Act Zero: Prologue

Why The Trail Became Medicine

Why strangers became teachers I never properly thanked. None of this was planned. None of it was formal. But all of it mattered when everything collapsed.

What follows are two parts: the crisis that broke me, and the accidental preparation that kept me alive. Together, they form the origin story of everything you've read so far.

Sometimes the most important chapter comes last.

The Beginning Was Brutal

From the outside, I looked capable. Controlled. Even strong. But survival mode wears a convincing disguise.

I didn't understand survival mode can look like competence.

My body had been whispering warnings for decades... Joint damage and pain I dismissed as normal wear, nerve symptoms and spinal pain I bulldozed with willpower. Rheumatoid arthritis, Neuropathy, C4/C5 compressions (near bone on bone) and all the brachial nerve issues that come with it. A body-breaking trade. All of it simmering beneath a life that looked seamless.

Healing doesn't feel like healing at first. It feels like shit. Like grief. Like burning down everything you thought made you strong.

My version of strong was silence. Self-contained. Performative. Get it done. Fix it. Toughen up, cupcake. Sleep when you're dead.

Controlled. Disciplined. Machine-efficient. Resilient as hell. I was the problem-solver who worked until the job was done, regardless of bodily cost. Decades in the trades as an independent contractor meant no PTO, no vacation, no workers comp. Don't work, don't get paid. So I worked. Through joint pain, through nerve symptoms, through everything. Pure force of will was my only pain management.

I excelled at everything I did. That's what people said when they introduced me. Showing up with world-class competence and performance was a ride-or-die proposition. But chronic inflammation doesn't give two shits about national and world championships, or even world records. Illness doesn't negotiate with achievement, competence, or productivity metrics. And when you're already running compromised, there's no buffer left when real crisis hits.

Then came the caregiving years. For six years before collapse, I was primary caregiver to one of my childhood abusers. That choice, in truth, it didn’t feel like a choice at all. That choice burned down my business, my career, my earning potential, and prized possessions I’d spent a lifetime building. That choice crushed my personal life. It took what little health span remained. It stripped away my capacity for gratitude, for joy. That choice cost me everything.

No one can say for certain, but I believe those years of impossible dynamics accelerated the breakdown of an already compromised system. It pushed to the edge with a force of intensity I couldn’t have possibly imagined.

The subdural hematoma came out of nowhere — spontaneous bleeding in my brain, without having sustained a blow to the head. In a healthy body it would have been serious. In mine, it was the pin pulled on a grenade.

There was nowhere else to go. I ran out of road.

Eventually, my body stopped paying the price and just shut off the lights.

The Cascade

I was in the ICU. But this wasn't just about brain bleeding.

The subdural hematoma pulled the pin on an inflammatory cascade I couldn't stop. In a system already dealing with autoimmune dysfunction, that acute brain trauma triggered something catastrophic and systemic.

Organs failing. Heart ready to quit in protest. Cold fluorescent lights above me, a dozen tubes in my arms and chest. Monitors chirping in the background like a metronome of survival. The whine of machines monitoring imminent oblivion.

After all the years of quiet chronic struggle, my body just couldn't maintain the pretense anymore. Heart, kidneys, liver, endocrine, metabolic, and nervous systems cascaded into chaos.

After those in my circle had to leave, there was a strange stillness in that room. Time slowed down. I could finally feel the weight of everything I had refused to feel. My body collapsing under years of control, productivity, and hypervigilance while managing conditions I'd barely acknowledged.

I was alone at 4:27 am when the doctors came in. The truth: they couldn't stabilize me. Their interventions had all failed. They didn't understand what was happening and they couldn't stop it. Liver and kidneys would go soon, then the heart. This was so far beyond needing brain surgery to live. This was systemic breakdown with no way to pump the brakes.

They asked if I wanted them to call anyone. I said no. Maybe it was selfish. Maybe it was mercy. Maybe I didn't want to be seen going out like that. Or to see the grief in their eyes.

I wasn't panicked. I was oddly at peace with not making it. But I was curious — what could I do to stay present in this moment, to remain in that calm? So I did the one thing I had left: I breathed.

Not out of belief, not out of hope, out of instinct. I engaged the old breath work, simple, slow, regulation. The practice I'd pieced together years before from trailside teachers. Not for healing. Just for calm.

My nervous system needed something to anchor to while my body fought its inflammatory war. The breath became that anchor.

After a few hours, I passed out. Around 7:30 am they came back to wake me — I was stable. Stable enough for surgery. They gave me a choice: surgery now with the available surgeon, or wait until tomorrow for the best. I waited.

When I woke up after surgery, still groggy from anesthesia, I was more grateful than there are words. Not just for surviving — but for understanding, with perfect clarity, where the breath that had kept me stable actually came from.

Those weren't techniques I'd learned in any formal setting. They were gifts from strangers on trails decades before, people who had no idea they were preparing me to survive.

