with before that night. We were both active in a heavily populated military ward and lived a block a part. His kids were early teens and mine were toddler/pre-school. So for some reason we knew of each other but really didn't know each other.

He volunteered to give me a ride home that night because we lived so close.

All I remember is I felt a bit overwhelmed or awkward at some of the profound things he was saying about life, fatherhood, marriage, service in the Church, etc on our 20 minute ride home. He let me off at the corner before he turned towards his house and as I shut the door and started to jog towards my apartment I just thought "man that was some heavy stuff".

I got in the house and started talking to my wife and scurried the kids back into their beds since they popped up to greet me. Those few moments after getting out of the car something occurred and I've had a serious brain block ever since on what was actually said by the guy.

That was a Wednesday night. On Friday morning I was paged to do an autopsy and it was for the guy that drove me home on Wed. He had gone in to the ER for flu like symptoms but because "sick call" was still open in the family practice unit they sent him there. My down stairs neighbor was actually the med tech taking his vitals, etc and felt everything was checking out normal. Then while he was checking on another patient in another room the guy from Church coded and was unable to be resuscitated.

It seemed very sudden as he appeared very healthy while we were running up and down the court on Wed and he showed no signs of health issues by my impression or his families or his latest physicals.

But I'm convinced to this day that there was something being revealed to him about his time on this earth with some of the things I believe (although my mind is blocking it out) he was telling me. So either he really was saying profound things to me that have since been veiled from my memory or I some how was projecting some thing on to his words as I was sensing the capstone of his mortality. Either way I still can't remember the words but I remember the topics and how important it all seemed to me.


And as Paul Harvey would say - here is the rest of the story...

I did not have to do the autopsy on this brother as I was considered close to him and at that time the wife already had some outburst in the hospital threatening lawsuits and me attending Church with her and being a hospital employee would perhaps be an extra problem.

I was privy to some of the diagnosis and pathologist opinion on the case. The guy had received no shots or anything from the hospital but his blood showed high levels of free potassium. These caused his heart to stop. Injecting potassium into someone's blood stream is a way to knowingly kill someone. In talking with the doctor (who was always a bit odd and would often ramble about how he'd never let his kid watch the Lion King because of some religious angle or something) said to me "the question is not always why does someone die but why do the rest of us stay alive?"

At this moment each of us has all the elements in our body to end our life. But it does a great job of keeping everything in balance for some reason...there is potassium in our cells...cells will regularly release some of that but before there is to much free potassium another cell will pick up that potassium keeping things in balance.

He took two paper towel tubes and a BB as an example and rolled the BB inside the one tube by tilting it until it rolled out of that tube and dropped into the next tube where he did the same thing. He said your body does this all day long and you always have some free potassium in your blood stream. But for some reason it appeared that this guys body just decided to release it all at once and instead of one BB rolling out of 1 cell to be picked up by another it was like a shotgun shell releasing all of its BB's at once and from what seemed like all of his cells and not just one.

This was the first time I ever heard this doctor sound like he believed in a God of this world. He was very odd and very science based and before this time seemed like he felt he could explain away absolutely everything with science. At this moment it was clear that all that other outward persona or things he spouted really were hiding something underneath that this guy was in awe of our Heavenly Father's creation which is the human body but was probably a bit too arrogant to often admit it...

Sorry I rambled - I hope it flows and makes sense...