Above are photos of my helmet after my motorcycle wreck. At the bottom left are Richie and Darrell standing in Darrell and my apartment. Middle photo is Richie doing a stoppie in front of his infamous Hooligan van. The bottom right is of me a week before the accident.
March 23, 2025 marks the special day. I spent 24 years walking and 24 years in my wheelchair. Here's story.
March 23, 2001
Twenty-four years ago, I was on the verge of reenlisting in the Navy and looking forward to spending twenty years in the service of my country.
I’ll freely admit it wasn’t a selfless act. I liked my job as an aviation electronics technician (AT) and enjoyed the career stability. I enjoyed the people I worked with, the never-the-same-thing-twice quality of the job, and the fact that I finally had money to do the things I loved doing. In my backyard, I had a go-kart, in the kitchen was a mini-bike, and in the living room sat a brand-new Honda CBR929RR in flagship Honda colors of red, white, and black.
My job at HM-14, the helicopter squadron I worked at in Norfolk, Virginia, was maintaining the mine countermeasures equipment. We towed the gear behind big, lumbering MH-53E helicopters. I loved those smoky birds.
Before moving to the MCM department, I worked as a line rat, maintaining the birds and doing daily and turn-around inspections. I knew the helo inside and out. It was a fun job, although not so much on winter days when Arctic winds swept across Willoughby Bay as we worked in the dead of night to ensure the helicopters were ready for flight operations the following day.
On March 23, 2001, I was attending an update school for electronic upgrades to a piece of MCM gear. As an E4, capped to E5, I looked forward to completing the school and hopping a silver bird to Bahrain for six months. Nothing like a tax-free reenlistment bonus in a hostile-fire zone. Civilian instructors from the equipment manufacturer taught the class. They were always eager to cut out early and go home, so on that particular Friday, the instructors released us at eleven a.m. Since I was attending school, I didn’t have to perform my normal shop duties.
I had my pick of things to do after school let out. What I should have done was go across the street to my shop and work on my Collateral Duty Inspector so I could sign off maintenance requests after we completed the work. But I didn’t.
A few days earlier, I’d purchased a brand-new Joe Rocket one-piece leather racing suit and wanted to break it in, so everything else got put on the back burner for a time that would never come. Riding took precedence in my life. My first love as a kid was motorcycles.
I went home to throw on my suit and try it out. There is a superstition among riders that new knee pucks should always be scuffed before wearing them. You rub them on the asphalt to get them scrapped up and then put them on the suit for later use on the road. Yeah, I didn’t do that. I just went with a shiny suit right out of the package. Maybe there was something to the superstition.
I threw on the suit and rode over to my buddy Richie’s place. He’s the inspiration for Richie Rudic in The Stuntman Thrillers. Yes, he stutters, and yes, we tell him to “take the choke off” when he starts in. The stories are true. Even the wedding one, where I shouted it out when Richie got choked up while giving his best man speech.
Anyhow, I woke him up, and he didn’t want to go, but I begged him, and the icing on the cake was a cheeseburger at Monk’s Place. If you’ve been there, you know. Richie had to be back early. He had to work at 3:30 that afternoon. It would be a short but intense ride like they always were.
We headed out of Norfolk, Virginia, toward Virginia Beach and then turned south into Pungo. The area was a refuge for riders like Richie and me, who wanted to ride the twisties. But riders also loathed it because the roads had deep ditches on either side and debris hazards. Sometimes, guys would go out and sweep the gravel off the turns after it had been thrown up by passing cars.
In January of 2001, I broke both bones in my lower leg when I lost control doing a wheelie with my feet over the handlebars. I’d ridden into a five-foot ditch in Pungo but wasn’t leery about returning. I knew the accident was my own fault and had occurred during a stunt gone awry. And in March, I was still limping on crutches from a surgery to repair the break by inserting a titanium rod into my tibia.
The day was beautiful. It was warm enough to wear shorts under my riding suit. The sun on that fine spring day turned the muddy marsh water blue. I could smell the mud flats left by the low tide in Back Bay and along the North Landing River. Green shoots poked up through golden stubble left from last year’s die-off. Everything was beginning anew, including my life.
