How To Survive And Thrive When Life Blindsides You
The following is an edited excerpt from the book Blue Sky Lightning: How To Survive And Thrive When Life Blindsides You by Jeff Kuhn.
There is such a thing as Blue Sky Lightning. Actually, that’s my term for it. Scientifically, it’s known as “a bolt from the blue.” This is what happens when lightning travels away from a thunderstorm instead of straight to the ground.
Meteorologists have recorded lightning bolts striking as far as one hundred miles away from a storm. It’s an incredibly rare occurrence. Compound that with the fact that getting struck by lightning is very rare — even in a storm. We don’t hear about Blue Sky Lightning, or people getting struck by it, very often. It’s about as unusual as it gets.
Yet Blue Sky Lightning strikes all the time, but in a different, more symbolic way. In my case, it even struck in the same place twice — at least that’s how it seems.
When I was thirty-one, I woke up one day with 80 percent of my body covered in severe burns. Doctors told me I’d been in a medically induced coma for a month, ever since there was a fire at my home in Dallas. My condition was so bad that a priest had already given me my last rites.
As far as I knew, I’d gone to bed the night before after letting my yellow Labrador retriever, Sparky, go outside. Now, here I was. I spent the next two years going through seventeen major surgeries and intense physical therapy, making a recovery that shocked the doctors even more than it shocked me.
After my long, painful, but ultimately successful recovery, Blue Sky Lightning struck again.
I developed a neuromuscular disease that doctors could not accurately diagnose. All they could say for certain was that I was going to die, and that it would be slow and painful. Again, somehow, I survived — and learned to thrive.
My story may be extreme, but it’s also something everyone can relate to. Life throws us these lightning bolts when we least expect them — whether they’re something physical, mental, or emotional — and making it through often feels impossible.
I saw a psychiatrist on TV recently who had worked with patients who’d gone through serious trauma, and she said something that has stuck with me: “Nobody makes it through life unscathed.”
That’s why I’m writing this book. None of us make it through unscathed. Lightning strikes us all. But not all of us make it through our trauma. This isn’t just a book about being struck by lightning. This is a book about what happens afterward, about making it through. It’s a book about survival.
I’ve met a lot of survivors. I’ve also met people who did not survive, whether that meant with their lives or coming out the other side with their emotions or mental well-being intact.
What I’ve learned is that you have to fight and know how to fight. In this book I’ll be sharing two overarching lessons:
- You are not alone.
- You have the strength to make it through.
You Are Not Alone
When you first experience trauma, it feels like you’ve been singled out. It’s as though everybody else has gotten a free ride, and for some reason you’ve been picked by the cosmos to go through this incredibly bad event. You’re scared. You’re angry. You think, Why me?
That’s how I thought. And one of the biggest lessons I learned — a lesson I want to share with you — is that everybody, at some point, is fighting a battle.
This might have been a more obvious lesson to me because I spent two months in a burn unit, a place full of people in bandages where there’s often someone, somewhere, screaming in pain. But the lesson really came later, once I was out of the burn unit and in physical therapy. It was there that I saw so many other people with so many other problems. There were burn patients, cancer patients, and God knows how many other kinds of patients. And that was just in one rehab center. There were, I realized, millions of other people with millions of other problems out in the world.
It’s important to realize this, because it’s so easy to think about all the people who are not struggling. I’ve heard many people say to nurses or physical therapists, “You don’t know what I’ve been through and you don’t get it.” But when you hear encouragement from someone who does get it — or even when you learn the hard lesson that, as bad as you have it, there are people who have been through the same thing or worse — then you realize you can’t feel sorry for yourself. You stop thinking, Why me? You realize there are plenty of people who have had it worse than you, so you choose the option to be happy to be alive, keeping your head down and working that much harder.
Because of the severity of my burns and the long duration of my stay in the burn unit, I became something of a veteran burn victim. I earned a lot of respect from my fellow patients because so many of them would be in and out in a week, while I was stuck there for an indefinite period.
