The Message - The True Story of Nathan and His Fantastical Night in a Hospital Bed

Note: In the piece where Nathan said he wanted to 'strikethrough' the more graphic parts, Wix does not have such a feature that I can find - so I've made that text smaller to emphasize his desire to soften the bloody sections. You'll see the difference when you read what he texted me.

----

I met Nathan in 2024. He came from a dear colleague and friend in New York City. His case was unusual. He was born with a rare malformation called Arteriovenous Malformation. He says, “It’s pretty much a big word for saying the veins and arteries on the part of my face are jumbled and not right.”

We met online, and at the time, he’d had a device inserted into the left side of his face that caused it to blow up, making it look like a very painful balloon had erupted on one side of his face. He told me it was a procedure to stretch the skin for an upcoming surgery taking place in Milan.

We talked about stuff that’s not normal for a 20-year-old to talk about. Deep faith. Meaning of life. Purpose. And then there was the usual. School. Girls. Athletics. He had a gravitas that comes when someone much too young is forced to endure things most of us never will.

I related to his struggles, but my malformation was more on the inside. As a kid, I was always told, "You're so mature for your age." I was 15, going on 49, due to my abuse. Abuse I never talked about. Nobody asked me what I was going through. It’s what I feel today – we don’t listen to kids. They’re the great exclusion.

Nathan had the intellect and drive of someone decades older, yet he was bright and clear. He had loving parents and, again, that relationship with God.

He was ready for the surgery. He’d had so many by that point that one more wasn’t much of a bother to him. He meant it when he said, “It’s just another one. I’m a little nervous, but I’m okay.” I marveled at his tenacity. I don’t use the word resilience much. It always feels like how we describe our behavior after we fall, whereas tenacity accepts that we will fall, so we’re prepared in advance.

He knew it was about what happened after surgery—that was the real test. We talked about identity—who he was with and without the external malformation. He said his challenges were fodder for a stronger sense of faith.

I was struggling at the time. God and I weren’t on good terms. Or deep terms, if I’m honest. It’s hard to feel Him. I’m capitalizing Him right now only because I know that’s expected. That may change by the time I finish writing this. I still say Source Energy. Makes my attempts to emotionally connect to whatever “it” is easier. Doesn’t always work. I don’t often feel this elusive power. It’s like everyone has a manual on how to feel faith, except for me.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to feel he’s – sorry, He’s – here with me. To experience Him/It/Them. Evangelistic churches as a child, Scientology as a teen (yes, it’s a racket), a father who gave me books on religion, over four decades now of study. I can quote books on spirituality at the drop of a burning sage stick.

I mean, I find the idea of God very reassuring, but my experience has been lackluster. It’s like a hyped-up blockbuster movie that never quite delivers. It’s so exciting at the start, with so many promises, but it’s underwhelming by the time it’s over.

Nathan seemed more connected to whatever God was than I was. I marveled at that. How did he find it? Could his suffering be so extreme as to portend an immediate infusion of faith? Was I elevating his experience to some odd mythology, which is why I used the word portend in a sentence?

He flew off to Milan and had the surgery. It wasn’t a success. He texted me to say he had to go under a second time. As I expected, he was Mr. Chill and so easy-going. Me? I would have been demanding a Percoset cocktail every hour on the hour.

The second surgery was a smashing success. I was relieved, and I could tell he was as well. I asked him how he was, and he texted me:

 i just spend the last, almost five hours, writing because i felt called to write some stuff down. i’d love to share it with you.

He did. This is what he sent me in italics. He prefaced the attachment with this text:

so a little preface,

Well I had a few thoughts and i don’t even remember what spurred me on to start typing, but this is something I started writing a few hours after my surgery. it’s looking like a rough draft for an updated testimony. the paragraphs were written mostly in the order they come. It’s funny looking back and reading it myself, some parts i vaguely remember witting and some i don’t remember at all. I don’t even remember what I searched to find the verse at the bottom. Anesthesia does some weird things. hopefully it somewhat makes sense.

Here is what he sent me. Try to read in one go.

