Riding around on bikes opened up the world; you were no longer zipped by things, and you had time to see all there was to see. I went out and purchased a new digital Canon Camera, as my old film-bearing Ricoh Camera was fine before, but digital was the new way of the future. I photographed everything. I began to look at things from a different perspective.
At the same time, my niece would constantly call me up to ask something about the island’s natural world, and I would answer her as quickly as I could. Eventually, she stated that I should build a website about the wildland and its inhabitants on Vancouver Island so others could learn. I told her that I wouldn’t even know what to call it. She said “askbud.ca” because she always does that. I thought it might be fun and started into it right away. It became a passion, and I worked on it day and night. My new camera provided the images needed. Both my boys bought Canon cameras as well, and we started to go out together on camera shoots.
Over the next couple of years, the site started to get quite big. People began to discover it, and we were getting thousands of visitors a day. I would receive many emails daily from people with questions. I purchased a car and we began to travel around the island to as many cool places as we could. My site became quite popular with schools, and they would use it in their lessons. Then, one day, I received an email from a teacher wanting to know what was going on at my site. She was very upset. I opened up my site to check things out and quickly found that all my links had been changed, and they all now went to Asian porn. I was appalled and contacted my server; the company was in Holland. I informed them that I could not access my c-panel or get control of this problem. It took us over a week to get my site back. It was a Russian group that had hacked it.
All I could do was make a hard copy and delete the whole site. I was devastated by the whole ordeal. Eventually, I cancelled my account with the Dutch server and signed up with a server company in LA called A2 Hosting. They have a much beefier security system and offered me the ability to host as many sites as I wanted on a shared server.
I needed to buy a new domain name before loading my site back. I was surprised when I looked up the domain name “gohiking.ca” and found it was not taken. The new site now had a name. Adding the pages back was going to take time, lots of time. a website was born.
One evening after working on the site all day, my neck was sore. I decided to go to bed and see how it felt in the morning. I just figured it was from bending over my computer all day. I had no idea what was in store, when all of a sudden, in a flash of almost visible light, I felt like I had been hit in the forehead by a baseball bat, or perhaps that I had been shot. The pain was the worst I had felt. I remember leaping out of bed and yelling at my wife to call 911, and then I collapsed onto the floor, puking my guts out. It was a massive diffuse brain bleed. I can barely remember the next 24 hours, but I do recall brain scans in Campbell River, where they had trouble stabilizing me to transfer me to a brain ward in either Vancouver or Victoria. It was late the next morning before they could move me by ambulance to Victoria. There had been much debate about flying me, but they were afraid to have me at a high elevation. As they were loading me up, my best memory of the whole event is still crystal clear in my mind, in the ambulance, framed by the open door was not only my whole family, but several of our foster kids as well, all looking in with scared faces, all tear-stroked. I might have said that I would see them all soon. Then a nurse came and gave me a shot of morphine, and I don’t remember much after that until I woke up in the brain ward.
I was in a dark room, all by myself. I was hooked up to many machines that were all beeping away, and I could not remember why I was there or even where I was. I was quite dozy and in severe pain. A nurse came in to check on me and ran out when she saw I was awake. Several doctors came back with her. They asked me how I was feeling, and I said I hurt like hell, and what happened to me. They told me I was in the Victoria Hospital and that I had a brain hemorrhage. I was informed that I was very lucky to still be in the world, but that it was going to be a slow recovery. They gave me more morphine.
I was in that dark room for about 3 days, I think. I do remember my wife and kids came to visit me, but I was pretty screwed up. I must have looked really bad because they cried the whole time they were there. Then they moved me into a room with a window that let in some light. I spent 4 days there before I was moved into a bright room with a TV.
Twice a day, they took me into a room where they would insert this long needle into a shunt in my thigh that would travel up my spine and into my brain, where they would use various tools that would come out of it to cut and seal holes in my brain. I could watch this on a computer screen in real-time. I was always told to stay still, you bet. I felt like a hot dog on a stick.
Since this first happened, I had been suffering from horrific migraine headaches. The morphine was great at reducing the pain, but it was giving me terrible nightmares. I had demons running through my dreams, chasing, catching and eating alive, little creatures that could talk with me. I saved as many as I could, and many were eaten. Sometimes I could see them while I was awake. They had on little tweed suits.
On day 9, a male nurse came in with a shot of Morphine, to which I said I did not want it. He began to get a bit aggressive as he tried to give me that shot. As I began to get upset, I told him that if he pushed it, we would get into it. He left to call the doctor, who said to see how it goes without the morphine. The headaches got bad; it was from the blood that had pooled on my brain. I still refused the shots, and my mind started to lose its haze and clear up. I began to remember things, but could not remember my family members’ names, and this scared me. After a couple more days, my memory mostly came back, and I was feeling pretty good, except for the headaches.
On day 12, after breakfast, I asked the nurse if there was a Timmy’s downstairs. She said there was, so I asked her for a pair of slippers and a housecoat so I could go get a coffee. She said I could not go, so I told her this was not a prison and if she would not get me slippers and a housecoat coat I would be going down barefoot and in my gown that was open in the back. She brought me some slippers and a housecoat. A few minutes later, I was sitting outside, in the fresh air, having a coffee and a chocolate Bavarian cream doughnut, and it was good. When I got back to my room, my doctor was waiting for me. He told me that if I was able to go for coffee, I should be able to go home. I phoned my wife in Campbell River and told her to hurry before they changed their minds. It took 5 hours for her to get there, and she found me in my room, all my clothes on and a bag of other stuff, itching to get out of there. I never did like hospitals.
Had to go see my doctor the day after getting home, and he told me that he had never thought he would see me again. He was surprised that I had survived. He said more than half the people who go through this are dead before they hit the floor, and many more die in the hospital. Took a few weeks for my memory to return fully, and 6 months for the headaches to stop. Life goes on.