The old me was a huge jerk!

After healing, I went back to work, but things never felt the same again.

I was extremely unhappy and very much unfulfilled in my career. I wanted to do more. I wanted to be more.

Wishing to make a more meaningful contribution to society (but not knowing how), I resigned from my position to seek more altruistic work. With the knowledge and experience I gained while working in IT, I began collaborating with law enforcement agencies to help promote community-wide Internet safety.

I spoke publicly on this subject and helped school districts draft Internet safety policies for their students.

In the process, I obtained my master’s degree in Social Work. I was privileged to work with at-risk students in both K-12 and university settings, providing therapeutic services including crisis intervention to students following the violent deaths of their classmates and direct assistance to children and families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

These experiences were humbling and powerful, cementing my commitment to serving others.

I continued my graduate education earning a doctorate in clinical psychology. During my training, I was fortunate enough to gain experience seeing patients at the Emory School of Medicine and training in an inpatient forensic hospital.

Afterward, I completed a residency in neuropsychology where I worked with patients from the Cleveland Clinic and assessed NFL players as part of the league’s concussion protocol. I also gained extensive experience working with physically and sexually abused children.

Around the same time, I picked up a book that changed my life. Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning Feeling made me realize that by shifting your mindset, you could do anything. I started to gain confidence in my belief that I could make a bigger, more global impact. So I launched a podcast to help people everywhere improve their lives.

Around 2:00 AM, I awoke suddenly, feeling very strange. Instinctively, I yanked the pillow out from under my wife’s head. As I was groggy and confused, rather than asking for her to take me to the hospital, I apologized and went back to bed.

My brain continued to bleed while I slept for the next three hours until our new puppy, Crusher woke me up. When I got out of bed I was confused and made my way downstairs with some difficulty. When I got Crusher to the front door to take him out, I pulled out my cell phone to turn on the flashlight. And I had no idea how to use my phone.

In panic mode after realizing my brain had been bleeding for several hours, I woke up the kids and threw them in the car as my wife drove me to the hospital. My children who were around seven and five at the time kept asking what was wrong. I told them I had to go to the doctor because I had a headache which as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say was true “from a certain point of view.”

He had totally missed it, and I knew if I didn’t convince him to treat me, I was in huge trouble. While in survival mode, I remembered something my first supervisor, Milton taught me in my first job out of college. He told me that when you make your best offer as a salesperson, you need to look the prospect in the eyes without speaking. We’re uncomfortable with silence by nature and usually, whoever talks first concedes. 

Remembering Milton’s teachings, I told the doctor he was wrong. I explained that I was a clinical psychologist with extensive training in neuropsychology and that a CT can miss an ischemic stroke. I then told him he was going to order an MRI immediately and then provide me with blood thinners.

We locked eyes and after what felt like an eternity, he agreed. My MRI showed the focal point of the stroke less than a millimeter off of my basal ganglia, a part of the brain heavily involved in speech and motor movement. I was lucky to be alive, although now my speech was severely impaired (to the degree that my phone’s voice assistant wouldn’t recognize me). My fine motor skills were also shot (I couldn’t make my fingers hit the right letters to text), and I had facial palsy where the whole left side of my face was drooping significantly. 

I’m so grateful I was able to fully recover but the fact that my ER doctor was so overwhelmed and notably stressed to the degree that he missed my stroke on an MRI really stuck with me. In fact, it led me to become a partner in another company, Joy At Work System (J@WS) which has two remarkable missions:

Reduce the cost of healthcare for businesses and empower hospitals to address the mental health care of their medical professionals to minimize unnecessary deaths caused by medical errors.