This isn’t something i normally do and i’m not great at writing these types of things, but i hope and i pray that when you get to the end of reading this you will be encouraged, but most importantly feel the insurmountable love that our heavenly father has for you.

Ever since i was a baby, i have spent my life in and out of hospitals for all different types of facial surgeries to cure a rare malformation i was born with called an Arteriovenous Malformation. It’s pretty much a big word for saying that the veins and arteries on part of my face are jumbled and not right. Because it’s a big term, i’m going to call it an AVM for convenience.

when I was a baby my parents were told that there was no cure, but that there were surgeries I could have to reduce the size of the AVM. So that’s exactly what they did when I was 1 year old… and 2… and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and for my whole life. It was said that my heart wouldn’t have been able to support the blood flow for my AVM and I would have died by the age of 6 if I didn’t have my first surgery. This meant it could be contained but not cured. It also meant I was in for countless surgeries, hospitals, scans, trying different medical techniques, and needles in different locations like China, New York, Miami, Denver, and Milan, Italy.

This was something I tried to keep on the down low when I was a teen and a young adult,

even though it’s not like my surgeries had stopped. I would tell most of my friends in high school and also college, “oh i just have a surgery… or i won’t be there next semester bcs i have to do a medical procedure. Maybe I’d say where i had to go for it bcs that was cool, but that was about the extent of it.

I didn’t really think people would want to talk about it. frankly i didn’t want to tell them because i was looking really pretty rough

after some of the surgeries and some of the parts of the recovery were real but gross. When i’d see them in a few weeks, or over text, they’d ask how i was doing. To which i would say, “it went well and im feeling good” and that would be the extent of it. I didn’t really want to share with them, not because of them, but because i didn’t want to put that out there. I would then return like nothing ever happened and we’d go back to doing whatever and having fun.

This was Nate’s game plan for my most recent procedure. Don’t really tell anyone unless it comes up that I have a surgery. Go through surgery, get the expander out, be put back together, have my stitches taken out a week later, and make it home before the holidays and the start of school. well… that was the plan at least. little did i know i would be in for the hardest few days of my life, i kinda thought my hard weeks peaked last year with the bleomycin injections but i was wrong. Up until the point when I got put asleep for my surgery, things were going well and according to how they were supposed to. I never thought that when i would wake up, i would wake up to the craziness that would ensue.

The first things that i remember as i was coming out of anesthesia was hearing that things didn’t go as planned, they had to stop the surgery part way through, and a lot of my skin is left open. i remember confusion and questions that couldn’t be answered almost as if they were balloons floating in my head. I would come in and out of my senses but the first thing i could feel was a steady drip, drip, drip running down my left ear and down my neck. the night was a little blurry, but i remember almost every half an hour the nurses would come and change my bandages because the blood was soaking through, dripping down the back of my neck, and

pooling where my shoulder blades meet. i remember the first time they changed the pillow, they slowly tried to turn me on my right side. As they were turning me, blood streamed across my lips and into my mouth. it was the feeling as if you had just pushed the button on a water fountain and gone in for a drink of water.

Except the taste and immediate coughing quickly ended that. the nurses resorted to putting a towel under my left chin in their attempt to catch the blood. then a new towel, and another and another to the point where i lost track. at one point one of the nurses started mumbling under her breath, “oh christo oh christo” or something like that.

The next morning the bleeding had slowed and the doctors came in to explain. they said that when they were cutting, the veins in the skin weren’t able to take the blood away fast enough. because

of this, it started stagnating in my skin and clotting which would have led to the skin dying. They ended up injecting blood thinner and doing what they could so that the blood could keep moving, regardless of whether that was back through my veins or through the open incision. The doctor said my skin was shocked from the cutting, they were able to save it, but they would have to wait a week to finish the surgery and stitch me back together. This meant i would have to wait a whole week with part of my face uncovered by skin, and other parts where it was barely held on by a few stitches he had put so gravity wouldn’t take its course. wow.

