Welcome to Jump David Jump. It's probably the majority of your first time here. It's just a personal blog that I've done a few things with here and there.
So first off, thank you all for the kind words that you have given to me over the past 1-2 days. I am so appreciative of them. You kinds words are with me here in the hospital.
So, here's what happened....
1. As a development partner with Dot&Cross, we went to the "Experts Academy" in San Francisco, a conference to learn more about how to promote people as experts and develop their platform. I am lucky enough to work with Dot&Cross as we create media (which works with different 'experts' we look to impact the world by creating media for their respective fields. So in learning about this, I've spent the last week in San Fransisco. Expert Academy went great, but on Saturday night... everything changed.
2. Saturday night, I visited Josh and Sarah Shipp and their amazing new baby in San Jose and took a train to come back to the Hotel in South San Francisco. I ended up gettng there about 12:30 am. Over the next hour I hung out with my business partner Brett VanTil and we all sit around and discussed what happened at the experts academy with some fellow attendees that had become new friends.
3. As an ongoing joke I had going for a couple days when someone asked me for what field of topic I was in an expert in, I said "Kung-Fu". As a joke, this new friend came at me with some sweet fake kung-fu moves. And as a professional recipient of his fake Kung Fu move should, I pretended that he actually had kicked me in the hopes that everyone else would think we were starting a bar fight. (I'm sure none of you could even imagine me doing this...) As I turned around, I hit a concrete pillar holding up the roof of this hotel lobby. I hit it just to the left of my left eye. Ouch! I'm not going to lie. It's wasn't THAT bad. But it definitely hurt. I had a weird experience where after I hit, I continued in conversation but had a little difficulty finding my words and actually apologized to the person I was talking to unclearly. I ended the conversation and proceeded to bed.
4. Next morning - I was feeling OK and had a couple conversations where I thought my speech was a little better. I got down stairs to the final day of the conference. About maybe 3 minutes into it, I actually went into a 3-5 minute seizure. I don't remember much after that, except going to the hospital via ambulance with a lovely women who I need to get the name of. Later I found out that out of all 400 of the people in the room, 3 of them were medical 'experts' and all 400 of them prayed for me. Amen.
5. Arrived at Stanford Hospital and Clinic at about 9:30. They knew about my head traumas near my left eye and put me under x-rays. Sure enough, bleeding in the brain. This is where I posted to Twitter / Facebook (photo courtesy of my business partner who thought I was crazy as I twittering between scans, etc.. :). Thank you all for your amazing comments. It was really nice to read them between the tests I had to go through.
Well, that is a pretty good story for a great way to get blood on your brain. Then is gets worse...
6. The person who looked at the MRI came back in to tell me that, yes, there was indeed blood on the brain as they expected. The problems with my lack of speech abilities, along with a few moments of numbness on the right side of my body could be the fact that this is from the left frontal cortex of my brain.
7. The bleeding in the brain isn't by itself. I have an Oligodendroglioma, a brain tumor.
8. This has probably been growing in my brain for 2-3 years. Up until my seizure yesterday, I have never seen any of the symptoms involved with this. It appears that running into concrete as a 'Kung-fu' expert may have actually been the incident that caused the swelling to affect the tumor which caused me to seizure. Yes, if I hadn't hit my head, I may never have found out about this. It could have be 5-7 years down the road before this tumor grew enough to actually effect me. In other words, my kung-fu mishap allowed me to see this. I recently relieved an email from Thomas, the Kung-Fu Gentlemen who caused all of this. I am so happy to report that this crazy experiment may save my live.
9. I now have several options. I may stay here in Stanford for surgery (an unbelievable place to end up after a seizure) or go to Minnesota (most likely Mayo, which is an EVEN BETTER place for this treatment). Either way I will get the 'awake surgery done', where they would open up my head and tell me what is actually going on and test their hypothesis by talking to me throughout the surgery and then move to immediately fix what they find. They may recess the gene. They may see if I am eligible to do chemotreatment, etc... I guess the MRI can't quite tell them right now.
10. Above all else, I have a wife, Amy, who is the dearest thing to my heart. She dropped her photography workshop of 20 photographers each coming to Grand Rapids from around the country. I know she will make it up to them, but she isn't going to spend one more minute away from me. I pray that you have and appreciate someone like this in your life. It's unbelievable. Amy is flying into Palo Alto today (Stanford) to come visit me and most likely take me over to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
All of this to say, I'm happy. I really truly am. As this blog indicates, my life has been several crazy jumps from one area of life to another. From growing up in England and being thrown back into elementary school in Omaha, Nebraska knowing nobody. From knowing everyone I graduated with in Omaha and then going to Cedarville University in Ohio where I once again knew nobody. From moving out from knowing everybody at Cedarville, I moved to California with Amy where she and I struggled to find our place before moving back to GR where each of us started our own companies. We have both done extremely well and this point, but... it's time for another jump.
I know that God is going to do something with this as it has already blown my mind that all of these things have transpired to bring me to this epic moment. I'm excited for what God is going to do with this. I'm serious. Without any doubt, it will be very different from what I imagined, and that's okay, my own imagination has it's own weak limits.
I leave you with this, because well... I can:
Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen. - Ephesians 3:20-21
**Thanks to Brett Van Til, business partner who is here to edit this considering my speaking / typing capabilities have gotten a little rusty until surgery, etc.. Without him the last last two days would have been very lonely.
