Resilient Seeker Coaching | Ross Raymond Nunamaker

I was 53 years old when I learned how close I was to being dead.

On Thursday I was at the local pub for Trivia Night. I played with some people from the bar and we met up each week to play. We won a lot. I typically had two drinks when I was there between 6:30 and 9:30 p.m.

The next day I had decided to do a two-day fast with water only. I wasn’t feeling 100% right and I had a follow-up doctor’s appointment that day. The follow-up was from the heat exhaustion incident that took place the first week of August. 

I had my follow-up on a Friday morning. The doctor wanted me to get more tests done later that afternoon. They took blood and did some scans.

I kept to my water only fast on Saturday. I felt good. At 8:30 p.m I gave a presentation via Zoom to the J.R.R. Tolkien Society’s Oxonmoot Annual Conference. Afterward, I replied to some questions that were emailed to me and around 9:30 p.m. I went to bed.

As I laid in bed, I thought I heard music. I got out of bed to see if some device had been left on, but couldn’t find anything. I went back to bed. Then as I was trying to sleep I noticed a red light behind my shade, which is opaque. It was small, but started to get larger until it morphed into a girl with red hair. I saw her very clearly. My bedroom is on the second floor, but there is a roof over the deck outside of the window.

She stepped aside and a gorilla took her place. It was a man in a gorilla suit. Behind him I saw performers in the tree and a balloon went bobbing across my view of the window. Then the gorilla disappeared. 

I heard noise again and went to the hallway. I saw a group of people sitting on the curb and in my driveway. There was a van pulled up along the sidewalk. Then the people got up, they looked like they were from a circus based on the clothes they wore. They approached the house, some were looking in the windows.

This shook me. I thought about whether or not to call 911. As I looked out different windows, they were continuing to try to find a way in. I made the call.

When the police arrived they found no indication that anyone had been there. They suggested a trip to the hospital. After talking with them, I agreed. By this time it was about 11:00 pm on Saturday. I’d be in the hospital until Wednesday afternoon and took the balance of the week off of work.

Lots of blood work, tests, and results leading to more of the same watching my levels and meeting with doctors to interpret them for me.

Alcohol and diet were the primary problems.

I typically had two to three glasses of wine per day beginning in my mid-twenties when I was first married. As one doctor called me out during the hospital stay, was it a restaurant fill or did you fill it higher? 

Since I was being honest at that point I admitted it was higher. He said, “so you probably have a bottle a day.” I agreed it was a fair assessment.

I wasn’t getting drunk, a glass at dinner, one after, and one more later when reading or watching TV.  It was what I considered to be three drinks in three to four hours, which I didn’t think was bad, but doing it for over twenty years on a daily basis was taking its toll. There were also days when I had more, but very few when it was less.

By current definitions I was an alcoholic. I didn’t feel like one. I knew I could stop drinking if I wanted to stop, but frankly, I enjoyed it.

In the hospital I was told by pretty much everyone if I kept drinking I’d be dead. 

Additionally, my nutrition was completely out of whack. From the testing they did the following issues were found:

• Essential Hypertension
• Fatty Liver
• Chronic non seasonal allergic rhinitis due to pollen
• Umbilical Hernia with obstruction without gangrene
• Rosacia
• Elevated TSH
• Jaundice
• Tchycardia
• Loss of Appetite for more than two weeks
• Fatigue
• Abdominal Distention  (partially collapsed stomach, distended gall bladder, fatty liver)
• Hallucination
• Cirrhosis
• Hyponatremia
• High Serum Ferritin
• Electrolyte Abnormality

Being in the hospital gives you lots of time to think. I don’t do well sitting and watching TV. Pretty sure I never turned it on while I was there. Instead, I’d play sports talk radio or listen to a podcast.

Mostly I thought, but that was once the hallucinations ended.

Sunday morning when I woke, I started having hallucinations again. They were different from the ones from Saturday. These were less vivid. 

They were opaque, ghost-like. They didn’t approach me. They mostly stayed in one corner of the room, but a couple sat on the floor and leaned their backs against the bed with legs outstretched.

Once I deemed I couldn’t rid myself by willing them away, I simply let them be, they weren’t bothering me, no point in bothering them.

My mom visited and asked if I was still seeing things and I said yes, pointed out where they were and what they were doing, which was mostly nothing.

On Monday they were still there, but were joined by a monkey. It was one of those capuchin monkeys in the organ grinder outfit. He moved around a bit. I took a picture of him on some monitoring equipment. He was upside down.

I looked at the gallery on my phone and there he was in the picture.

When the nurse came in, I prefaced that I didn’t want to freak her out, but was simply confirming my own sanity, “do you see a monkey in this image?” She said no, I still saw it, but knew it wasn’t there and she confirmed it for me.

Later that night after dinner when I hadn’t seen any hallucinations for a while I checked my phone and there was no monkey in the image. 

I haven’t had a hallucination since.

It does make you question reality and your mind, not to mention your awareness and judgement.

Tuesday and Wednesday there were no hallucinations, I had three meals a day, lots of blood work and tests and it was time for me to go home.

My discharge instructions were straightforward: limit liquids to 50 ounces per day, sodium to 2000 grams, balance my electrolytes and no alcohol.

When I got home, I hadn’t had a drink for six days, that Thursday, August 5, 2024, marked one week since my last drink that night at Trivia.

Lesson Learned

I was fortunate for the heat exhaustion. It exposed a potentially much bigger issue that I had to address immediately and I put my mind to doing it. I could have been depressed about everything, but the reality was I had limited options. Doing nothing or feeling bad for myself would do nothing to help my situation. I had one choice and that was to fix it. The doctors told me it was possible, so I took them seriously about it, one step at a time.

Question for You

Have you been in a situation where you had a choice to make a difference for yourself or to sit back and see what would happen? How did it turn out? How did you feel about it?

Preview

I decided to first focus on the first two levels of the Hierarchy, which are Needs and Safety. These were the items I had to address for myself.

Of all of these transitioning from Food to Physical Health was most transformative as it opened the door to Esteem, particularly Confidence, Sound Mind and Body, Differentiation, and Achievement.