Jason Collier, a center for the Atlanta Hawks, died of a heart attack this weekend. He was 28 years old. ‘Til the other side, Jason.
The description of his death hit me in a bad way.
Howell said Collier and his wife ate dinner at a restaurant Friday night and then returned home, where Collier spent time playing with his daughter.
“He started feeling real bad in the middle of the night,” said Howell, who spoke with Collier’s wife. “It’s just very sad. I’m totally stunned and devastated.”
When my best friend died, the circumstances were somewhat similar. The only difference is that his first round of chest paints–which I was personally a witness to–compelled him to go to the doctor. After that trip, the middle of his night was the same as the middle of Collier’s. The difference–he was in bed alone.
Here’s what I have to impart–if you have chest pains, go to the emergency room. Not to the doctor, and surely not to an HMO. Go to the emergency room. Make them hook you up to a monitor. Make them keep you overnight. But whatever you do, do not leave the hospital until you are absolutely certain that doctors have done whatever they should do to make sure you’re okay. That situation has dwindled my faith in doctors so low to the point that I give the bird to the HMO that dropped the ball on my boy every time I pass the place. Oh, and I haven’t been to a regular doctor since.
I’ll go to the hospital, though, and chest pains will send me there faster than anything else.
Chest pains are just no good. There is nothing in your chest that should ever hurt. There is nothing in your chest that should ever be sore. You might get a stomachache sometimes, but a sudden shock to your belly isn’t going to put you in the ground. Your chest…that’s air and blood. Don’t take long for an affliction to either of those to take you out.
Don’t be tough, folks. Be smart. Get that shit checked out.
Wanna know why I’m saying this? It’s really not because of the pain I felt when my man died. The hardest thing about it all was walking into the wake and seeing the look in his mother’s face, sitting on the front row of the church, looking at her son. His head was swollen, something that made him unrecognizable to us. That glaze in her eye, her apparent inability to see make sense of what the hell had just happened, the reality that the last time she’d see her son’s face would be in that fuckin box.
I hope you never have to see those things in someone’s eyes. I hope no one’s eyes have to be fixed on you like that. And I sure as hell I never have to be any character in that story.