He said, “I want to show you why you’re alive.” He took me over to his computer, where he had the picture of the X-rays. There, on the X-rays, he said, “Do you see your neck? Because of the arthritis in your neck, because the curve of your neck was 180 degrees different than it should have been, it made the force of the blow go into your shoulders instead of into your spinal cord. Because your vertebrae were ossified, it protected your spinal column. You are alive because of your malady.”
Now, when you have a broken neck, and a lot of people out there don’t know this, you have to remain vertical for three months. I mean vertical. You cannot lie down. When you go to bed, you have to sleep vertically. You have to lean up against the wall like you’re in a bus stop. The neck brace can never come off. I made the mistake once of taking the brace off, thinking, “Well, I can lie down.” The world went away. My vision went dark, I suddenly couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. Fortunately, I screamed. Ann put the brace back on and I sat up again, but I realized that was the last time I was ever going to be horizontal for the next three and a half months. It was a nightmare. It isn’t just pain. It stops your central organs from functioning. Your heart stops, your breath stops, and if one of those vertebrae, as they’re healing, slips, you’re in blinding pain. You lose your vision, you lose your hearing, you lose your ability to breathe, you feel your heart stopping. It’s a nightmare of darkness.
After this, I went to prayer services twice a day for a couple years because I lost my mother. Not because of my neck. It was during this period of time. There is one of the psalms you read in the morning service that God counts the number of stars in the sky. He heals the brokenhearted. He knows the secrets of the ocean.
I asked my doctor, I said, “How does this neck brace thing work? How do I heal? How does this happen?” He said, “Well, the brace holds the broken ends together, and after a month the ends get kind of sticky. Then after two months the stickiness becomes a soft bond. After three months it becomes a hard bond, then it’s solid.” I said, “No, that ain’t my question. I get that. How does it happen?”
He said, “Oh, we don’t know.”
I realized, God heals the brokenhearted, and that’s when I think, Oh, I get it. The astronomers say they don’t know the number of stars in the sky. You can’t talk about God because who knows what it is? Who knows what the concept is, but I felt it when I had my broken neck. I said, “I got it. I got it now.” It’s that life force that connects me and you and all of us together that you want the other guy to do better. You want the other guy to heal. It’s that thing, the force of positiveness that moves us forward in the universe.
I mean, that’s the only thing I could say it is and the broken neck made me see the wonders of it all. It made me see things I never saw before. I know people who have cancer and people who have heart disease and people with broken necks, they say it’s a blessing. I’ll join that long list of people with the same boring kind of thing and say, “Yeah, it was a blessing. The broken neck was a blessing.”
JOSH HOMME—MUSICIAN
I got this MRSA infection, which is an antibiotic-resistant staph. I couldn’t shake it because my immune system was so destroyed. People die of that all the time. In fact, down the hall someone died of it while I was in the hospital, and I was like, “Oh, no. What have I done?” Then when I was having surgery to try and fix it, they lost me trying to get the oxygen tube down my throat and reoxygenate my blood. I choked to death.
There was no tunnel.
When I woke up I knew something was wrong, someone had hurt me. Really something was stolen from me or I had lost something because it took a couple of years to recover. I’ve always heard music in my head since I was a little kid. When I woke up this time, I heard nothing for a couple of years and it affected me.
Marc
Oh my God. They told you you died?
Josh
Yeah. My doctor was like, “Whoa. I lost you. I thought you were going to stay lost.”
I knew it. I could feel it in my body. When you get defibrillated, you’re being electrocuted. You wake up and you feel like you’ve been beat up. Feels like you’ve been in a car crash. Then I was kind of contagious and in bed for four months and you can’t hug your little kid. Your mind starts to play tricks on you. I’d never been knocked down that hard. You’re in your tower without the Rapunzel hair.
I was stuck in a room for four months. I had to have these tubes in my leg and it was painful. Then all of a sudden after two months in bed you go, “I’ve got two months left. How do I do this?” It did the greatest thing it could ever do to me. It zeroed me. I was below zero. I had to crawl back up to zero, and I’m really thankful for it because I know what’s important.
MEL BROOKS
I was on a show once, and the announcer who was interviewing me said, “So, when you were only two and a half or so, you lost your father.” I took a pause.
I said, “No, no, no, no. He was dead. He wasn’t lost. We knew just where he was. He was in the back. Finally, they took him away and they put him in some cemetery, but we never lost him. We were never that careless with our father. We cared about him.”
JON HAMM—ACTOR, DIRECTOR
My dad had a lot of sadness in him. His first wife passed away suddenly. My mother, his second wife, passed away at a very young age. They were divorced at that point, but still, that’s a bummer.
Marc
You remember your mom passing away.
Jon
Yeah. Vividly. No fun. She had cancer and it was no good. She was single. I was living with her. She got custody and I’d go every other weekend to my dad’s. She had just massive, rapid abdominal cancer. This is 1980 in St. Louis. Obviously, it’s not like we were living in the Mayo Clinic or anything, or Manhattan where there’s up-to-date blah blah blah. There was just no treatment. It was kind of like, well, let’s cut it out. We’ll see what we can do.
They took out a bunch of her colon and they didn’t get it all and it was in her liver, in her stomach, and that’s a wrap.
It was not fun. It was not a good time. You’re ten, so you have no mechanism to deal with it either. There’s just nothing. You have family and you have friends, but your friends are ten. We’re not going to get a beer and commiserate. It’s going to be, “You want to play kickball?” All right. That’s all we got.
It’s the lamest expression in the world, but it is what it is and you can’t do anything but get through it.
LESLIE JONES—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
The conversation my dad and I had before he passed was, because, like, he used to always give my brother favor and I used to be like, “You never had to take care of me. My brother, you had to bail out of jail, you had to do all kinds of stuff. You never had to take care of me. I never came to you to borrow money. You never had to take care of me, ever. Even when I dropped out of school, I took care of myself, and I was just always wondering why you were always so fucking hard on me.”
He said, “Because of just what you said, I never had to take care of you. Your brother, I’ve had to take care of him.” He was like, “You’re the one thing that I’m going to be proud that I had, and you’re so funny. It was all worth it because you are really funny.”
It was good to get there before he passed.