Just Another Day at the Office

July 16, 2007. It was supposed to be just another routinely run of the mill Monday; just like any other day in the middle of an otherwise routinely hot Northern California summer. But it wasn't. It wasn't like that at all.

Here at my place of employment, EMF Broadcasting, Mike Pendeault worked in Desktop Support. Residing just a couple cubes down from mine, Mike was the guy IT usually dispatched whenever there was a PC problem.

 

On moving days, Mike was also the "Bekins Man"; anybody being shuffled from cube to cube, cube to office, or office to cube (all which seem to occur around here about as often as Lindsay Lohan gets arrested for something) always knew it was time to go whenever Mike showed up. He made it happen, unhooking all your electronic gear from one work station and re-connecting it at the next one. 

 

I’ve gone through this semi-frequent rite five times now, since moving into our new complex several years ago, so I saw Mike often.  Always around, always with a funny story or really bad joke, Mike (or "Big Mike" due to his tall and imposing stature) was a staff favorite. I liked him. I think everybody liked him.

 

Right up till that routine Monday when he dropped dead....here at work, as many of us helplessly looked on.

Everything seemed absolutely normal.  But just before noon time, with great difficulty, Mike began coughing. Loudly. It sounded like he had something caught in his throat, like he’d swallowed wrong. At first I didn’t pay a lot of attention, because in the ambient background of the work environment, people are coughing, hacking or clearing their throats all the time. At almost the exact same time, I got called down to my supervisor’s office for a brief pow-wow on a spot I was working on. So it didn't quite register that something might be terribly wrong. 

 

But five minutes later when I came back, whatever was happening to Mike had intensified and grown worse. He wasn’t coughing anymore, instead he was making loud, bellowing gasping sounds and concern had spread throughout our work area. Somebody called 9-1-1, while Jason Hollis did what he could to assist, or at least keep Mike calm. I was only a few feet away but might as well have been in another state, I felt so utterly useless.

 

However in the confined space where Mike lay struggling for his life, the last thing the situation called for was a crowd. So I stayed where I was as Big Mike's gasps for air became more and more in vain. Mercifully, the paramedics were on sight in less than 5 minutes and began feverishly trying to stabilize him and figure out what the problem was.

 

They cut off his shirt and hooked him to several monitors, including an EKG. Everybody stood back and watched them pump him full of drugs, but Mike continued to gasp, crying out in mournful pathetic pleas- “God help me please. I can’t breathe. I can’t BREATHE!!”
He said it over and over. It was scary, and becoming increasingly apparent that Mike's condition was grave and deteriorating.

I have no idea what his vital signs registered, but clearly they weren't very good. One of the EMT’s kept saying things like, “Hang on Mike....Stay with me.....Don’t leave us, Mike.....C’mon, stay with us”. I don’t think they ever got him completely stable. But when Mike stopped writhing I guess he was stable enough to transfer to the hospital. That’s when the three EMT’s lifted Mike’s 6'5“frame onto the gurney and quickly wheeled him out of the building to a waiting ambulance.  By then though, he wasn’t responding—in fact, he wasn’t moving at all.

It was 12:55 p.m. when Mike died on the way to the hospital.

From the time he’d started going into convulsions till the end, less than 45 minutes had passed. Later, after it’d sunk in that Mike was gone, it snuck up on me that the ones who’d been in that room as the paramedics continued to frantically work on Mike, had been witness to a man truly in the throes of death. I was one of them, and it became surreal to recall exchanging "Good mornings" and following Mike through the employee’s entrance and into the building that morning at around a quarter to nine. 

 

He had no idea he had just over four hours to live. Nobody did.

 

Then I thought back to the conversation he and I had at the front desk, about an hour and fifteen minutes before he’d be pronounced dead, where, as usual, Mike was trying to solve somebody's computer issues.

 "Hey, the printer in back isn't printing. Can you take a look?" 

 ”Yeah, when this bad boy straightens up and flies right again (nodding to the PC in front of him), I'll come take a look”

I remember the words sounded like Mike, but his voice was kind of tired and he looked a little tense and distracted. But I didn’t make the connection that anything might be wrong.

Then I kept thinking about Mike's last words. I couldn’t get them out of my head. ”God help me please….I can’t breathe...I can’t BREATHE!!” It was only a few minutes later, while sitting at his desk, and before getting back to that printer, that the trouble began. And an hour later, he was gone. He was 42 years old.

 

Yet Mike’s work space, like his outward appearance, remained eerily, but familiarly, disheveled. His cup of coffee, nearly full, had gone cold. There was a half eaten banana on the counter top, along with several manila folders. Their contents were strewn about, half in and half out. A couple boxes of printer paper were stacked in a corner. His backpack, wallet and keys were tossed on a shelf over his laptop and PC, both continuing to run in sleep mode, the screen savers both gone black. The red light on Mike's phone indicated an unanswered voice message waiting to be heard. And out in the parking lot, his car was still exactly where he'd left it earlier that morning.

 

Everything appeared just as it would on any other work day. So mundanely routine, it was as if Mike had just stepped out for a minute or gone to the restroom, or another part of the building to work on a colleagues PC problem. It looked like he’d be right back. Except he wouldn’t. Ever.

 

There were tears and an uncomfortable silence throughout the office the rest of the afternoon. You wanted to work, you wanted business as usual, you wanted to hear people laughing and talking and moving about, and for the environment to feel “normal” again. But nobody could concentrate on working and nothing was normal about the rest of that day.

The event was too difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Mike was only 42. There didn't seem to be a way to wrap your arms around it. It was all so...so final. The coroner said he died of two pulmonary embolisms, one in each lung. There was nothing anyone could have done and by the time help arrived, it was too late. The doc's called it "just one of those things". But that was small consolation to those of us who saw what "just one of those things" actually looks like.

Yet Mike had got out of bed that day, took a shower, brushed his teeth, put gas in his car and drove to work to start another Monday. It was a Monday like a thousand other routine garden variety Mondays, but Mike hadn't the foggiest idea that this particular Monday would be his last day on earth, and no clue that by lunchtime he’d go out into Eternity and taken to Heaven.

 

Somebody described it in Gulf War "Shock and Awe" terminology. Shock, that a seemingly healthy human being we worked and laughed with, and who'd walked among us that very day, had been taken so quickly. But there was also a reverent awe knowing that Mike, as a committed believer, had been instantly taken into the presence of his Lord and Savior.

Stuff like that just doesn't happen every day. Not at work anyway. At least, it’s not supposed to. It was supposed to be a random run of the mill back-to-work Monday, just like any other day. But it wasn't and there was nothing random or run-of-the-mill about it at all. For Mike, that Monday was an end and a beginning- the end of his earthly life and the beginning of life everlasting. At last, there was nothing left for him to fear, or fix. Mike’s work here was done. God had called him home.

And for me and the rest of us in attendance that Monday, as Mike's life abruptly, then gently slipped away, it was an up close and personal reminder that tomorrow- and sometimes even today- is promised to no one.