Sebastian Junger

And then one of the reasons the blood loss slows down is that there's so much blood in your abdomen that there's back pressure.

and it keeps, it slows down the blood loss from your artery because now it's trying to flow into a full container, and it doesn't leak as fast, right?

So as soon as you open up the abdomen, you can imagine what happens.

I mean, you geyser blood, and you gotta push the organs aside, and it's this desperate search for the bleed before you bleed out, and as you can probably guess, it doesn't go well very often, right?

So it's not quite a death sentence, but if you go into the OR with an abdominal bleed,

You know, they bring your wife in to say goodbye to you, basically, before you do that.

They don't tell you or her that, but that's what they're doing.

And that's what they would have done with my wife, who got to the hospital.

The ER doctor was like, you better come now.

So at one point, I'm in agonizing pain, because I've got all this free-floating blood against my kidneys and my liver and my spleen, and just agony, it's like kidney stones, right?

I'm in agony, and they can't sedate me, because my vitals are too low, right?

So I'm conscious through all this, and I'm watching the doctors, and at one point,

I watched one of the doctors just sort of shake his head and shrug and was basically like, well, we tried.

This isn't working.

And the other doctor nodded and he was like, yeah, we tried.

And it was the first moment where I realized, oh, my God, I didn't realize.

We're playing for keeps right now.

This might not turn out well.

I might not be going home.

I couldn't believe what I'd seen.