Now at this point I was thinking, wait wait wait wait wait, hold up. I didn’t sign up for this. Why am I the one who has to go through this? why all this pain and suffering and hurt? not just this week but my whole life. why all the staring from others, why do i get what feels like a spotlight on me in the shape of scars? when i was younger i was like, oh, i get to look like this for my whole life??? wow even better. God i didn’t ask for this. God i don’t want this… God. why. me.

these were the types of questions in my head for most my life, to which i settled on the answer of, “it’s okay to question

what God is doing,” “his ways are higher than ours” which i just thought meant he’s doing something i don’t know and can’t see, or “God won’t give us more than we can handle” so i thought, “im just supposed to handle it i guess.” but i still wasn’t really sure why i had this. Sometimes i thought, “God if you are with me and you say in your word that you will give me comfort, then you’ll take this away. well… maybe not all the scars but surely you’ll take away this suffering, you’ll take away all this pain, you can heal me and you can make this all go away.”

But man. what i learned this last week was that i had my thinking all backwards. Now God could have done everything i just listed and beyond, but the thing is, i was coming from the point of me me me. God if you do this for me that’d be great because this is what I want, and you care for me so that means you don’t want this for me either, right?

So you see what was made clear to me tonight was that it wasn't about all of my suffering and hardship, trust me i’m writing this 3 hrs after surgery and can literally turn my head and my ear feels like it has water stuck in it like when you come up out of a pool. except… it’s not water.

Anyways, God was saying all along, Nathan, I love you and I am with you. and it all clicked. Nathan I wanted you to know that I am outside of what is going on with you, just like i am outside time and space. I wanted you to learn that through sickness and in pain and hurt, I will still be with you, and for those that call on my name.

(it’s almost more of a feeling than what words can describe.) that whatever is thrown at you i will be with you and that is all you need.

What was made so evident to me tonight and what I learned was that the value of having God’s comfort and peace WITH you is far greater than ANYTHING he can do for you. i

theoretically knew this but it hadn’t sunk in. Having God with you is better than him removing your struggles. Being in the presence of God, even when we may not feel like we are, far exceeds the pain and hurt. What i learned was that through it all in life, no matter the pain or sickness, or hurt, as long as we have the Lord we have all that we need. we don’t need him because he can heal us, or because he can can change situations in our lives, we need him because we are so intricately create to be with him so much so that it doesn’t matter how we feel, or how we hurt or what happens to our physical bodies because if he is in us and with us, we have what really matters in this life and to come.

The bleeding lady in the bible understood this when she had faith and thought, “if i only touch His robe, that will be enough.” While she did get healed, i believe that what happened inside in her spirit is far more amazing than the physical healing, because Jesus even noticed. He didn’t notice her because he saw her physically change or saw the blood stop. He knew someone touched him because he said he felt his power had left him. As for the stopping of her bleeding, that was God saying I love you and I care about you.

I think also what I’ve learned about faith through this is that it isn’t just believing that God can do good or is good or that he exists, faith is believing that as long as we have Jesus, we have all that we need. No matter what. It is true! Any healing or any pain pales in comparison to being able to be with him.

Jesus says in John:

 “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”

_______

“Having God with you is better than him removing your struggles.”

So, that is the part I struggle with. I don’t know about you, but this is the part I’ve read and re-read several times. Some of the Jesus talk does jettison me out, I’ll be honest.

I did some research into the bible quote, and it means this: Whatever suffering we are going through, we have to have faith that even if we don’t see the divine purpose of it, it’s there, and we can’t wish it away but let it serve its function. The struggle has meaning, but we can’t let it dictate our emotional state.

It’s that last part I genuinely dislike. Or, I should say, struggle with.

We all want to know we’re not alone and that our suffering has a purpose. When I read what Nathan wrote, I could hear him on a tiny pulpit, but mostly, I heard a man having received something from somewhere that I wanted and if I wanted it, someone who has studied this work for decades, I knew others would as well, hence the reason you’re reading this.

Is it The Truth? It is for Nathan. Is it for me? I want it to be. For us? Yes, I do think it is.

My entire family lived in their heads. My sisters, my dad, my uncles, and aunts, except for one person – my mother. And she was a piece of work. But what she did have to her great glory was an ability to tell if anyone was lying. She was always hunting for something that smelled fishy, to her detriment. Her favorite expression was, “It’s not if the other shoe is gonna fall, Mike, but when.”

