.

After filling out the admission form I left the emergency room in a hurry. I wanted to forget about what just happened with the speed of light. When I mentioned the emergency room incident to friends and relatives, I didn’t say I was knocked down by the gorilla that dragged me through feelings of horror. In reality, I never forgot but I consciously downplayed the memory of this event in hope to restore the confidence in my own future.

Moving (on)

I knew that the arrangement of me staying in the corporate apartment was temporary and I shouldn’t take advantage of my company’s benevolence. Sooner than later I should be looking for my own place to live. A few weeks after my accident (but before the emergency room event I just described) Sushila told me her friend, Jim, was looking for a roommate. I’ve met Sushila for the first time on a remote Swedish island of the Baltic Sea, 40 minutes away by a motor boat ride from Stockholm. We both just joined Typesafe in its early stage and went on for company off-site to meet the rest of the team.

When Sushila told me about Jim, I was on one hand very happy to hear there is a room available that I could take. On the other hand, I knew I didn’t look or speak like a promising flatmate. I was still wearing splints on my wrists and sounded like a broken speech synthesizer. I suspect Sushila knew about my reservations so she just set up a time for me to visit Jim and left me with no other choice than just to show up.

The apartment was at the very end of an extremely steep street in San Francisco. The street was so steep that, if you were pedaling up on a bike, you had to watch out to not flip over the back wheel. I was anxious about meeting a complete stranger and presenting myself favorably. When I was walking up the street, I stopped in the middle of the climb breathing heavily. Since the accident, my stamina deteriorated very quickly. As I was trying to catch my breath, I thought to myself “This makes no sense. I won’t get this room and I should turn around to avoid an embarrassing disaster.” But after thinking more about it, I thought it would suck to explain Sushila why I didn’t come.

Finally, I met Jim and he turned out to be a really cool guy. Although talking with me was hard I tried to remain calm and pretend to be jolly; we chatted for a while. Jim agreed to keep the room for me and I would move in as soon as splints and wires were removed. Much later on, when I asked Jim why he chose me over any other person he could have as a flatmate, he responded longanimously: “I enjoyed talking to you.” I think only Sushila could find somebody in the whole of San Francisco that would say that about me at the time.

I spent the next few months trying to shake up the bad memories and figure out a new plan for my life. The first blow came when I got an estimate of the dental and orthodontic work I needed to do in order to fix the damages I incurred from the impact of hitting a tree. The total cost of repairing my teeth and fixing my occlusion rounded up to be at least $40,000 and the health insurance wouldn’t cover it. Being that far into my recovery, I learnt to be paranoid about negative scenarios and double any cost estimates I received. In my head, I heard $80,000 as the actual number. I didn’t have that kind of money laying around but I thought I could earn it if I stayed in the Bay Area. The second blow came when I learnt that I didn’t win the H1B visa lottery. My current J1 visa was to expire in October, just a few months away and I would have to move out of US. I was sad to see this as the end of my dreams to start a company in California.

As part of my resolution to restore as much as possible of my pre-accident life, I resumed my regular exercising. I used to love the feeling you get from an intense workout. I believed it would help boost my tested mood if I got back to sports. My wrists were still sensitive to pressure and my arms were weak so I decided to focus on running and biking instead. “Your legs were left intact during the accident so it’s safe to get full speed on running and work on your wrecked stamina” — my thinking went along those lines. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me that the loss of over 7 kg of body weight, the long-lasting effects of experiencing a strong pain and the traumatized psychology formed a particularly violent brew. I would taste the bitter flavor of the mixture a couple of months later, on the other continent already.