STEPPING OVER MYSELF

          The other day, I was almost  killed -- and I was overjoyed by it.

            It happened in a manner that's mundanely routine for millions of people. I was, as I often am, lost in a daydream as I was walking down a street, my head in the clouds, not paying attention to what my feet were doing when I stepped off the curb and was suddenly a sitting duck for a mass of oncoming traffic.

            Moments like that, which we barely think about, are when the space between life and death can be  the half-second needed to come down from the clouds and see where we're going. Though we take for granted that this will be snap, just think about all the little processes and mechanisms that have to occur to make the transition. There has to be a massive chain reaction in the brain, when synapses have to fire smoothly and make the eyes focus on the imminent peril. Fortunately, for most of us, the brain does the work and makes it easy. 

            Knowing how complicated the art and science of survival is, I envy them.

            Because for me, survival is a little less routine, a lot more tricky. I, too, have a brain, and it works pretty well, knock on wood. But it also has been through the wringer, almost literally. Two decades ago, I was a young man with seemingly an unlimited future. I was athletic, strong, fast -- the son of a onetime world-class swimmer who competed for Switzerland in the 1964 and 1968  Olympic Games. I was on the same path, to some glorious reward on the international spot circuit, perhaps the next great tennis superstar.

            And then it happened. I became slowed, then completely stunted, by growing headaches and vision problems. For three years, some of the finest doctors in Switzerland misdiagnosed me, somehow missing a tumor in my head that eventually grew to the size of an orange when it was finally discovered .It damn near killed me. In fact, by the laws of probability, I shouldn't be here today. Not to brag, as there was nothing about it that was my doing except for being there, but my operation on October 18, 1988 was an important milestone  in the evolution of brain surgery, the lead doctor of the team that operated on me one of the world's most visionary brain surgeons.

Yet for three days afterward, it could not be determined whether the operation was a success. That could only be the case if -- against the odds set by the doctors for my survival, which was at best thirty percent -- I woke up from a coma and had viable brain function, since when the doctors cut out the orange they also cut out more than a few brain cells.

            These cells are not something we can afford to lose. Every one of them is a precious, charged with some vital activity that helps us live normal lives. So even though I made a fairly remarkable recovery, I would never again live a "normal" life. Or so it was believed, reasonably, since for a time I could neither speak nor move. And as I began a long, long road back to a normal life, I found myself in a kind of self-protective, psychological cocoon, one in which I was very naïve and childish -- fueled in that repressed mind-set by the stream of drugs I was kept on, and the fact that I was isolated to the exterior world for so long. It was as if I had returned to childhood in a way and was far too sensitive to my plight to want to challenge myself.,

            There is life and there is death. And sometimes, there is both at once.

            The long story made short is that my brain needed to be refired, rewired, and reprogrammed. And if that critical half-second of reaction time still at times just a bit too quick