Mike with a salmon he caught in Washington in 2011.
Today would have been Mike’s 63rd birthday. He left the planet just over four years ago. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think of him.
The night before last I went to bed with some worries on my mind. He came to me in a dream to show me that everything was alright. I know he’s with me every day.
We were married young, and I almost lost him when I was pregnant with our second son. He had asthma. His worst allergy was to wheat dust – and he was a wheat farmer. He was OK if he stayed in the air-conditioned equipment. This evening the header of the combine had plugged. He was alone in the field. So, he got out to fix it. He had exhausted his inhaler so when he started having trouble breathing, he didn’t have that to help.
He got in the pickup and managed to get back to the farm where his sister and mother were but couldn’t even make it into the house, so he honked the horn. His sister came out and drove him to town while his mother called the hospital. His sister says that he stopped breathing a little before they got to the hospital. There was an ambulance that had just brought someone in and one of the EMTs and nurses pulled him out of the pickup and started CPR. Then the nurse practitioner, who was living in the basement apartment of the hospital as he spent his last two weeks here, was called.
My dad, the only doctor in town, was out mowing and got a page to come to the hospital – NOW. When dad got to the hospital, he passed the young couple and small child that the ambulance had brought in who were wide-eyed. He went into the room where they had Mike and at first didn’t recognize him. By then he was breathing shallowly on his own.
When I talked to Cliff, the nurse practitioner who had been a medic, later he told me he’d seen 150 code blues and three had been successful. Mike beat the odds that day.
A little over a year later we were going to pick up one of my mares from the breeding farm. The shortest distance was a two-lane road that went through a remote area of western Kansas. Mike had started to get panicky when we didn’t have signal on his bag phone. It was a hot day in August and the pickup overheated. We managed to get to a station in a town where he knew a mechanic, but he wasn’t answering. By the time we finally got in touch with him Mike was in a full-blown panic. We got the pickup fixed and came home in the middle of the night without getting the mare.
Mike would minimize his experience when he stopped breathing at least around me. He didn’t want me to know how he felt about this. He wanted to protect me. It wasn’t until late in his illness that he mentioned something that gave me a hint of how that affected him. It must have been terrifying and traumatic.
Had I known then what I do now about how trauma affects us I would have insisted that he see someone about it. I believe that Gestalt could have helped him immensely.
Gestalt also helps with the grieving process.
Would you like to learn more about Gestalt with the horses? Connect with me here to find out more.
One of the songs that reminds me of Mike because we watched Top Gun together more than once. Take My Breath Away.
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Onward!
