What would you do ?
Being a natural born American citizen has never been a problem before, but then... I died.
Warning : This article contains a real near death experience with very graphic descriptions. This is not an opinion piece, and it is definitely not intended as humor, satire, or fiction. You have been warned.
Imagine this .. .. ..
Just like most other people you plan for the future, or at least you try to. Being one of those people who live alone and die alone without having kids, or family is not in your future itinerary. You found the love of your life, and at with both of you being 35 years old, and making good money, it's an amazing time. You are working as a diesel mechanic and like I said, you are making great money, and you love your job. It's always something new, one day you will be working on a piece of farm equipment, the next day a semi truck. The job is never boring. On top of that, the beautiful woman that you want to marry more than anything, is a nurse. As a couple you certainly aren't broke. It's not long before the two of you find your first home, and sure it needs some repairs but it's yours. Fixing it up just becomes your hobby for a few months. One day, the kitchen is completely gutted, and you are laying the floor. Your wife walks in to help you, and she is carrying a battery powered circular saw in one hand, and a hammer in the other. She just got off of a 12 hour shift at the hospital, but says she just wants to spend time with you. It's a perfect moment, and to you she's perfect. You know it now in this moment more than you ever have, this is the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with. So much so in fact, that you are actually planning on proposing to her 7 times, once on each day of the week. Let's just say that she felt the same way, and over the next year has accepted 7 very unique engagement rings. Life is great.
Planning your wedding is up to her, she dreams it up, and you just agree to anything she wants. Luckily for you, she is into very simple things, and only wants immediate family, and a hand full of our life long childhood friends. The wedding will not be super expensive, but the event is not what a person making $50k a year would consider cheap either. In a rare offering of overtime, the boss asks you on Friday afternoon if you could use a few extra bucks. What perfect timing.
With a wedding to plan of course you need the money, so you tell him yes. He tells you that it's only 2 break jobs needing to be done on Saturday. He makes it a point though to let you know, he wants you to be able to finish them both before noon. It's six brake sets per truck, two trucks total. It gives you 30 minutes per tire, you already know that you can do one in 15 minutes. After quickly doing the math in your head, you tell him that's no problem. In the back of your mind, you know that something random and unexpected always happens, even more so when you are on a schedule. Life's funny that way. It doesn't matter how much extra time you thought you would have had, it gets chipped away. You could get almost done, and figure out one of the last boxes has no springs in it. Or the whole stack of pads could even be the wrong size. Shit just happens so you always try to pad some extra time in there just in case. Anyways..
Saturday morning rolls around, and you get an early start. You are at the shop early enough that you get two of the sets done before the boss even gets there. It's going smooth, all the pads were the correct size so far, and there were no missing parts. It's almost too easy. When 10:45 rolls around, surprisingly you are wrapping the whole job up. All of the brakes are changed. The first truck is totally completed, all the pads are changed and the brakes have been adjusted. The pads themselves are done on the second truck also. The only thing that's left to do, is adjust them on this truck. You roll under it laying on your creeper. The only tools you need, are a single box wrench, and a ratchet. You roll back to the far rear axle, and do those two tires first. Then you do the set on the forward rear axle. Adjusting them takes you all of 2 minutes per tire. You adjust them all the way out until the pads are touching the drum, then you back them each off exactly ¼ turn.
The boss sees out the office window that you are nearly finished, and it's almost an hour earlier than he figured. He's happy, so comes out and he's standing there beside the semi talking to you. He walks from the rear axle up to the front one while you roll your way under the truck, grabbing the driveshaft, and frame rails pulling yourself up towards the front tires. The bottle jack is still under the the front end, the tires are already lowered down to the ground. They have been since you finished the front pads 20 minutes prior. The jack is literally just sitting there, so after adjusting the final set of tires you pull it out.
You shove the bottle jack out from under the truck at the passenger side gas tank with your foot. Just as you do this, your wife pulls up with her sister. They made plans for lunch while you were working, they are coming to let you know. The job is done. So you go to roll out from under the truck, and the boss is distracted. He removes the only wheel stop that is holding the truck in place. An unfortunate chain of events kick off, and purely horrific tragedy unfold from there.
The sensitive folks among you, should not continue reading this.
You are only part of the way out from under the truck when it suddenly starts to roll. You reach past your head and shove off of the transmission trying roll out quickly and clear the gas tanks. That's when it happens, the horrific moment that ends your life, and it happens right in front of your wife, and infant son. The front wheels of the truck roll right off of the driveway, and they drop down off of the 4 inch ledge. It happens just as your chest is under the gas tank. The full weight of a Peterbilt semi is now sitting on your chest. It rolls forward a few inches more, and the realization hits you. It's heading down the dirt slope, and the massive fuel tank squeezes the air out of your lungs like you are a cheap whoopie cushion. The tissue is tearing between your ribs, not only can you feel it, but you can also hear it. In this moment, you realize through the shock that the breath that you took just a few seconds before, was likely going to be your last one ever. You can hear your wife, and her sister screaming in horror. Both of them, and the boss are scrambling for jacks, and any other tool to pick up a 14 ton truck. Then it all fades to black.
