When I was six months in to my Covid México trip in 2020, I received a message from my highschool sweetheart, my first love, the one that got away. “Hi Ronnie, what are you up to?” We hadn’t spoken in 20 odd years. She was an assistant producer in Hollywood now, after doing some hard time in Chicago years ago which was the last I had heard. My life was a series of setbacks and I was surprised to be alive honestly, laying in my bed, in México. I wrote her a quick reply trying to sound cheerful and optimistic but she kept pressing me for details so I started to tell her the truth. This is transcribed from my letters to Danielle:
…around this time I started to have strange symptoms. First, I had a bout with vertigo. One weekend my girlfriend was out of town and I woke up one day feeling nauseous. Over the course of the day it turned into very severe vertigo which meant the room was not only spinning, but also pitching up and down. I thought I had finally food poisoned myself with Bluefish and port-infused goat cheese the night before. I couldn’t even turn my head without vomiting so I had to lay on my couch perfectly still, until she came home. The ER doctors had to give me an IV because I was dehydrated from all the puking and I hadn’t eaten in a few days. I still don’t eat Bluefish.
They refused to do a CAT scan because I didn’t have insurance so they just prescribed Dramamine. What doctors later figured out was that my brain tumor had crushed my inner ear mechanism which helps you balance. This trip to the ER cost me $1000 for them to simply release me, shrugging their shoulders. Later, I would return to see an ear, nose and throat doctor for ringing in my ears. That doctor also dismissed me saying that I had some hearing loss and that it was normal for a 32 year-old. Again, $1000. I couldn’t afford that at my art handling wage so I stopped having things checked out.
In 2005 when Katrina hit, like everyone else, I was watching it on TV. One day, my boss called me to ask if I wanted to wade through alligator infested water to save some art. We were going to the Big Easy. We got there just two weeks after the hurricane so the city was still fucked up, boats on the grass, bodies, national guard. With no electricity, we had to bring generators for lights and there was no air-conditioning anywhere. At this point, I was still shying away from going to the doctors. My symptoms were getting worse but no one really noticed because they disintegrated at the pace of a growing tumor. The main problem in New Orleans was that we had to yell to each other over the noise of the generators and by then, I had lost 90% of my hearing on the right side. Also, the tumor was squeezing all of my cranial nerves so it actually affected my vocal chords and weakened my voice. One day a friend told me I sounded like Harvey Pekar. So this was a real problem that my coworkers noticed. I couldn’t hear them over the generators and I couldn’t yell back.
As soon as I returned, I had an appointment with a specialist because I had purchased some health insurance before I went to N’awlins. Right away, the doctor seemed alarmed. She put a hose in my nose with a camera and looked at my collapsed vocal chord. She said my voice sounded strange and prescribed an MRI the next day.
So I go to the hospital, the MRI technician is straight up flirting with me and says she can pump reggae through my headphones while I’m in the machine. I hate reggae but I agreed. A half hour later she pulls me out of the machine and her attitude had changed. No more was she flirty but now called me, Mr. Ribant. She looked at me with what I can only guess was pity. She saw the tumor on her screen as the magnet passed through my head but was not allowed to say anything. The next day I would see why. The tumor was the size of an egg and glowed white on the scans because they had injected me with dye.
I shook off her creepy look and rode the subway back home. Before I had taken my coat off, the hospital called back. They said, “hey remember that doctor that was so busy working on famous people that he couldn’t see you? Well, he wants to see you now.” Now? Now. I was literally on the other line talking to my friend because he was so worried about what seemed to be happening. He said, “sit tight, I’ll be right there.”
Sitting there waiting for the doctor was terrifying. I had just had my scan that morning. What did they find? He came in with an entourage of 4 other doctors. He was one of the best surgeons in the world and he had many students and admirers. The hospital had alerted him to my scan because it was extraordinary. He and his entourage recognized my symptoms as they showed on my face. Paralysis on my right side, trouble blinking, a high squeaky voice, hearing gone, etc. They explained that they found a growth but didn’t say tumor. He also assured me that I was in good hands.
The next month was crazy. I was going to the hospital everyday for tests. They did nuerological tests where they zapped me with electrodes to see what nerves were being affected. They ran a tiny balloon up through my thigh all the way into my head and then inflated it to make sure I wouldn’t have a stroke during the surgery. I was going to have two surgeons and they said it could take 24 hours. There was a chance I would end up blind, needing a tracheotomy, being mentally disabled or dead.
During all this my Philly friends were there for me and since this was pre-Facebook, I started a blog because trying to tell everybody the news everyday was impossible. My family was absolutely out of touch with the situation and my mother seemed only to care that I was not in Michigan. They failed in every way, I thought, as I faced death. The only family member that was any use to me was my old man whom had drifted farther and farther away in my adulthood but responded when I wrote him a letter. My girlfriends family came to my rescue.
The day of the surgery was less than tranquil. My family and my girlfriends family awkwardly mixed in the waiting room. I had no idea, as I was in an induced coma for five days. The surgery only took 13 hours after all and I managed to survive. Not only did I live but they told me that while in my coma, I was still cracking jokes. When I woke up my family had left. They couldn’t take any more time off work. So I recovered enough to be released by Christmas 2005 and went home to a hospital bed and soon physical therapists, pain, vomiting, headaches, babysitters.