Richie and I stopped at each stop sign to catch our breath after wringing the bikes to the edge, leaning them over to scrub the knee pucks on the pavement. Richie would lead, and I chased the more talented rider. He always was. Some people are born with the innate ability to drive or ride motor vehicles at high speeds. There is no fear inside them when on wheels.
The straight roads were for tucked-in speed runs, long wheelies, smoky burnouts, and stoppies (a maneuver done under braking requiring the rider to balance on the bike’s front wheel with the rear in the air).
Eventually, we came to Monk’s Place. I was more than glad to stop. I had to pee. The bottle of water I’d drunk earlier was making itself known.
Monk’s had sat on a curve of Princess Anne Road since the 1940s. It was seemingly in the middle of nowhere, a pitstop for locals, bikers, or anyone venturing off the beaten path for a delicious burger. I took a long leak, and we settled into seats to order burgers.
Over sweet tea, Richie and I talked about riding, new bikes on the market, and girlfriends. Once we finished our meal, we chatted a bit more. I thought about having another sweet tea before heading out to kill time and enjoy the early afternoon with my best friend. But remembering the urge to pee on the way to Monk’s, I held off. I wished I’d lingered. Maybe my life would be different than it is now.
On our way out the door, we met another rider, Jason. He was checking things out and decided to stop since he’d seen our bikes. We invited him to ride with us. And like us, Jason was in the Navy and looking for a place to sling his Yamaha around at the edge of sanity.
I pulled on my leather suit, shrugging it over my shoulders, and then zipped it to my neck. Standing by the Honda, I started the fuel-injected motor and listened to it purr while pulling on my Shoei helmet and leather gloves. We left the parking lot and the shade of the pine trees for the open road. Richie led, I was in the middle, and Jason brought up the rear.
We made a left onto Pungo Ferry Road, a two-lane strip of blacktop that spans the North Landing River. From high above, it was a breathtaking view that looked down on tidal flats and the crumbling, forgotten ferry building. Once over the river, we ripped down Pungo Ferry Road, and I rolled a nice stoppie up to the stop sign at the junction of Blackwater Road.
Jason was impressed with my skills. I wanted to show off some more. It’s a specialty, or maybe it’s just stupidity.
We turned right onto Blackwater Road and merged onto Head of River Road. Stopping at the yield sign, we left with screaming engines and pinned throttles.
And then it went dark.
I awoke in an ambulance, reciting my girlfriend’s phone number and asking the paramedics to call her. I told them I had pain in my abdomen and I wanted to know how damaged my motorcycle was. Could I ride it again? It’s all on the accident report.
Reality came in snippets.
My girlfriend, Donna, stood by my bed, her black hair shining in the dim light. I struggled to grasp where I was and why I was throwing up. The nurse rushed in and jammed a tube down my throat. It didn’t seem to do any good because I spit out large chunks of onion from the Monk burger. The nurse kept yelling at me to stop spitting, but I didn’t. I was afraid the large chunks wouldn’t get vacuumed from my mouth by the tiny hose.
I passed back out.
A doctor came into the ICU room to examine me. I knew him somehow. He called me by name. He uncovered my feet and said he wanted to run some tests. Standing at my bare feet, the doctor rubbed a swab up and down each sole and asked me to wiggle my toes. I couldn’t. I tried again, but still nothing.
He suddenly appeared on my right side, peering down at me as if he wanted me to see him more clearly. The morphine dripping into my veins to numb the excruciating pain was also clouding my head.
I knew what the doc was going to say before he opened his mouth.
Gently, the doctor touched my shoulder and said, “Son, you’re never going to walk again.”
It still gives me chills and leaves a lump in my throat to think about it.
I blacked out. My mind wanted to protect me from the pain and the misery.
I was forever a paraplegic. I would never walk again. There are so many things I would never do again.
So what happened?
Here’s what I’ve pieced together.
Richie won’t talk about it.
After the accident, he disappeared to his parents’ house in West Virginia. I didn’t think I would ever see him again. I guess he had to get things right in his mind, too. When I pressed him to talk about it, he just shook his head. I had to ask several times over the years before he said the only thing he would ever say about that fateful day. “You screamed a lot.”
After leaving the yield sign on Head of River Road, we rode approximately three miles to a set of S curves. The first turn is into a blind right-hand corner blocked by a bunch of pine trees that I couldn’t see around.
