Six Weeks
of Silence

What the dark gives back

In November 2018, a routine dental procedure triggered bacterial endocarditis that destroyed my mitral valve and sent me into a coma that lasted forty-six days. I was a chiropractor, an Army veteran, a doctor who had spent his career telling people how to heal. Then I became the patient — and I couldn't remember any of it.

Six Weeks of Silence is the story of what happened before, during, and after those 46 days — the Tarpon Springs boyhood, the Army band at Fort Drum, the chiropractic career, the coma itself told through the people who watched over me, and the long, uncertain road back. It is also a story about what the VA system does and does not do for the men and women who served, and what it means to be both a provider and a patient in that system.

This book is for anyone who has survived something they didn't think they would. For their families. For the nurses and doctors who stayed. For every veteran who has sat in a waiting room trying to explain what they've lost.