Faceless Blog

On February 23, 2008, a new holiday was created…Water Day. If you’re reading this, then you’re most likely a friend of mine, and I’d like you to understand the story behind it. 

On January 16, 2008, I underwent a twenty-two hour surgery to remove a softball sized tumor from my abdomen. The surgery was originally only supposed to take four or five hours, but the tumor was more…integrated…inside me than they originally thought. It had grown completely through my vena cava, and was seriously pressing against any number of other things. After that surgery, I was free of the tumor, but I had lost feeling from the waist down, my abdomen and legs were dangerously swollen and I had any number of tubes sticking out of me, including a trach tube.

They didn’t even really let me wake up for a week or two. I have some fragmented memories of my birthday, Jan. 27th, when one of my doctors thought it would be a good idea to remove my breathing tube as a surprise for my family, to show how far along I had come. Turns out, I hadn’t come that far. I remember the awful sensation of the tube coming out, and struggling for every breath as the doctor encouraged me to breathe on my own. Fortunately, I don’t remember the new tube going back in, I imagine it was pretty unpleasant too. The thing that irritated me the most, after I woke up, was not pain, or the monotony of being in the same room day after day, barely moving. It was the fact that I was not allowed to drink…anything. You see, I’ve always been a very heavy drinker. No, not like that, I mean I go through a lot of fluids…tea, water, soda, whatever I can get my hands on. Growing up, with how much time I spent in the pool and how much I drank, I always suspected I was half fish. However, with the trach tube in, I could not eat or drink anything…something about not being able to swallow correctly. If I tried to drink anything, they said, it would end up in my lungs, and they’d have to be suctioned out…again. (I had it done several times…and it’s no picnic.) My sister, in her nightly email updates to friends and family, described pretty accurately like this: “It’s kind of like when you wake up in the middle of the night and your mouth is all dry, you just hop up, grab a drink and head back to bed…except Jeff can’t hop up, or get a drink, or move…or do just about anything other than lay there and think about how thirsty he is.” It also hit my mom pretty hard when I wrote on the white board that I used to communicate “Imagine being adrift in a sea of food and drink and not being able to have any or you’ll drown.” (along with a little cartoon drawing of a stick figure on a raft in the ocean)

My family knew how miserable I was and tried to help as best they could. I was allowed to have ice chips in my mouth…as long as I didn’t swallow the liquid. One of the nurses even came up with the idea of mixing Crystal Light with the ice chips to give me a little flavor now and then. It was wonderful, comparatively speaking, but still torture. On February 23, I was told that I was being taken down to Radiology for a test, a “swallow” test. My heart immediately jumped at the thought, and I verified with the nurse that, if I passed this test, I’d be allowed to drink again, once I was given a special valve that would fit in my trach tube which would allow fluids to go down the right way. The swallow test consisted of drinking a series of thicker and thicker fluids (from watery up to nearly oatmeal-like). The fluids, whatever they were made of, were visible on x-ray, so I sat in front of a fluroscope and the doctor watched a live image of my profile as I tried to swallow these foul little shots. It only took about ten minutes, and I was casually informed that I had passed, and that I could drink…anything I wanted, whenever I wanted. This was within reason, of course, they were talking about water, tea, maybe my Crystal Light…but all I heard was one thing…Water. I had been craving it since I woke up, sometimes, all I could think of was a tall glass of ice cold water, droplets of condensation rolling down the side.

My family and my wife were in my room when I got back. My mother had a bottle of water waiting for me. I could not control the tears that ran down my face as I drank it, and it was, to this day, the best thing I’ve ever drank. After I finished my…I don’t know…forty-seventh bottle of water, I revised that little cartoon I had drawn earlier. I left the little man in the ocean, but erased the text, replacing it with the following: “And with that, the veil was lifted and I drank the ocean.” We decided on the spot that Water Day would be celebrated from then on, a new holiday to make sure we always appreciated and were thankful for the little things.  (The attached picture was sketched by Randall Munroe of XKCD.com who, upon hearing the story, was nice enough to provide a clean version of my original for future Water Day activities.)

So, I invite you all to celebrate today, and every February 23’rd. It’s not hard, just pour yourself a tall, cold glass of water and enjoy it with friends and family. So, Happy Water Day everyone!

-Jeff