Your wife, 3 month old son, and sister in law just watched you die.
The End.
There is no bright light, no tunnel, no Angels, or feelings of comfort and serenity. Your soul is outside of your body now. You are suddenly just standing there beside the truck. You are looking down at your legs sticking out from under the massive steel beast, they are flailing and kicking. Your torso is pinned into a tiny gap between the fuel tanks, and your creeper. Then you notice something odd, there are other people or souls there who are all standing there silently, doing nothing but watching you die. Your flailing legs sticking out of the truck suddenly pause in midair, and you notice the observers are now staring directly you, at the version of you standing next to the truck that is. They aren't moving, and you don't recognize any of them. There is one other thing you notice, that not all of their clothes are not from this era. There's a guy not far from my body, in a lace up collared shirt and thick patched up leather pants, and another with an almost pointed leather hat and lederhosen (Leather short pants) they were natural brownish leather colored, and very plain. One unfamiliar cought my eye, this woman looked kind of like my younger sister, she was the only one that spoke, and she spoke to all of them, the other observers that is. But I couldn't for the life of me understand her, frantically shouting almost angrily, but they no doubt could understand her.
I couldn't even tell what language she was speaking, other than the words “I’m Jennifer” which to this day, still doesn't make any sense. The next thing I know, she was running from observer to observer whispering in their ear, they would nod yes, and then she ran up to the next one. After speaking into the ear of almost everyone there, she turned her head and ran into the neighboring mechanics shop.
Imagine now, that your body is dying under a truck, and frozen in time. You spirit, or soul is now looking now over at where this vocal spirit went into the open bay door of the neighboring mechanics shop. Suddenly several of the other silent observers are now also in there, and they are frantically moving around something. Then you notice what it is. They are gathered around the bosses grandson. He rolls out from under the vehicle he is working on, looks towards the truck where your body is currently being crushed. He reaches over and turns down his radio. Then he snaps into action, grabs a floor jack and drags it running towards the truck you are under at near full speed. He's got at least 20 yards of uneven ground, and rough driveway to drag it across before he makes it. The jack weighs almost as much as he does, it's heavy duty, and he's a tall bit very narrow guy. It looks like to everyone around like it's too late though, your legs just stopped flailing. The fight for life appears to be over. The observers vanish.
It doesn't slow down the bosses grandson, without hesitating and in one fluid motion, he keeps running, dragging the floor jack by it's long handle. When he gets close, he kicks the rubber wheel stop that the boss moved previously back up under the tire. Then he slings the floor jack sideways and almost drifts the thing on its tiny, chipped up, hard plastic tires right up under the truck. It slides to a stop. He cranks the handle to the right, and frantically starts pumping it. Without weight on it, each pump only brings the Jack up about an quarter of an inch. Once he gets the jack pumped up to a point where it's touching the truck, it moves only half as much per pump. After 16 pumps the truck has raised 2 inches, you are still laying there motionless. By this point you have been for over 30 seconds. Another 24 pumps, and the truck has now raised a total of 5 inches, its still too low to pull you out from under it. One of your arms was across your stomach, under the gas tank, the other was over your head from where you pushed off the yoke of the driveshaft. The bosses grandson still doesn't slow down though, he keeps pumping. The fact that your wife is screaming, his grandfather is attempting to direct the event, and your sister in law looks like she is going to faint, has the atmosphere charged. Eventually they have enough clearance to drag your limp lifeless body out from under it without risking smashing your chin up against the fuel tanks.
As they drag you out, the wheels on your snap-on creeper have all been broken or bent, and are no longer rolling. They drag and scrape against the concrete driveway, while your body is now just a lifeless 255 pound diesel mechanic shaped weight, just helplessly holding the creeper down. Vomit and bile are dripping from your face, and trailing from the tires of the creeper, leading right back to the pool of the caustic body fluid that was puddled under the truck. Time almost seems to completely come to a stop again.
You don't exactly know what happened, but somehow you are suddenly in the car with your wife. She is telling you “I will bring you to the hospital if you want me to, but you need to let me know.” At this point you are clearly in shock and not feeling the pain yet. You are trying to figure out how you got out from under the truck, but can't because you are still missing a block of time. You look down at your arm, it's already bruising and swelling up. That's when you answer her with, no just take me home, you notice your ribs and insides did hurt. But at the moment it was not quite bad enough to go sit in the ER for 17 hours. Shortly after getting home, the adrenaline and shock faded. The missing block of memory never came back, but a much dreaded trip to the hospital was inevitable.
