My Brother Had a Heart Attack Last Night

Here’s why you shouldn’t care…

My brother is 55 and had a heart attack last night. No one who knows him is surprised. He’s been drugging and drinking for decades. He now looks like a 70-year-old homeless man and sort of acts like one too as he shuffles from room to room.

Here’s the thing, he’s not some random dude that doesn’t have an education or has never experienced success.

On the contrary, he has his Bachelors Degree in Nuclear Engineering and his Masters in Nuclear Physics (graduated 3rd in his class) and has worked for some of the most prestigious companies in the world making nice six-figure incomes, including Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola at very high senior levels which tells me; fear and pain trumps intelligence.

He had greatness to offer the world and now his brilliant mind is pickled mush as he struggles to remember what he did an hour ago.

He lost another six figure job recently because he would go out to lunch, drink and take pills and then come back to work and fall asleep sitting next to his boss and decided to go live with my 80-year-old mother in Atlanta.

“He’s walking around the house naked and peeing on the floor” my mom tells me. He wakes up goes to the bar, drinks, takes pills, drinks a triple espresso or does a couple lines of cocaine to be awake enough to drive back to my mom’s house where he sleeps for a couple of hours then repeats this routine at least two more times during the same day.

I called him in the hospital this morning excited to hear his voice because he was alive and to share my concern for his health and well-being and from his hospital bed while struggling to breathe he says: “I don’t care about your concern — you own that. If I’m going out, I’m going out with a Bang!”

Hmmmmm…hurt people — hurt people. Painful cliche but oh so true.

At that moment I realized I had two choices. I could be swallowed up in his imminent death or I could choose to put the oxygen mask on my own face, breathe and live.

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