They would all ask me the same questions: “How did you get burned?” “How severe are your burns?” “How long have you been here?”
Without realizing it at the time, I was teaching them the first lesson: they weren’t alone.
Inevitably, after those questions, there was always another one that followed: “How do I get through this?”
You Have The Strength To Make It Through
Unlike me, most of the other burn patients came in conscious, and they were scared to death. All of a sudden, they were rolled into this burn unit and had no idea what was coming. I had to brace them.
I had one roommate for at least two weeks who came in with third-degree chemical burns from his factory job. The burns went from the tops of his thighs to his feet. He was a young guy, probably about twenty-one, and was covered in tattoos. He was mad at the world. He yelled. He swore. He was rude to the nurses.
I tried to simmer him down, but he insisted on being angry.
As a burn patient, every day you get a bath…except it’s not really a bath. What they call a bath is, technically, called debriding — a process of cutting off dead and dying flesh with a collection of razor blades, knives, tweezers, and scissors. It’s beyond excruciating.
My roommate was having real trouble getting through it all. He was screaming, kicking the big metal bathing tub, and using profanity. He couldn’t understand how I could make it through the daily pain.
“Look,” I said. “You just have to realize they’re not here to torture you. The only way to heal is to be debrided. They’ve got to get the dead skin off so you can heal and, yes, it’s painful, and even though it feels like an eternity, it only lasts for an hour.”
I reminded him that once he was done, he’d be wrapped in clean bandages and he’d be able to rest and the pain would subside. I reminded him that while he was being debrided, the nurses would change his bed, and he could always look forward to clean, fresh sheets waiting for him.
It didn’t work.
“I’m not going to go anymore,” he said. “I’m going to refuse.”
I said, “Then you’re not going to heal.”
But even this didn’t matter. “I can’t get through the pain,” he said.
I still don’t know how I thought of what I said next. Maybe my dog, Sparky, was on my mind. But I said to him, “Okay, every time you are in excruciating pain, start barking like a dog.”
“What?” he said.
“Seriously,” I said. “When the pain gets bad, start barking.”
The guy thought I was out of my mind. The next day, we took our “baths” at the same time, only separated by a large, white curtain.
He started doing his same old thing, kicking the tub, yelling profanities. So I barked.
My nurse, who knew me well at that point, asked me, “What are you doing?” I just held my finger to my lips.
All of a sudden, things on his side of the curtain went dead quiet. All of the screaming, yelling, and kicking just stopped. Then I barked some more — and he barked back.
He barked again, and even laughed, if only just a little. I barked again; he barked again. The nurses told us we were insane, but after we barked, he never made another peep.
Maybe the nurses were right. Maybe we were insane. It was certainly the craziest thing I’d ever thought of. But after that, he never complained again. He had been Mr. Tough Guy, but in the end, he turned into Mr. Polite. He was much nicer to the nurses and became a lovable guy. The “bark bonding” we shared helped us both.
Through first realizing he wasn’t in this alone, and then being crazy and finding some humor, he found the strength he needed to make it through the most painful thing he’d ever experienced.
On the day of his discharge, he was wrapping up his stuff with his girlfriend and a nurse, and I heard him say, “God, I can’t wait to get out of here. I never want to come back.” He was the tough guy again.
The three of them left. Then, about ten seconds later, the door opened. He came back alone. He just looked at me. Then he said, “Jeff, I have to tell you something.” He was staring at the floor, unable to meet my eyes. The tough-guy persona was completely absent. I could tell this was a side of himself he seldom, if ever, showed in his life.
“What?” I asked.
He said, “There’s no way I could have made it through these two weeks without you. Thank you.”
I’m tearing up while I write this, because I didn’t realize at the time how much I’d helped him and what it meant to him — how important it was for him to find the strength to get through. No one wants to feel weak, but this was particularly true of him. He was a tough guy. Yet he needed to realize — in this case through a crazy coping mechanism: barking! — that he did have the strength to make it through.