The cruel irony: I was still in just as much pain after surgery. When discharged nine days later, the head and eye pain remained at the same ER-level intensity. What I didn't know was, it was intracranial hypertension from hydrocephalus caused by the brain bleed. Almost 10 years later, it's with me every second of every day. No days off. Some days are better, some days are worse.

The neurologist was the only doctor who took it seriously. Puzzled by the complexity, but never treating me like a hypochondriac. Sobering truth: one doctor can validate while the rest of the team gaslights. Yeah, "team", that's medical speak for the reality of "you're so totally fucked".

The Practices That Saved My Life

Lying there in that sterile room, I could trace each technique back to its source. The things that saved me weren't learned in clinics or courses. They were gifts from strangers who had no idea they were teaching.

I was still a teenager when I met the women who first handed me something that would later save my life. They weren't trying to teach me anything. Just doing their own thing, moving, breathing, laughing. But something in me paid close attention.

One of them, barefoot more often than not, practiced something I now see as close to Wim Hof Method: breathwork and cold exposure. This was the eighties, no internet, no WHM. This was just her practice.

She would stand shirtless in the snowmelt wind at dawn, inhale sharp and deep, exhale with a grin like it was holy. That breath was heat. That presence could be protection. Later, when I started practicing WHM, it felt something like a merge of Pranayama and Tummo — what she showed me lived somewhere in that space.

From an older hiker, quiet and steady, I learned something different. He spoke of placing the mind gently, like a hand resting on water. Later I'd learn the name: Samatha.

Another trail encounter gave me its counterbalance, Vipassana. A practice of simply observing: pain, sensation, discomfort, beauty. Not chasing, not fixing. Just noticing.

I never joined a studio. Never committed to formal practice. I carried these fragments for decades like insurance policies I didn't know I had. Techniques without names that lived in my nervous system.

And in the ICU, when modern medicine failed and my body was shutting down, I didn't reach for hope or prayer. I reached for the breath that barefoot woman showed me in the cold mountain air. I reached for the stillness that quiet hiker had taught me to trust. They kept me from disappearing.

Not mystical. Practical. The accumulated wisdom of trail encounters I hadn't fully valued until my life depended on them.

The New Reality

What I didn't know in that ICU room was that surviving the crisis was just the entry fee.

The discharging doctor made a point of saying that "beyond lucky doesn't even begin to explain" how I was still alive. That I shouldn't have been alive when I walked into the ER. The CT imaging showed my brain had been bleeding for at least several weeks before. That nobody sustains that kind of bodily stress, for that long, and without downstream complications or compromise. That being alive wasn't a pass, and there would likely be fallout.

He was right.

The subdural hematoma had been the stress trigger, but the cascade it unleashed wasn't finished with me. Those subclinical autoimmune conditions that had been manageable through sheer force of will? They weren't subclinical anymore.

And the cascade didn't stop. Year one brought ramped previous up RA pain to beyond excruciating. There were muscle and organ pain from lupus, rashes misdiagnosed as dermatitis and vasculitis — all Lupus. Kidney and liver cysts, also Lupus. Since discharge, every six months I have to have abdominal and chest imaging to monitor damage, as well autoimmune disease progression.

Three years later, Barrett's esophagus with precancerous changes after years of stomach and throat pain they dismissed it as stress. So, Endoscopy and biopsy every six months to monitor damage and cancer surveillance.

In 2021, within an hour of the second COVID vaccination: left arm paralysis and left side body pain lasting over six months, pain and left side deficits persisted for over three years. Within two hours of that second shot, it also triggered POTS. A month later I got COVID and that brought on Long-COVID issues as well.

Recent years have layered on even more metabolic and endocrine dysfunction. Each new diagnosis reshaped survival. This wasn't recovery — it was adaptation to a body fundamentally changed. The disciplined worker who powered through everything was gone. What remained needed entirely different tools for entirely different terrain.

It took years to understand what that meant in practice. That's why the trail became medicine instead of recreation. Why breath became daily survival instead of occasional calm. Why movement became negotiation instead of conquest.

Before you chase summits, you shore up the ground.

Full Circle

Now, looking back across decades and diagnosis, I can see the thread that connects it all. The barefoot woman. The quiet man. The others. They had no idea they were preparing me to survive.

I'll never be able to thank them. I don't even remember their names. But decades before I needed saving, they gave me the anchors I'd cling to when the machines were beeping and my body was going dark.

Not cured. Not transcended. Just inhabiting a body that needs different rules now.

Enough to still be here. Enough.

Why This Belongs Here

Series One showed the raw act of survival — just showing up at all.
Series Two traced trauma etched into the body.
Series Three wrestled meaning, frameworks, and truth.
Series Four documented sovereignty — agency inside constraint.

And then comes this: Act Zero. The thing that came first, but only makes sense after.

This archive doesn't end with sovereignty. It circles back here. If something in these pages helped you walk differently — inside or out — then it's done its work.
Thank you for walking this far.

← Back: Still Rolling Out (Series Landing Page)

*Peer reflection, not medical or therapy advice. Your healing journey is uniquely yours.*