Oddly enough, the ER doctors said I had only bruised a few ribs, and my left arm. They insisted there was no internal damage.
Fast forward a month, you are still alive from what you can tell, but are starting to have abdominal pain. You go to the same local hospital, and they say maybe it's an ulcer. They give you a discharge paper with a generic diagnosis of (undiagnosed abdominal pain) and send you home. Then within a few weeks, it happens again, you have to go back to the ER and this time you are pissing blood. They say, you passed a small kidney stone. Again, sent home.
This becomes a rinse and repeat cycle for almost a year. Either getting undiagnosed, or idiopathic Abdominal pain, or Kidney Stone, they would give me a prescription for something like prevacid, or Prilosec, if it was upper abdominal. The next week or two would go by, and I would have a heat stroke, or severe dehydration. They pump me up with a few IV bags of fluid, tell me to stay out of the heat for a day or two. Then I would lose another job for not being present or dependable. Every month it was something else. But they insisted at the multiple following ER trips that these had nothing to do with a truck falling on me. Roughly a year later, and there were no more mechanics shops to work for, I was in the hospital so frequently, and then recovering for so long afterwards that I lost my job, over and over. After the 3rd one, and about the 9th hospital trip. I got diagnosed with acute pancreatitis.
Then came the surgeries.
They (G.I. Doctors) told me that the extreme pain and discomfort I had been experiencing was being caused by my gallbladder being swollen. They insisted that it needed to come out, and me being an Odinist asked them, is this surgery necessary to save my life, they said yes. They perform the surgery, and remove my gallbladder. When the hospitalist comes in to visit me afterwards, he tells me that “after” removing my gallbladder, they discovered that was not the source of the problem. It was my pancreas. I had acute pancreatitis. Now, my wife being the bold nurse that she is, asked the Dr. if the blood work before the surgery showed abnormal enzyme levels. He said yes. She asked him to look back at the charting from my prior visits, if the enzyme levels were off then also it means I had been having recurring cases of pancreatitis. He said that on the visits where I had been complaining of abdominal pain, my enzyme levels were off. It has been pancreatitis over and over again.
The other ER physicians and Gastro Doctors (G.I.s) had overlooked it, over and over again. It had gone unchecked for so long, that it had progressed to the point of permanent damage happening to my pancreas. Now I have to take replacement enzymes for the remainder of my seriously abbreviated life. The doctors say that when you feel the inflammation start, to stop eating and drinking fluids immediately. It's called an (N.P.O. order) and means nothing by mouth. Not even water. When you give your pancreas time to “rest” as they call it. The swelling usually will go down after 2 to 3 days.
The problem with that, is that a person will fully dehydrate within 72 hours. So it's another trip to the ER. It takes multiple IV bags to replace the fluids, and sometimes I still had to stay there in a hospital bed for 3 to 5 days. Fast forward again another year. The flare ups are so bad that about 1/4 of the time, I was either fasting to let the swelling go down, and completely exhausted. Or, I would be in so much pain I was curled up in the fetal position, and screaming. Sustaining a job for more than a handful of days had become impossible long ago, now just getting up and being able to bend down and put shoes on in the morning is considered a good day for me. Tasks that once took me a few hours, will take weeks, and have to be broken into sections.
I was given about 10-15 years of pancreatic function conservatively, by more than one doctor.
What would you do ???
Sue the doctors that overlooked it over and over, they insist that it had nothing to do with the truck, and are now saying it was caused by chronically high cholesterol. But again if that is the case, they had the lab work done every time and they should have noticed it far sooner. If they had, and started me in cholesterol medicine, my pancreas would not be permanently damaged from all of the times it went acute and they said it was probably only an ulcer or something else. I also could have adjusted my diet, and several other things much sooner, and would probably still be a mechanic. The guy that owned the shop, is old he since sold it, and is dying of cancer. Plus.. the doctors insist it wasn't the truck that started this.
Seriously…. What would you do ?
Now… on top of all of that, I have the added issue of my funeral rights. Here in Florida, I can not have a funeral pyre in tradition with my religion.
This one has been stressing me the hell out, like literal anxiety, and a blooming resentment for our legal system. In order to have a traditional funeral, and not be forced into the traditional Christian burial, and be buried beside the people who attempted our genocide for over 1000 years, or unceremonious cremation in a metal furnace.
Why is this the case ?
Why have Pagan Funeral rights actually been outlawed, if American Citizens are supposed to have the freedom of religion?
So I am forced to have to fix this issue myself, before my inevitable death. Then future Odinist, Celts, and Wiccan folks will have the right to do the same.
Thank you for Reading, Voting, and Sharing. If you would be so kind, please donate, and help me to build a Proper cemetery / Sacred Grove. Anything helps move the needle.
From $1 to $100 it all helps.