You have that strength, too, even if you haven’t found it yet. And with this book, we can find it together.
Finding Hope
To find strength you must have hope.
There are many situations that seem hopeless, but they aren’t. You may be stripped of everything, but you can always have hope. In some situations, like the ones I’ve been in, there were points where the only thing I really had left to hang on to was hope.
The worst thing you can do is let yourself or someone you’re trying to help lose all hope, because that’s the last thing to go. After the fire, I wasn’t able to move. I wasn’t able to walk. I wasn’t able to do a whole lot of things. But I was able to hope.
There is always hope. It may be small, but that small amount is all you need. You take that small amount and grab on, and it can get you through. It may take more than one day or a week. It took me more than two years of continuous hope and hard work after the fire.
Hope can require tremendous effort, but the work is always well worth it. Hope has given me twenty-five more years of the full use of my arms, eight more years with Sparky, and a whole new life.
Not Hoping Is Unacceptable
Sometime during my first two months in the burn unit, the doctors came to see me and said, “Look, we just have to lay out some statistics for you here. Your arms and sides were badly burned. The odds of you being able to have full range of motion and full use of your arms again is pretty low.”
I thought, Wait a minute. I said to them, “That is unacceptable. This is unacceptable to me.”
They looked at me, and I saw that they were smiling. They laughed.
I said, “Why are you laughing?”
They said, “Because we want you to recover. We want to see you fight. You’re showing us what you’ve got on the inside. There’s a fire in there. We triggered the mechanism inside you that not everybody has.”
They were talking about hope. I believe that everyone has it. Sometimes you just have to find it.
I found it despite some very bleak statistics. When the doctors told me it was unlikely I’d regain the full use of my arms, I told them to put a number on it, statistically. They looked at each other. Then they explained the surgeries I’d already had and the ones I would have to have just to give me a chance of getting my range of motion back. Even if those surgeries were successful, they said my chances of getting back the full use of both of my arms was probably between 7 and 10 percent.
I smiled. “As long as you’re telling me it’s not zero, I’m hearing 100 percent.”
One year later, I was at the park doing chin-ups with Sparky by my side.
Like I said, you don’t need much to start with.
Get Fired Up
I have a fighting side and a good sense of humor. Together, they helped give me the motivation I needed to get through my recovery. Nothing motivates me more than when someone tells me that something is impossible. You have to find what motivates you. Think about the places you’ve yet to travel to that you’ll see after your recovery. Think of the time you’ll have with your friends and family. Whatever it is for you, find it and use it.
Mostly, you have to find it on your own. You’re not going to have somebody walking along with you every step of the way like your own private motivational coach. Once I was out of the burn unit, it was just Sparky and me.
A lot of whatever you’re going through is going to be painful. It’s important to find ways to make it tolerable, even if you have to bark! In other words, be creative. Reward yourself along the way — go see a movie or dine at a new restaurant. Use the things you love to help you through.
I’m Proof You Can Make It Through
In fact, I’m proof twice over.
When I found out about my neuromuscular disease after I’d recovered from my burns, I couldn’t believe it. How could something so traumatic be happening again? The pain was just as excruciating as the burn injuries. My muscles and nerves were self-destructing simultaneously.
I felt like I’d already climbed Mount Everest, planted my flag, and climbed down, only to have someone pat me on the back and say, “Guess what? You have to do it again.”
And so all I could do was laugh and say, “I know how to do it.”
The odds were once again not in my favor, but at that point I knew how to hope and fight. I knew I had the strength to overcome great difficulty. I had the roadmap of my past recovery tattooed in my brain. War had been declared again, and I was going to battle with everything I had.
The Roadmap Of This Book
That roadmap of recovery is what I’m going to share with you in this book. Each chapter will alternate between a different part of my story and the lessons learned along the way. I’m writing about this journey so that whatever you’re going through now, we can do it together.
Like I said, you’re not alone.
To keep reading, pick up Blue Sky Lightning: How To Survive And Thrive When Life Blindsides You by Jeff Kuhn.
