On Monday, December 12, 2016 at 3:36 PM I sent some text messages to my friend Judy Chapman asking for prayers in desperation. It was the culmination of 12 days of an emotional roller coaster surrounding one of the most serious health risks I’ve ever had in my 61+ years. It started with an ordinary scratchy throat from a viral head cold on December 1. By dinner time on December 3 we called 911 and I was on my way to St. Vincent Hospital in serious respiratory distress in the back of an ambulance. I made my way from the ER to the ICU where I was intubated at 3 AM that morning. Although I was extubated a couple of days later, I took another turn for the worse and they had to perform a tracheostomy. The inability to talk while intubated and after having had the tracheostomy pushed me to my emotional limits. I’m accustomed to being an active participant in my own healthcare decisions but the inability to talk led me on a bizarre sequence of events that would lead to the text message prayer request that I sent Judy that afternoon.

Because of my disability, I cannot operate an iPhone using the touchscreen. Earlier this year I designed, built, and programmed an electronic gadget that I described as “the ultimate remote control“. It is operated by three small push buttons that I hold in my right hand. The device sends Bluetooth signals to the phone and makes use of the iOS 9 accessibility feature called “switch control”. By pushing three little micro switches, I can operate any of the phone’s functions including sending text messages. Over the past several days this was my primary method of communicating with the doctors and nurses for anything other than simple yes and no questions. I would type messages in the “Notes” app on the iPhone and then the doctors would look at my phone and they would read what I had written. Unfortunately it was a slow and tedious process fraught with difficulty.

I began the text messages to Judy with a joke. I told her that if she had heard a loud whirring noise from the south side of Indianapolis it was my mother spinning in her grave over all of the things that I was enduring. But then it came time to get serious and ask for prayers.

Typing using this device is a bit slow so there’s time to think about each word. I begin with “Pray that…” Okay Chris, be specific, for what do you want her to pray? Healing? Even though I was lying in bed with a tracheostomy and in need of a ventilator to sleep, physically things were going reasonably well under the circumstances. What led me to this emotional meltdown that I was experiencing? What did I really want most in the world at that very moment? Patience? I didn’t want to be patient. I wanted results now. If not healing or patience what did I want? I typed the next two words “…they listen…”.

The message now read “Pray that they listen…” and I was about to type “… to me.” But a sad, sick giggle rose up inside me. “…listen to me?” I had no voice! How the hell do you listen to a man who has no voice? Yet that’s what I really wanted. I wanted a miracle. I wanted people to listen to the man with no voice. So I completed the sentence that way.

“Pray that they listen to the man with no voice.” And I sent it.

And then I read it over and over and over again. The sentence shocked me. It was full of pain and sorrow and desperation. It perfectly expressed the emotions that I was feeling and it revealed them back to me with a clarity that shook me. I’ve written powerful dramatic sentences in my time. I’ve won awards for my writing. This may have been the most powerful sentence I’ve ever written in my life.

I realized that if that was the title of a blog post or perhaps a magazine article or even a book that I would be drawn in immediately. I would want to read that story. What was the story behind those words? Why did the man feel he had no voice and what did he want them to hear that they were not hearing? How did he get to that point in his life that he made that prayer request?

That’s the story I’m going to tell in this series of blog posts. When it’s complete, perhaps I will attempt to get it published. My experiences leading up to that moment, the issues raised in my struggle, and the journey beyond that moment I believe will be a worthwhile tale to tell and I feel compelled to tell it to the widest possible audience.

So let’s go back to the beginning of the story and I will tell you how I got to that moment where I felt that despair and wrote those words.