THE MCLAUGHLIN FILES---"The Last Twenty-Five"...

The McLaughlin Files

For 12/19/2024

The Last 25…

On December 14, 1999, I died.

Granted, it was for thirty minutes but the effects of a pulmonary embolism hitting my heart were sudden and immediate, and at least momentarily, fatal.

First, my leg hurt like hell, and it was swollen to twice its size.  It felt like the worst groin pull in the history of anatomy.  My doctor in Harlan, Iowa got false positives from INR and doppler, but sent me in an ambulance to Omaha’s Methodist Hospital.

Then, at the big moment, laying in a hospital bed at 1:30 AM in the morning,  I suddenly felt incredibly hot, sweat pouring off of me.  I couldn’t breathe while laying in the hospital bed and had just enough awareness to hit the nurse’s call button before I blanked out, my last words,”There’s something wrong”.

I could hear the heart monitor go from a rhythmic pulse to a flat, single, frightening whirr.

Thirty minutes later, I just woke up…I was surrounded by nurses and a doctor,  and they put an oxygen mask over my face and I faded into unconsciousness again.

I woke up the next morning with my wife in the room and was told what happened.  Though I didn’t remember it, somehow I got out the words, “don’t call my wife”, because I didn’t want her to drive the 45-miles back to Omaha at two o’clock in the morning.

They told me that I had died, and they spent thirty minutes trying to bring me back. They admitted that they were close to calling my time of death, but they kept pushing.

Thanks guys, for not giving up on me.

A lot of people say that they “see the light”, or experience heaven briefly and get directions to either move forward, or to go back.

I didn’t experience any of that, but my life was forever changed.

I've viewed my life since then as a second chance and it was about eighteen months later that I left education and started my own business, which would be my life for seven years until moving to Missouri and going back into teaching.

Two days after this experience, my oldest grandson was born.  Landon turned 25 on Tuesday.

I’ve had a couple of other close calls in the time since and have learned to endure one thing as a fact of life pretty much ever since.

Pain.  Sometimes, just nagging, other times, debilitating.  Call it a constant 4 or 5 with times it explodes off the chart.

The embolism came as a result of a knee surgery followed by insufficient physical therapy.  Eight years later, in 2007, I was told by an orthopedist that my knees needed to be replaced.  I’ve been told the same thing by four others in the last 17-years, but my issues with blood clotting do not give me the kind of chances that make me willing to take the chance, or to believe that it’s worth it.

I’ll just hobble along on my cane.

A trio of falls in the last five years led to two torn up shoulders.  Sleeping is an adventure and a night without neuropathic hands going numb and hurting horribly are five hour time spans I am very grateful for.

Getting to coach the kind of basketball I wanted to as a boss between 2001 and 2015 was a great experience, involving hundreds of young people and a good number who became closer than just coach-player, but more father-son once removed.  Their parents and I developed long-lasting friendships.  The coaches who I worked with became brothers.

So 25-years out into this second half of my life, now much closer to the end than the beginning has positioned me in the last year to serve two communities as a reporter, to ask sometimes hard questions, and to tread into difficult territory from time to time.

I may draw criticism for the amount of national politics that mark these columns I write, and I’ve been called a few names, been threatened a time or two, but I know this.

Three constants in  my life are my wife, Katie, the greatest blessing of my life for the last 38-years, the pain I live with, and the gratitude I feel for being able to find a job I could do that kept my mind sharp, ignited my passions about freedom and about good governance, and placed me in proximity to coaches and sports teams that I admire and respect, and will shamelessly root for.

I absorb reading material and research, and I’ve learned when to recognize the truth from our leaders, and when people were B.S.ing me.  My weasel radar, Spidey Sense, call it what you will, is extraordinarily well-developed.

Sadly, though my mind is twenty three, my body is 75, and my wife has now begun to encounter some of the challenges that go with retirement, things going wrong with the body, and requiring more help than she would like to ever ask for…Hating that is in her DNA.

She’s a doer, a pusher, still has the teacher’s voice, and is still my center of gravity.  Our two dogs are her world, and the fact that I live 35-miles away from the job means I sometimes have to make choices between taking care of my family, and being at an evening event or a game.

I’ve tried to find “work-arounds” and will continue to do so.  The people who have helped me with covering me on  pictures, the coaches who dutifully call in their results, and an amazing boss who cares about our well-being as much as being first with the story make me grateful, humbled and inspired.

I’ve covered a lot of ground in my second life, and my secret given my pain management issues has been this.

Just. Keep.  Moving.  If a shark quits swimming, he dies.  

So armed with a hot McDonalds coffee, my notebook, my elementary understanding of a Nikon D-90, and the great people I’ve met since coming to Cameron, I will just. Keep. moving.

I need to find a place to live in Cameron.  That will change a lot of things.  But in the meantime, I will emulate Donald Trump, the Happy Warrior, and keep my eye on the prize.

And in the immortal words of Kamala Harris, I “will not be burdened by what has been.”

Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow is a mystery.

The only thing that matters is today…One more day in my 65th trip around the sun.

And how great it will be…Could someone pass me the Bio-Freeze, please?