A semi-truck was coming toward Jason and I. Richie had already gone around the bend and was safely past the truck. The truck driver swung wide to make the corner. His skid marks showed that he had come all the way onto my side of the road before starting to negotiate the turn.
When I rounded the corner, doing about twenty-five miles per hour, the trailer was still on my side of the road. I admit, I was high in the corner, but not over the yellow line, as the trailer was clearly over it. The trailer had a large piece of angle iron welded to the side, extending the sides into wide-load status, but the driver had never marked it as such.
Knowing I would hit that angle iron, I rounded my left shoulder and turned my head to the right to absorb the blow. My helmet struck the angle iron low and just behind my ear, turning the fiberglass skidlid to mush. The impact of my shoulder against the trailer fractured my left scapula.
As we continued in opposite directions, my body bent backward, shattering the T-10 and T-11 vertebra, allowing my spinal cord to fold backward and pinch between the now exposed bones.
Unable to control my Honda motorcycle, I fell off and ended up face-down on the road. The bike came to rest on top of me. The truck driver, I assume, seeing what was happening in his mirror, locked up his brakes. The rear wheels caught the bike and pinned me against the road, dragging me twenty-nine feet on my stomach before the driver could stop his truck.
The brand-new leather suit took most of the abrasion as I slid along on my stomach. I had no road rash on my body, but the asphalt had chewed through my glove fingertips on my right hand. My ring finger had no fingernail left and looked like a bloody stump. My thumb still has a large scar over the middle knuckle. The Shoei helmet protected my face. I must have twisted my head as there are drag marks on both sides of the face shield. The left side bore the brunt of the action, and the flimsy plastic face shield got so hot that it bent at a ninety-degree angle when I lifted my head.
I don’t know what happened during the forty-five minutes we waited for the ambulance to arrive. This is when Richie said I screamed a lot. Was it pain, frustration, anger, fear, or a combination of all of it? I will never know, and I don’t want to.
Apparently, there was a debate about using a life flight, but eventually, they settled on an ambulance. The one I came conscious in, reciting Donna’s phone number.
The ambulance crew took me to Chesapeake General Hospital, the closest medical facility to the accident scene. Emergency room staff stabilized me with a steroid drip and then sent me on to Norfolk Sentara Hospital for trauma treatment.
Once there, the doctor determined that I had enough symptoms to warrant immediate surgery to stabilize me, as they thought I had a chance of making a full recovery. Boy, were they wrong.
Again, I don’t remember any of this. I spoke to the doctor, signed all the paperwork for surgery, had a long talk with the chaplain, had him call my parents, who were at work, and eventually got him to call my brother’s place after he left a message on my parent’s answering machine.
My sister-in-law remembers the call well. The chaplain told her he was calling to say that I’d been in an accident. Bonnie said, “He broke his leg in January. Why are you calling me now?”
The doctor performed surgery to decompress my spinal cord, repaired the shattered vertebra with bone from my hip, and then placed two titanium rods and multiple screws along the spine to hold everything together. My leg and my spine were now a matching set.
I remember my parents arriving at the ICU. I told them that we had to stop meeting like this as they had come to Norfolk when I’d broken my leg. None of us can recall what we talked about beyond that witty quip.
Eventually, I moved to a step-down unit. I was there for a few days before I went to a regular room. The doctor wanted me to keep my left arm in a sling to stabilize the scapula fracture, but my arm kept falling asleep, and I would remove the sling so I could straighten my arm and get blood pumping.
When the nurses rolled me over to check my ass for pressure sores or clean me up when I shit myself, because when you have no feeling down there, you don’t know when it’s coming out, they would invariably put their hand on my left shoulder, which would make me scream in pain.
A prosthetics guy made me a TSLO brace to keep my spine stabilized. TSLO just refers to the thoracic, lumbar, and sacral regions of the spine. Once I had a brace, the doctor wanted me to sit up. It was excruciating. The physical therapists would transfer me to a stretcher-style bed and lift the back so I sat vertically with my legs straight out in front of me. My mother had to leave the hospital so she couldn’t hear me screaming. It was the first time I’d seen my father cry.
Richie turned up. He and our buddy Mike stole my therapy bands from the bed, put them on their foreheads, and whooped around like Indians, excuse me, Native Americans. Other friends came to see me in the hospital. I was surprised by the number of people and the variety. People I didn’t think cared about me stopped by to see how I was doing and to say they would miss me.
