dinner with v and chuck -- part one (m)

I've known V and Chuck since we started working together in 1981.  We became fast friends and have kept in touch since.

Chuck, in V's words,  "is the most 'relevant' person I know."  I guess today you'd call him a "cruncher"....nature lover, eater of whole foods, avid jogger.  How he came to hawk razor blades and deodorants is beyond me.  Before there were Casual Fridays, Chuck would walk around our uptight office with his jacket off, sleeves rolled up and a pocket knife attached to the back of his pants.  "What the hell is he doing in the office with a knife?" someone asked when they first met him.  Turns out, he would slice his apples during meetings and eat them.

If you walked into his office, you would swear you were at a spa....lots of pictures of faraway places to help you escape the madness of driving market shares for women's shave preps.  There was a bowl of raw almonds for his "guests" which he bought at the food co-op, and then there was the fan, stirring up a gentle breeze to conjure up a feeling of the great outdoors and purring in a manner that helped drown out the ambient sounds of Corporate America.  Bliss.  I made daily stops to Chuck's office.

While we've kept in touch over the years, our interactions were infrequent.  A few months ago, I got a call from V saying she heard Chuck had suffered cardiac arrest and almost died.  "He's okay now.  We should go see him."

Tonight, we saw Chuck again.  He looks fabulous...in fact, he looks exactly as he always has...very thin, fit, and handsome.   

Chuck told us about that awful day.  He was jogging in a park, felt something in his chest and fell to the ground.  He doesn't remember anything else.  A woman came running by and saw him.  She had taken a CPR class 25 years before and worked to revive him.  Initially, he had a faint pulse and then "she watched it slip away."  Frantically, she kept working on him.  Within a couple of minutes, another female jogger came by.  This one happened to be a physician.  She called 911 and immediately began working on him, too. Together, the two women brought him back to life.  The doctor directed the ambulance to take him to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston because she happened to know they had special equipment to deal with this type of cardiac situation.  The nearest hospital, just down the street, is an excellent hospital by the way.

Because he had no identification on him,  the hospital gave him a name, "Vlad, the Jogger."  He was literally put on ice to minimize damage to his brain function until they could determine the nature and extent of the damage.  Meanwhile, his family was calling hospitals and police stations desperately looking for him as he had been missing for hours.

To this day, they don't know why it happened.  It was an "electrical malfunction of the heart" with no pre-existing underlying cause.  95% of those who suffer these episodes die. 

Yet, on the day he died and was brought back to life, two coincidences converged to save him.  The first jogger who knew CPR and the second, a doctor, who also knew CPR, had a cell phone, and knew where to direct the ambulance. Amazing how it all came together to save a life. 

V and I teared up as Chuck told his story.  He ended it by saying:  "I must have been brought back for a reason, but I don't know what it is.  I keep thinking about how I can make the most of this second life."

How often do any of us think about the purpose of our lives?  If you were asked, what would you say about your own life?  Have you made the most of what you've been given?

I can't answer those questions either.  What Chuck made me see, really see, is that we are given many gifts that we don't fully appreciate or fully utilize. 

I thought about this as I limped down the street to the restaurant with V and Chuck.

I had a perfectly formed, healthy body when I was born.

How did I let this happen to myself?