There are pivotal times in life, times when you re-examine your priorities, beliefs, and your life-trajectory. August 3rd, 2015, was one of those moments for me, because on that morning, I had a near-death biking accident, in Montauk, New York.
In 2013, I purchased a summer house in Montauk, in the Hither Hills area. We lived in New York at the time, and went to Montauk a lot during the summers, so it made sense. But in late 2014, we moved to Miami. Still, we decided we would keep the Montauk house. We loved everything about the quiet town of Montauk, from our house, to the beach, the restaurants, everything. Flying up to spend the summers there would be great.
In August 2015, after a three-hour flight and five-hour drive, we finally arrived in Montauk: myself, my wife, and my little daughter, who was then about one and a half. After quickly unpacking, we headed out to dinner, making grand plans for all the places we would go and things we would do for the rest of the month. But as the old cliche has it, “Tell God your plans, and watch Him laugh.”
My Old Montauk House in Hither Woods
The next morning, my wife decided to go to a local Soul Cycle spin class, and I decided to hit the gym at Gurney’s, a nearby hotel. At first I thought I’d jog there, but as I made my way through the garage, I noticed my bike, left there untouched for almost a year. Perfect. I would pump some air in the tires, and bike to the gym, just under a mile away.
There was one hitch, though: I couldn’t find my helmet anywhere. After hunting for a while, I was losing time and patience. Eh, I thought, it’ll be fine. After all, it’s only a four-minute ride.
Two minutes into that ride, I was feeling great, cruising along and thinking about what exercises I would do at the gym. I was picking up a lot of speed, heading downhill. Too much speed, actually. Better put on the brakes.
But as I squeezed the hand-brakes, all I could hear was the screeching of metal on metal. The bike didn’t slow down at all. Still going downhill, I was picking up even more speed and starting to lose control.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened, or even exactly what happened, but I know I hit some gravel, and went sprawling over the front of the bike, landing on my shoulder and back. I remember skidding over the asphalt and feeling the side of my head scraping the ground, which made me so angry with myself for being dumb enough to go without a helmet.
Thankfully, I never lost consciousness, and after coming to a halt, I lay there for a few seconds, taking stock of what had just happened. The wind was knocked out of me, like I had taken a punch to the stomach. Cautiously, I reached up and touched my head. It was scraped up on the right side, but I had to use my left hand; for some reason my right arm wouldn’t move.
Next, I tried to get to my feet, but again, I couldn’t move my right arm. It hadn’t really hit me until that moment. Not only was my arm immobile, but I was struggling to breathe. It was like my sense of self was returning little by little; I started to feel the cuts and bruises on my head, shoulder, forearms, knees, thighs. I felt the struggle to get enough air. I felt the heavy, numb weight of my right arm. As I tried and failed to reach my phone, panic started to set in.
* * *
In Hither Woods, the houses are scattered pretty far from each other, and are situated a good way back from the road, with long, winding driveways and woods in between. As luck would have it, I had fallen off my bike just in front of one of those driveways, and the owner of the house miraculously happened to be within seeing distance. This was unbelievable luck. Had I fallen anywhere else, the chances of someone immediately finding me would have been slim to none; I would likely have lain there for half an hour or even longer before anyone drove by.
As it was, the man ran to me and asked if I needed him to call an ambulance. All I could do was nod my head. He called for help, and within about ten minutes, an ambulance came roaring up the road. The paramedics loaded me on board, placed a giant brace around my neck, and listened to my chest, asking me to take deep breaths. When I tried, I could hear and feel a crackling in the right side of my chest.
Hearing that, I knew right away that my lung had deflated. A long time ago, my ex-girlfriend’s lung had spontaneously deflated and she had described the exact feeling I was now experiencing. The paramedics finished their assessment and told me that they would have to transport me via helicopter to Stony Brook Hospital, because the local hospital in Montauk wasn’t equipped to deal with injuries as extensive as mine.
I felt the panic surging back, and frantically asked the paramedics to help me use my phone to call my wife. Luckily the phone wasn’t damaged in the fall, and they were able to call her, but because she was still in her spin class, they couldn’t get through.
Lying there in pain from the cuts and bruises, struggling to breathe, unable to move my neck or limbs because of the braces and straps, and now unable to reach my wife, the panic was becoming unbearable. My mind was racing with crazy thoughts of permanent lung damage or even death. More than anything, I longed for my wife and family.
When the paramedics finally got through to my wife, they put her on speakerphone, and I was able to calm down and gain some control. She reassured me and reminded me of the meditation app I had recently downloaded, coaching me to breathe slowly and carefully. This all happened just in time, because the next thing I knew, they were loading me onto the helicopter, and it took all the meditation I had to not think about the crazy high statistics of helicopter crashes!
