April 29, 2024 is the 10 year anniversary of my emergence from a coma that started on March 31, 2014. I emerged blind, unable to stand, or, indeed. not really move, still with a feeding tube in my belly, and a breathing tube in my throat. When the doctors removed the trachea, they asked me to speak or sing, since they knnew I was a musician. I am told that I astonished the staff by singingly loudly in my strong tenor voice. I have no idea why I chose this tune, but what came out of my mouth was the folk tune, “Oh, Danny Boy”. I got the lyrics of the last phrase wrong–instead of, “It’s you must go, and I must bide”, I sang, “…and I must die.”

A few weeks later, I was accepted to a brain injury ward at Mt. Sainai Hospital in Manhattan for a 2 week trial. I improved well enough for the doctors to approve a longer stay for longer, as long as I continued to improve. Unfortunately, my brain was damaged by the injury, that I began having seizures. Once those were under control, I went back to the brain injury rehab ward, where I learned to stand and walk again, put on my own clothes, and complete daily tasks. Each day there, I had an hour-long group group cognative therapy session followed by 1 hour sessions of physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and individual cognative therapy. Depending on my progress, i often had two of one type of of session for the day.

In physical therapy, I progressed from simply sitting up to standingto using a walker to a cane to walking holding my therapist’s hand to walking unassisted. The simple joy of walking from therapy room to therapy room was undescribable. In occupational therapy, learning to put my shirt on with that tag in the back and putting my shoes on the correct feet were challenges that took more than 1 session.

After 5 months at that hospital, I was released on September 29 to my wife and a home aid, who was there to help me and my wife Rebecca with weekday visits for multiple hours for a few months. Eventually, they were no longer needed. My therapies continuied with specialized vision therapy, vestibular therapy and even music(!) therapy where I used music to integrate the othertherapies or augment some of my work in these other therapies. I even did two rounds of 14 weeks of cardiac therapy–mostly exercising fo an hour 3 days a week. The most arduous therapy was the 18 week, 6 hours per day, 5 days per week Mt. Sainai cognative “phase 2” program.

After completing all these and siting around as a retiree, I began to REALLY get my life back.

In early 2020, I decided to try to compose again. I began with a simple, short, 2.5 minute piece for voice and piano–I decided on that, because I hoped it might help me to regain my skills with the software I use to compose. It was quite a challenge–I had forgotten much, but my love of composing remained. That piece was acceptable to me, so I decided to pick up the piece I was working on when my cardiac arrest occured–a work for woodwind quintet. that I had received a grant from the Queens Council on the Arts to complete. When I turned in the materials to them, 6 years late, they were quite gracious by not penalizing for breaking their contract!

This year has been my most productive. I have sompleted 4(!) works in just a few months of 2024. I have more ideas ready to go, Random Access Music is still running strong and the Queens New Music Festival will be happening in a few weeks. (It’s the festival I founded in 2013.

Still here. Still composing. Still leading the arts organizations I founded.