The docs decided I needed to learn how to catheterize myself so I could pee on my own. I had this hot blonde nurse who took my penis in her hand and showed me how to slide a catheter up my dick to pee. I hoped some miracle would happen and I would pop stiff in her delicate touch. Or not so delicate. I couldn’t feel a fucking thing.
The Navy medically retired me. I pleaded to stay on. There were a lot of papers I could push and parking spots for disabled people all over the base. The Chief explained that I could not stay in the service since I could no longer deploy on a ship. Thanks for playing, but now you’ve got to go home.
I had my choice of going to rehab at the VA hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, or in Richmond, Virginia. I chose Cleveland as it was closer to my family. It was still a three-hour drive for them. As I lay in my bed, all I could think about was the movie The Deer Hunter, a 1978 American war drama starring Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken. Parts of that movie had been filmed in the spinal cord treatment ward at the Cleveland VA. I remember it looked bleak, and I could feel the anguish and tension from John Savage as he portrayed a paraplegic.
I was gutted to go there and didn’t have a high opinion of the place from the start. It didn’t get any better.
A funny thing happened on the way to Cleveland.
My CO, Kevin Scott, visited me before I left for Cleveland. He tore the unit patch off his flight suit, pressed it into my hand, and told me he would get it from me the next time he saw me. I clung to that patch and his belief in me as the ambulance transported me and Donna to the airport. She would accompany me to Cleveland and catch a flight home after I was settled.
Commander Scott turned up at the airport to see the Air Force guys load me into a transport plane. That was a mistake. I should have asked Scott to fly me to Cleveland on an MH-53E.
So, there we were, winging it across the blissful blue sky, expecting to land in Cleveland at any minute when the pilot came on the radio and said, “We are cleared to land in St. Louis.”
Wait … What?
Donna and I exchanged nervous glances. I guess they forgot to divert to Cleveland. We landed, and the Air Force guys took me into a hospital ward. Donna called my brother to let him know what was happening. I couldn’t remember my parents’ number. She slept in a chair overnight.
In the morning, the AF pukes loaded me onto another plane, promising again that we would land in Cleveland.
A few hours later, we were not pleased to learn that we would land in Washington, D.C. What is going on, Air Force? I couldn’t understand how the AF kept screwing over an injured man.
I got carted off to Walter Reed. It was my first stay in an AF hospital where the nurse was an officer. I was in a strange land with strange people. No matter how many jokes we make about the Air Force having the best food, they’re hospital food still sucked.
I spent two days in the luxury palace of Walter Reed before someone told us that The AF would once again fly me to St. Louis. What the actual ... Who planned this excursion?
Donna said she would get off in Norfolk if the plane went there. This was supposed to be a weekend trip, and she needed to get back to work. I understood her reasoning but hated it. We, indeed, flew to Norfolk. Donna left me on the plane all alone. I wasn’t very good company. I slept a lot. I’m sure they had me heavily sedated.
From Norfolk, we made a tour of the south with stops in Raleigh, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Biloxi, Mississippi; and then back to St. Louis.
The guy in St. Louis who got me off the plane the first time asked me what I was doing back. I wish I knew, brother.
The next day, the plane finally diverted to Cleveland and dropped me on the tarmac five arduous days after the journey began. And the AF wankers left my TSLO brace and shaving kit on the plane. Thanks, guys!
An ambulance crew loaded me in their truck and asked if I wanted to go lights and sirens to the VA. I said I didn’t care. We went lights and sirens. As we pulled up to the VA entrance, the ambulance driver clipped his mirror on another car, knocking it off. Way to go, guys. This journey seemed doomed from the start. Just send me home.
The Rehab
Remember my impression of the VA from the movie? It was just like that. The VA was doing an extensive renovation, and the entrance ramp was roofed and sided with plywood. My view of it was bare studs and warped particle board. It wasn’t a great first impression.
The ambulance crew took me to the newly renovated sixth floor, where all spinal cord facilities were. On the sixth floor? Really? What if there’s a fire? We can’t walk down the freaking stairs. I cried myself to sleep.
I had a lot of visitors over the next few days. Lots of therapists, fellow paraplegics, doctors, nurses, and the like stopped by to tell me how great life was going to be. I told them all to fuck off. I was angry, bitter, and didn’t want to hear any of that shit.