I breathed slowly, reminding myself that my wife was on her way to meet me at the hospital. One of the paramedics seemed to recognize how anxious I was inside, and kindly took my hand, holding it for the entire helicopter ride.
It seemed like hours, but about 20 minutes later, we finally got to the emergency room. It was like an episode of ER or Grey’s Anatomy - everyone running around, cutting through my clothes with scissors, sticking wires and electrodes onto my skin, injecting me with needles and IVs. They did an X-ray immediately, and told me that I’d broken my right collar bone and all the ribs on my right side. As I thought, my right lung had collapsed.
Having seen my ex-girlfriend go through that same injury, I knew what they would do: cut me open between my ribs, and insert a chest tube to suck the air out of my chest cavity and re-inflate my lung. I vividly remember how she screamed in agony as they made the incision, and placed the tube. So I begged the doctors to knock me out first.
They said they couldn’t do that, because it would depress my breathing even more. I pleaded and cried until all of a sudden I woke up, with the chest tube in place and a nurse picking pieces of gravel out of my scalp. My wife was there, sitting next to me in a chair. Thankfully, the doctors had given in and knocked me out before doing the procedure.
I spent five days in the hospital with a tube between my broken ribs, not moving my right arm, pretty much delirious the whole time thanks to the pain medication. They had given me a morphine injector, so that I could press it and get a small dose when the pain grew intense. In that time, I lost about fifteen pounds, because I was too out of touch to eat.
During my more lucid moments, I realized that I couldn’t raise my arm at all, not even an inch, and a few of my right fingers were constantly numb. The doctors told me that this was likely due to stretching my brachial plexus nerve, and that I was lucky I hadn’t severed it, which would have put an end to all functionality. As it was, nerve damage can be unpredictable, so they told me that I could heal in a few weeks, or months, or years.
Being cleaned up by the ICU nursed after I arrived at the hospital
By my fifth day in the hospital, I was feeling well enough to get out of bed and walk, wearing a sling on my arm. On the sixth day, I left the hospital, battered, bruised, and in a lot of pain - especially during the two hour ride back to Montauk, during which I felt every excruciating bump in the road. But I was happy to be going home, and especially happy to finally see my daughter. When I saw her, I tried to hug her close, but it was physically too painful to do that for more than a few seconds. Emotionally, it was even more painful, because I had missed her so much. But there aren’t any casts for broken ribs and clavicles, so every movement or push or pressure hurts, and it takes a very long time to heal.
My wife had rented a hospital bed for me to sleep on, so that I could be propped up when I slept on my back. I was used to sleeping mostly on my right side, but at that point, I couldn’t sleep on either side because of the pain. It was difficult to adjust to sleeping on my back, and so lack of sleep was another problem on top of all the others. I spent six weeks sleeping in that hospital bed, and started going to physical therapy.
Again, I had great luck. There was only one physical therapist in town, but she was absolutely phenomenal. Her name is Dr. Rachel Lys, and she put me on a very rigorous training regime that took several hours each day. As challenging as that was, it was worth every minute.
Still, my day-to-day experience was rough. Simple things like taking a shower, typing on my laptop, sleeping, and walking were now huge obstacles, filled with frustration and anxiety. I would take a shower and try to move my right arm in small circles, bending over and letting it hang down. The pain and numbness were so intense that I would break down crying. I hadn’t cried like that since I was a kid. The doctor had told me to use a hairbrush to stimulate the numb areas on my arm, chest, and shoulder for at least an hour each day, but with my damaged nerves, it felt like the scrape of hot needles.
And not only was I in physical pain, but I was nervous and sad, because I really wasn’t sure that I would ever get well. It was as close to becoming paralyzed as you could possibly be. No matter what I did, I couldn’t move my arm, and was completely numb on my shoulder, part of my chest, my forearm, and two of my fingers. Living that way day after day was freaking me out, because I knew that, in spite of all the therapy, I might stay that way forever.
Walking out of the hospital the last day to go home
After the first two weeks of intensive therapy and rest, I started to see some results. The process was slow: my first “breakthrough” was finding that I could type a little on my laptop, and then after another four weeks, I could raise my hand halfway up. I began to feel much better, both in terms of pain and mood. It was great to finally be able to hold my daughter and take her for walks.
When it was time to go home to Miami, my wife and daughter booked a flight, but I had to buy a train ticket. That trip took just about two days. I couldn’t fly with my wife and daughter because there was a risk of my lung deflating again in the pressurized cabin. Once I got home, I resumed therapy. After about eight months of that, I could raise my arm again completely, and in most ways I was back to normal. Some numbness remained, and still remains, in my chest and fingers. I don’t think that will ever go away completely, although it has faded over the years.
