The Night I Came Closest to Death

A rapid response, an emergency heart procedure, and the moment my diagnosis became real

At some point during my first night in the hospital, I came closer to death than I ever had before. I woke suddenly from sleep to the coldest chill I’ve ever felt in my life. It was paralyzing. The call button was right next to my hand, but even reaching for it felt like a struggle.

When I finally pressed it, the nurse came in, took one look at me, and immediately called a Rapid Response. Within seconds, there were what felt like 10 people in the room. They took my blood pressure and it was 70/30. It was almost certainly even lower before they got there, while I was still lying there trying to understand what was happening to me.

I kept asking one of the nurses why it was so low. I couldn’t take my eyes off the blood pressure reading as I asked. She wouldn’t answer me. I must have asked a hundred times. I took that as a bad sign.

They rushed fluids into me—maybe a different kind than before, I still don’t know—and whatever they gave me eventually stabilized me, though my blood pressure stayed much lower than normal. Then I had to wait until the following morning to get more answers.

But that night stayed with me. The cold. The helplessness. The look on the nurse’s face when she saw me. The silence when I kept asking what was happening. It was the first time I truly felt how thin the line can be between being here and not being here.

The next morning, I was seen by a cardiologist. A technician performed an echocardiogram, and not long after she left, the doctor came rushing in after reading the results.

He told me I had a pericardial effusion—fluid surrounding my heart. That was why my blood pressure had dropped so low. The fluid was compressing my heart. I remember thinking: what was this fluid, and how had it gotten there?

He told me I needed an emergency procedure to drain it. As soon as he said it, I was wheeled off to the OR.

I was awake for the entire procedure. They used local anesthetics to numb my chest, so I didn’t feel sharp pain, but I could still feel the pressure—the jabbing, the pulling, the pushing. Most unsettling of all, I could hear everything.

I heard the conversation in the OR. I heard every tool they called for. I heard the nurses question the doctor’s call for a certain needle size. I heard disagreements over other parts of the procedure. At one point, I even told the whole room that I was not happy being awake and able to hear everything that was happening.

Why didn’t they put me under? My understanding is because they weren’t sure they’d be able to wake me back up.

After the procedure, I was in intense discomfort. It felt like I was having trouble breathing. They sent me for an immediate CT scan. Thankfully, there was no additional damage. The procedure had gone exactly as the doctor intended. What I was feeling was my body reacting to a foreign object—a tube inserted into my chest to drain the effusion.

The fluid was sent to the lab for analysis, and I was moved to the Intensive Care Unit for monitoring. That specimen is what identified the cancer. We would later learn that the fluid itself was being produced by the cancer.

A few days later, I was transferred to another hospital in preparation for a possible pericardial window, in case the fluid did not stop accumulating. Thankfully, the initial chemotherapy worked and the fluid stopped building. But by then, I had already crossed a threshold in my mind. I had felt how close death could come.

But the medical emergency was only one part of what was starting. What I did not understand before this happened was that a life-threatening event does not just create a medical emergency. It creates a continuity emergency. Family, finances, childcare, work, legal documents, decision-making—everything suddenly matters at once. Living through that changed the way I think about what families need in place before crisis hits.

When My Life Hung in the Balance: My Stage IV ALK+ Lung Cancer Diagnosis

A personal account of my Stage IV ALK-positive lung cancer diagnosis and the moments that changed everything

In June 2025, my life changed in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. What I thought would be a routine medical issue quickly turned into something far more serious—a reality I was completely unprepared for.

Ten days before I was admitted to the hospital, on Father’s Day 2025, I went to the emergency department with pain in my upper abdomen. They ran scans, found some nodules in my lungs that I was supposed to follow up on, and ultimately diagnosed me with pneumonia. I went home thinking it was temporary—something treatable. But by June 24, everything had changed. I had been struggling to breathe for days, and when they scanned me again, the doctors told me it looked like the nodules had “exploded” throughout my lungs. What had seemed contained was now everywhere.

That same day, I learned that fluid had built up around my heart—a pericardial effusion that had reached a dangerous level. I didn’t fully understand the severity in the moment. I had even driven myself to the hospital. But very quickly, things became urgent. I was hours from death.

A cardiologist performed an emergency procedure, inserting a tube into my chest to drain the fluid from around my heart. I was awake for the entire procedure, and while I was numb, I could still feel the pressure—the push and pull of the tools, needles, and tubing inside my body. A sample was sent off for testing, and the tube remained in place for days, continuously draining fluid, as they monitored me and tried to understand what was happening.

Three days later, the results came back: cancer. Stage IV lung cancer. How could that be? I'm not even a smoker, nor was I ever around it for prolonged periods of time. Further imaging showed that it had already spread—to my brain, to two areas of my vertebrae, and to my liver. Before we even knew the specific type, the situation required immediate action. On June 28, I underwent an emergency chemotherapy treatment.

On July 1, I was transferred to another hospital because there was concern that if the fluid around my heart didn’t stop accumulating, I might need surgery. While I ultimately didn’t need the pericardial window procedure, the move—and the possibility of it—shook me even further to the core. Around that same time, word began to spread about me being in the hospital and my initial diagnosis. People started coming to visit. I know it came from a place of care and support, but it also felt like something else—like people were bracing for the worst.

I was between two hospitals for two weeks before being discharged on July 7. I had my 2nd chemotherapy treatment on July 21. And just as I was beginning to adjust to being home, I was readmitted on July 23 with a persistent fever that no one could explain. I spent another week in the hospital undergoing tests, but no clear cause was found. Ultimately, the fever was attributed to the cancer itself or the chemotherapy treatment—a diagnosis of exclusion—and I was discharged again on July 28.

Three days later, on July 31, I got a call that changed things yet again. An infectious disease doctor told me I had CMV—cytomegalovirus—a virus that can be dangerous, even deadly, for someone who is immunocompromised. What had gone undetected during my second hospital stay suddenly had a name, and it required immediate treatment.

In the weeks and months that followed, there were countless needles, scans, and tests—CT scans, MRIs, and bloodwork—revealing more about what I was facing. Eventually, we learned that I have a rare mutation: ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer, found in only a small percentage of patients. But in those earliest moments, lying in a hospital bed with a tube draining fluid from around my heart, everything came down to one simple realization: life is far more fragile than we allow ourselves to believe.

I’m sharing this not because I have all the answers, but because this experience has reshaped how I see time, family, and what it means to be prepared. There’s a clarity that comes from facing something like this—one that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it.

When life hangs in the balance, what matters most becomes impossible to ignore.

My hope is that by sharing my experience with Stage IV ALK-positive lung cancer, I can help others better understand what a diagnosis like this feels like—and maybe encourage someone to think about life, family, and preparation a little sooner. I had no idea how unprepared we actually were for what came next.