However, the same nurses who had worked in the ward during the filming of The Deer Hunter knew how to handle a tough case like me. They taught me how to be independent. My fractured scapula stretched my learning curve, which didn’t allow me to use my arms, which were now my legs.
I met a guy named Jake Hips. He had a lumbar injury and had recovered enough function in one leg to be able to walk using a walker. Jake stood right there in front of me and told me how great things would be and how my life would be a thousand times better in a wheelchair than when I was walking. I didn’t say anything, but inside I was screaming for him to shut the fuck up and go away. He didn’t know what he was talking about. He could walk!
Years later, I saw Jake at a snow skiing event hosted by the VA in Snowmass, Colorado. I told him the story from that day and then apologized. Jake had been right. My life had become a fairytale. I traveled all over the U.S., parachuted out of airplanes, been bungee jumping off a bridge in Vancouver, Canada, gone scuba diving from the St. Lawrence Seaway to the far-flung Caribbean, snow skied from Vancouver to West Virginia, and I’d married the love of my life and had a son. My life is charmed.
But when I was in rehab, I couldn’t see any of that. I went on a hunger strike as a way to cope with my situation and rebel against the absolute crap food they fed us. It was my personal way of controlling a situation that I saw as out of control. I went from 198 pounds walking to 171 when I left the hospital. I only started eating when my body began to rebel and vomit any time that I put something in it. I wanted to leave the hospital.
I had a psyche eval while there. The doctor asked me if I drank a lot. I said rather honestly and naively, “Of course, I drank a lot. I was young and in the world’s largest fraternity. I drank like a fish.” My psyche eval from the VA includes a line that says: patient blames the Navy for his drinking problem.
Not anywhere remotely near what I said. But I digress.
Eventually, my scapula healed, and I went on with rehab, learning how to use a manual wheelchair. The first thing I wanted to learn to do was wheelies. I was showing Tony, one of my therapists, my exceptional new skill and promptly fell over backward and bounced my head off the tile.
My parents came every Sunday to visit. They took me to dinners at nearby restaurants. I wanted to show off for them. I hopped off a curb going too fast and face-planted in the middle of the street. My mother cried.
Tony took me out for driving lessons and made me stop at Metro Parks to try my hand at various terrains. The one I remembered the most was a stop at a place where the gravel trail slopped downhill. I proudly wheeled down it. At the bottom, he told me to go back up. That wasn’t so easy. I couldn’t do it. He showed me how to go up backward, using the large rear tires to leverage traction on the steep slope. It was a workout.
We had a recreational therapist who took hospital-bound vets to area attractions to boost our morale. He took a group of us to a Six Flags theme park. I drank beer and rode a roller coaster. I mean, what else were we supposed to do?
My doctor, Dr. Ho—I called him Dr. No—promptly ordered my dismissal from the hospital, saying I had violated the rules by having too much fun. Yep. I was always a risk-taker and a rule-breaker.
It was a good thing. I was going home.
Home
On June 30, 2001, Dr. No released me from the hospital.
But I was still angry. Angrier than I could ever remember being. There wasn’t anything anyone or anybody could say to make me feel better. Even guys with twenty-plus years of experience in wheelchairs couldn’t comfort me in the fact that I had lost the best things in my life: a promising career in the Navy, riding motorcycles, and my girlfriend, who found it difficult to deal with a boyfriend in a wheelchair.
Home wasn’t that great, either. My parents’ house wasn’t accessible. Dad built a ramp up to the front porch. They moved out of their first-floor bedroom so I could have a place to stay. I had to transfer to an office chair to push myself into the bathroom. The door wasn’t wide enough for my wheelchair to go through.
And I was stuck at home by myself. I had no vehicle, and the house was fifteen miles from the nearest town. I was alone and angry and miserable. I bought a new stereo to listen to tunes. I lay in bed a lot. I got a pressure sore on my ass from my shower chair, where the padding had pulled away from the wooden base. My sacral rubbed the wood and caused a wound. Dad drove me to Cleveland—six hours round trip, not including time at the clinic. I lay in bed even more. I couldn’t control my bodily functions. I kept peeing and pooping myself. I had yet to find a schedule that my body would respond to.