During my recovery, I spent a lot of time resting in bed. I found myself reflecting, reading, and thinking a lot about many things—a wide variety of thoughts and emotions that are just too many to list. But a few things stood out, and as I said at the beginning, were really pivotal, changing my approach to life.
The hospital bed I slept in for over a month
Stop Complaining, and Appreciate the Little Things
Before my accident, a lot of times I would find myself complaining about little things that, in retrospect, were so unimportant. For example, I would get super irritated and impatient when I was put on hold for long calls, or if I got stuck in traffic. Or take business matters: if a deal didn’t go my way, or we didn’t hit our revenue numbers that day, it would cause me useless frustration and emotional drain. Or my mom might call and complain about why I hadn’t called her, to which I would respond with my own cycle of complaining about her complaints!
But my perspective changed sharply once those little things I had taken for granted were taken away.
When I could no longer sleep on my side, and I had to lie there for hours at night, trying to learn to sleep on my back;
When I couldn’t hug my wife or pick up my child, because it was just too painful;
When I couldn’t even pick up my hand to eat or type on the computer;
And worst of all, when I couldn’t even raise my hand half an inch or breathe without hurting my ribs;
Suddenly, all of the basics of life became extremely important, and the things I had complained about in prior years became luxuries. I felt that if I could get those things back, I would never be dumb enough to complain about them again!
Time Is My Most Valuable Possession
Prior to the accident, if my calendar wasn’t filled for the day, I would begin to feel anxiety creeping in about not being productive. That would lead to my filling the hours up with just about anything, even if it were only unimportant “busy work.” I was born in New York City and lived there all my life until the move to Miami, and the attitude in NYC was that if you aren’t doing something, you aren’t moving forward. Like most busy people, I took everything around me for granted, including my wife, family, friends, my beautiful home, and my business. Everything would go unappreciated and unacknowledged while I rushed toward the next goal. But being unable to chase goals - except for the slow, painstaking goals of physical therapy - forced me to take my time and slow down. In turn, that showed me the value of time itself, and of using it on the things that really matter.
Want What You Already Have, and Cut the Fat
Before the accident, all I wanted was more things, things that I thought would make me happier. More business. More investments. More vacations. A bigger apartment. Nicer clothes, nicer watches. Etcetera.
Even going to Montauk was probably vain, something I wanted at least in part because of the prestige of “the Hamptons.” After all, it was a complete pain in the ass to get there, with the flight and the long drive with a cranky toddler and the luggage and the child’s car seat that you have to schlep around. And yes, Montauk has a beautiful beach and nice weather… but it doesn’t beat Miami, so why go to Montauk?
While I was recovering, I wasn’t able to tend to all the “things” that I had amassed. For example, my car: I just wasn’t in a position to appreciate a nice car. I couldn’t drive it, couldn’t deal with routine maintenance, couldn’t even sit in it. And there were a lot of things like that, things I had worked so hard for, now sitting untouched, doing nothing for my happiness. I realized that in reality, those possessions had not done much for my happiness anyway. Mostly, it turns out, they had just made life more complex.
What made me happy now were things like taking a breath without having pain, moving my arm another quarter-inch higher by myself, or playing with my daughter for fifteen minutes without becoming too tired.
I quickly realized that having less was actually making me a happier person. I’m not saying that I became a Buddhist monk and got rid of all my possessions, goals, and desires! But it did prompt me to start cutting the fat: stuff that I had considered important in the past, but which was really adding complexity and taking away happiness in my life. I got rid of relationships, investments, possessions, and even real estate. In fact, I sold the Montauk house that next year.
Now, whenever I do something new, or want to buy something new or start a new relationship, the first thing I ask myself is, “Will this make me truly happy? Is it worth spending my limited time on? Would I rather spend that time on things that already make me happy now?”
This has really helped me to say no to things that I definitely would have pursued otherwise these past six years. It has also helped to keep me focused on the things that are most important: my health, my wife, and my kids. Yes, I have passed on some good opportunities, including some very lucrative business deals that have turned out to be big successes, but I have no regrets. I know the real price I would have paid: missing out on the things that make me truly happy, which are priceless.
Trying to hold my daughter while in crazy pain
So that’s the story of my biking accident in Montauk. It was totally unforseen, and completely life-changing. I sometimes hear people saying that they are grateful for the difficult times in life, because those hard times “made them who they are.” I’m not sure I could go so far as to say that I’m grateful for my accident, or the aftermath that my family and I have gone through while I recovered. But the lessons I’ve learned have definitely been pivotal, shifting my paradigm in a way that I can see, looking back, was truly needed. And for that, I am very grateful.