After the surgery, a lot of people asked me if I felt changed from the near death experience. The truth is, I did almost die. The doctors told me later that my heart rate dropped down to 13 beats per minute at one point and they withdrew for a few minutes to let me come back. But when I considered if I felt any different, I realized that it was still the suicide of my best friend in high school that formulated my existential beliefs 20 years earlier. That was so profound that it set my compass early, so that when they told me that I was facing death, I was not afraid. Everyone else was terrified. What I felt as they explained my condition was that I am not dying this way.
For the two months between them finding the tumor and taking it out, I was tested and prepared with daily visits to the hospital. Everyday, everyone in my life wanted to know what I had learned. Even though I was the one sitting through everything, usually alone, I still had to come home everyday and write a funny blog entry.
So waking up after a coma was crazy. I was out for 5 days. They had my head bandaged up and I was allowed to dose myself with a morphine button. I was in the ICU for a couple of weeks which is like first class hospital. Soon, I became the mayor of my floor.
The doctors were surprised at my speedy recovery and said it was because of my great attitude. With my friends campaigning strongly, they released me by Christmas.
There were many side afflictions. I developed a blood clot in my left leg from laying down for two weeks. I still have it. It makes that leg a little bigger than the other. When they punctured my meninges, they didn’t heal up very well so spinal fluid leaked into my neck, bulging it out so severely that it looked like I had a quart of milk under the skin. To solve this they had to give me a spinal tap. When they were putting the needle in my spine, the doctor hit a nerve and my entire leg leaped off the table as if I were a gymnast.
I had to return to the hospital multiple times after being released and the healing process took about 3-4 months. As far as I could tell from the bills I was getting, the insurance company paid a million dollars.
So, it seems to me that my experience with the tumor marked a change in my life that didn’t really start to show until a few years later and now I would say that it was around 2010 that I was walking around as the latest updated version of Ron Ribant.
While I was out of work, my mom helped pay my bills until one day she stopped. The cascading effect of all of my credit cards, utilities, rent, and student loans coming due spiraled me into a hole that I am still in. Right then, I stopped speaking to her. When I could go back to work, my body had atrophied to the point that I would get easily exhausted. I wasn’t working full-time again until 2007.
The doctors told my girlfriend that I would probably break-up with her as this commonly happens after life threatening surgery. It was true. Feeling that I needed to double down on rebuilding myself, I rented a loft in subsidized artist housing in the Philly ghetto. I landed one last teaching job after returning to art handling as a project manager for about a year.
When the recession happened in 2009, the school where I was teaching laid me off because parents stopped sending their kids to art school. I decided that art had done little for me in 35 years and I ceremoniously quit to become a chef.
I got my foot in the door opportunity at the Franklin Institute, a childrens museum. I was a line cook making pizzas and sandwiches for families. After my first day, I came home to find that my girlfriend of about a year, left. My new life as a chef began in the red. I hadn’t spoken to my family in 3 years, and I had given up on my dreams of being an artist. When my new coworkers would ask what I was doing after work, I began answering, “listening to records and crying”. After only a month, our head chef was fired for vomiting into the trash cans during lunch service as he was a junkee. They decided to promote me to the position so that after 1 month in my new career, I was a chef.
They promoted me because I was good with people but the thugs who worked the grills and fryers wanted to stab me. I finally got my hands on drugs through the cooks and would do ecstasy to get through a double shift. My new friends introduced me to California weed, Orange Kush and Grape Ape. Now my life was that of a rock star and I was reading Anthony Bourdain. Soon my coworker invited me to move in with him and his girlfriend and they swore to get me dating again. They coaxed me onto Okcupid and when I turned on my first smart phone, there were already messages.
Eventually the company hired a real chef and because I had been so stressed out from doing that job, they offered me a sweet deal to run my own little pop-up restaurant on a balcony of the museum. For the entire summer I got to work outside, high above the parkway serving fatoush salad and kebabs. I started messing around with drinks for my coworkers. Meanwhile, a friend in upstate NY opened a cocktail bar and when I visited, fell in love with classic cocktails. He recommended some reading and an online course.
Then in 2010 my father died. He had drifted away again after my surgery and his friends never said anything as he lost 100 lbs. When my sister and I finally found out he was sick, he died a week later.
It was weird to lose him because he wasn’t ever around. My mom divorced him when I was ten so I grew up with her boyfriends. My dad spent time in jail and was both a compulsive gambler and a compulsive liar, things I would learn from reading the DSM in psychology class at CCS.
His death affected me subconsciously. I started waking up screaming and drenched in sweat. I was drinking a lot for the first time in my life. I careened down my new path as a chef, a copy of Kitchen Confidential in my hand.
The girl I was dating insisted I go to therapy. I didn’t know why! After three sessions my doctor said “how are you doing so well after all that?!” My girlfriend also had me in couples therapy where the doctor would defend me to her surprise. After only a month of therapy we split. I decided that was all Philly had left for me. My ex who was there during the surgery had become my bestie afterwards and rescued me, we loaded my kayak and computer into her car, and I came upstate to “collect myself”.
Next up New York 2012-2020.