One of my mother’s friends sent me John Hockenberry’s book, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence. I read it. It resonated. Why? I don’t know. But the pupil was finally ready to receive. I decided to get off my ass and get moving.
My first forays were up and down the road. Then, I ventured into the woods, a place I loved in my youth. It was extremely difficult to maneuver through the brush and over tree roots, but I saw the old ramp I’d built for my ATV, the dirt mounds where my brother and I had trapped groundhogs, and the place in the fence row where our dad had fallen asleep while deer hunting and missed a prime buck.
Then the worst happened.
According to therapy rules at the hospital, patients should be able to transfer from the ground back into their wheelchairs before being released home. I had never been able to do it due to a lack of strength and coordination and desire. Dr. Ho waved that qualification on my way out the door.
So, there I was at the edge of the woods, ready to head for home, when the front wheels of my chair fell into a plow furrow, and I took a header. I lay on the ground, knowing I was the only one who could get myself out of the situation.
I got into a sitting position, backed myself up to the chair, and managed to lift my sorry ass into the chair on the first try. It was the achievement of a lifetime. I had made it back into the chair. I emailed my therapist to tell her the story. She said she wept when she read it. She had been very worried about me leaving. She said she still has that email.
It was the start of the journey.
West Virginia
Richie called me one day out of the blue. He said he and our friend Darrel were driving from Norfolk to my house to pick me up and take me to his parents’ place in West Virginia.
I packed my things and waited like a puppy at the door for my friends to arrive. They showed up after a grueling eleven-hour drive to be met by a nervously clucking Evan, ready to fly the coop. Riche was dog-tired but agreed to leave that night. We stopped to say hi to my brother and his family, then motored south.
We ended up at a strip club in Huntington. Richie admitted it was worth the drive. Lap dances all around!
The next day, Richie and Darrel threw me on a Polaris ATV, and we rode all over creation. It was amazing. Take me home, country roads. It was the most fun I’d had since Richie, and I had gone to a drag strip to race motorcycles a week before my accident. We spent a few days riding ATVs and even watched Darrell roll his down a shale bank, leading us to invent the term, Darrell Roll, playing on the term barrel roll. We still laugh about it.
After a few epic days in West Virginia. They took me to Norfolk. I spent several days there before Mom came to pick me up. Thank you, Mom. I needed that. Hugs.
The wrap-up
I can tell you that having friends who saw me in the exact same light as before I was hurt was a tremendous relief. I love those two guys, and they are my forever brothers. That trip jumpstarted my adventures. It showed me what was possible and that people were always willing to lend a hand to help a guy in need.
Don’t believe me?
I had a UPS driver stop his truck to help lift me out of a ditch. Two Japanese men towed me up the hill from Horseshoe Bend in Arizona and shepherd me to my truck when they saw my wife struggling to push me. Other tourists grabbed hold to push me up steep slopes from Indian ruins in Colorado. A guy blocked traffic with his car when I was stuck on a patch of ice in the middle of main street. He pushed me onto the sidewalk. Men in the Dominican Republic carried me across the beach to put me in a boat to go scuba diving. Three dudes helped Richie pick me up and threw me over the railing of a bridge so I could bungee jump. I screamed like a little girl. He still grins at having been able to throw me off a bridge.
In late September 2001, Commander Scott chartered a Navy plane and flew a group of guys from the squadron up to Ohio. I handed the unit patch back to my C.O. He gave me a new dungaree shirt with my E5 insignia sewn to the sleeve and presented me with a shadow box made by some boatswain mates at the squadron. Thank you, guys. I’ve never been able to thank you in person, and that shadow box has a place of pride on the wall of my bedroom.
I’ll never be able to thank everyone enough for believing in me, treating me as their equal when I didn’t always see myself as such, and taking me under their wings to provide friendship and help to guide me through the rough patches.
It has taken me a long time to come to terms with being in a wheelchair. I’m still trying to cope. But I’m here. I’m cranking out stories for all of you.
As Rush Limbaugh liked to say, I’m using my “… talent on loan from God,” or as my wife likes to say, “You make shit up for a living.” It’s true, but the story I’ve told you is real. It is mine.
I’m glad I’m here for the ride. Jake Hips was right. I’ve lived life beyond my wildest imagination, and there is more to come.