The problem with her was that her lens was bitter and resentful. She believed her destiny was one of absolute decimation—of herself, her life, her entire being. And I took that on. To this day, I have to tame the feeling of despair and death that rises during challenging times and remind it of the lie it is. I give it to her, to Source, and yet it’s still in my house, with me.

She was always looking to puncture holes in faith. I get that from her. I believe that there’s a higher purpose to our suffering, and how we access the feelings of ease and peace that come from the connection via faith is a constant obsession of mine.

How do we have faith when the outside world is on fire? If I couldn’t trust my mother, can I trust this elusive Thing In The Sky?

This discussion has been going on for centuries, and for me, reading Nathan’s testimony (as he calls it) simply brought home, after 60 years on this damn planet, an understanding of what faith truly is. It’s catching the wind in your hand and letting it cleanse you, knowing it’s impossible to hold onto it (it’s the wind, after all), but believing you can have the peaceful feeling of the wind anytime you want. All we have to do is ask for it, allow it in, and praise the wind for being in our lives.

Today, I say, “Sure. Okay. You want surrender?  Sure. I’ll surrender to what is now. I’ll accept it as part of a higher plan, and that it’s not my place to question. But let’s hurry up my yellow brick road, please. Even Dorothy had an expiration date.”

Will that bring me what I’m looking for? Relief? The final letting go of my past and being present? Bliss? Happiness? The elusive manifestations?

We’re addicted to literalism in our culture today. We distrust fluidity. We need stability, so we cling to strong views of right and wrong. There is no such thing, of course. Nothing is stable. Only that inner place we keep reaching for that I both love the idea of and find elusive.

Will that bring us all relief, which is why we embark on any path of faith? Maybe. It’s the goal. Until then, I bound up each day. Yes, bound. Like Nathan, I’m not resilient; I’m tenacious. I read the bible not because I’m suddenly Christian but because it’s good writing and often very logical.

I touched base with my therapist in NYC recently. I’ve known him for 25 years. He’s in his 80s now. Brooklyn man, so he’s blunt, direct, and one of the most insightful men I’ve ever met. I read Nathan’s note to him.

He laughed on the phone. “Well, there it is,” he said. “There’s your answer. Trust that God will take care of you. There’s a reason all of us have been telling you to surrender for decades. The time has come. To surrender…for your life.” I loved that he quoted RuPaul during an intense call about my interpersonal life.

The word “surrender” combines “sur-“ (to give “over” or “upon”) and “render” (“to give back” or “to return”). In its Germanic and Latin roots, different meanings define it as “trading away or giving something in exchange” and “related to yielding control.”

The idea is that when we “offer” or “give over” our emotional worries or life challenges to God/Source Energy, we don’t carry the burden and feel less alone. As Nathan wrote, it’s not that at that moment, we’re suddenly healed, rich, and complete, but yet, at its core, that is what faith is.

It’s the belief that something is here with us, looking out for us, and that by giving and offering over our burden, we suffer less, meaning we feel better. When we feel better, we can then “hear” the guidance God/Universe/Source Energy (running out of terms here) is giving us so we can act to fix our lives and (here is a bigger rub) learn to trust that other things are happening behind the scenes, helping us.

Trust. That word sticks in my throat.

It’s a grand idea. Do I believe it? Do you believe it? Do we have to believe it to make it work?

I’m willing to give my mother’s darkness the heave-ho and give it a shot. Believing was a block for her; it is for me. But perhaps that’s the block to finally surrender once and for all. Can it be that simple?

What harm can come from believing everything is conspiring to help us, and all we have to do is accept the help, knowing it’s what we deserve and that such help is always ready?

Is this kind of optimism the truth or delusional? Or does it matter?

It matters, and yes, it’s both. But if the result is enjoying our life, feeling less alone, and sensing (albeit now and then) that something is helping us, there could be much worse ways to live. And right now, we could all use a much better way to live.

Nathan is doing his searching, and so am I—we all are. And, like life, there is no end—only a new beginning.