my best friend moved to florida a couple years ago and i lost touch with him. nearly a year ago he blew his head of with a 45 slug and lived. one of my friends told me about it a couple weeks ago, but i didn't believe it until i saw him last night.

he didn't **** up ... he pointed it up underneath his chin and the bullet went straight through his brain. his jaw was hanging in pieces and had to be rebuilt with metal plates. he has scars along his scalp where they pulled his face down from his skull to clean the bone fragments and rebuild the entire top front of his head with bone cement. they also had to sew his tongue back on. the weirdest thing, though, is the permanent hole he has going from the roof of his mouth all the way to the top of his head. he wears a retainer like thing so that he can talk right.

he was alive and dead for five days. the doctors were talking to his mother about pulling the plug when he suddenly started breathing on his own again. when he woke up he said that he was extremely ****ed off but couldn't yell at the doctors for taking away his choice as his jaw had just been rebuilt and was wired shut. though he doesn't remember walking up on to the bridge and actually pulling the trigger, he knew what had happened and couldn't keep the thousands of images of what he must look like from flooding over him. he spent about a month pumped so full of morphine that almost all of it is unremembered. he spent months in the hospital and ate through a tube in his stomach for quite a while after he went home while his jaw and the hole in the roof of his mouth healed. the hole did close up allot but is still about the size of a dime and will not get any smaller.

all and all he made out better than i could have ever imagined possible. his face (including his jaw) looks fine and his hair covers all the scars on his scalp. underneath his chin is pretty messed up, but his goatee hides some of it and it's not a place that most people pay allot of attention to anyway. When he tilts his head back you can see how it kind of dips in on one side. he cant do math worth **** now (he used to be really good at it) and he says that sometimes it's hard for him to talk quickly off the top of his head like he used to be able to, but he has no other recognizable brain damage. that may even fix itself over time (imo not the doctors). not only is it amazing that he lived, but that he isn't a vegetable and has no damage to his personality. still the same ol' todd. though angry at first, he is really happy to be alive now. he feels that he lived for some purpose. he's not a reborn again christian, i don't think, but he seems to feel that someone had to be with him during those days when the doctors struggled to keep him alive even with the machines.

i wish i could tell the person who called in the incident that he is still alive. he would have saw nothing but blood, brains, and half of a face. he was likely quite dead at the time. the look of shock at seeing him alive would be beyond words i'm sure.

where's my beer?