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You know, we wake up in the morning,

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you get dressed, put on your shoes,

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you head out into the world.

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You plan on coming back, getting undressed,

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going to bed,

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waking up, doing it again,

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and that anticipation, that rhythm,

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helps give us a structure

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to how we organize ourselves and our lives,

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and gives it a measure of predictability.

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Living in New York City, as I do,

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it's almost as if, with so many people doing so many things

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at the same time in such close quarters,

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it's almost like life is dealing you extra hands

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out of that deck.

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You're never, there's just, juxtapositions are possible

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that just aren't, you don't think they're going to happen.

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And you never think you're going to be the guy

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who's walking down the street

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and, because you choose to go down one side or the other,

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the rest of your life is changed forever.

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And one night, I'm riding the uptown local train.

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I get on. I tend to be a little bit vigilant

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when I get on the subway.

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I'm not one of the people zoning out with headphones

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or a book.

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And I get on the car, and I look, and I

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notice this couple,

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college-aged, student-looking kids,

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a guy and a girl, and they're sitting next to each other,

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and she's got her leg draped over his knee,

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and they're doing -- they have this little contraption,

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and they're tying these knots,

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and they're doing it with one hand,

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they're doing it left-handed and right-handed very quickly,

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and then she'll hand the thing to him and he'll do it.

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I've never seen anything like this.

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It's almost like they're practicing magic tricks.

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And at the next stop, a guy gets on the car,

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and he has this sort of visiting professor look to him.

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He's got the overstuffed leather satchel

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and the rectangular file case and a laptop bag

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and the tweed jacket with the leather patches,

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and — (Laughter) —

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he looks at them, and then

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in a blink of an eye, he kneels down in front of them,

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and he starts to say,

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"You know, listen, here's how you can do it. Look,

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if you do this -- " and he takes the laces out of their hand,

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and instantly, he starts tying these knots,

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and even better than they were doing it, remarkably.

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And it turns out they are medical students

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on their way to a lecture about the latest

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suturing techniques, and he's the guy giving the lecture.

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(Laughter)

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So he starts to tell them, and he's like,

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"No, this is very important here. You know,

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when you're needing these knots,

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it's going to be, you know, everything's

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going to be happening at the same time, it's going to be --

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you're going to have all this information coming at you,

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there's going to be organs getting in the way,

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it's going to be slippery,

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and

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it's just very important that you be able to do these

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beyond second nature, each hand, left hand, right hand,

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you have to be able to do them without seeing your fingers."

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And at that moment, when I heard that,

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I just got catapulted out of the subway car into a night

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when I had been getting a ride in an ambulance

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from the sidewalk where I had been stabbed

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to the trauma room of St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan,

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and what had happened was

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a gang had come in from Brooklyn.

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As part of an initiation for three of their members,

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they had to kill somebody,

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and I happened to be the guy walking down Bleecker Street

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that night,

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and they jumped on me without a word.

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One of the very lucky things,

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when I was at Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team,

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so I put my hands up right away, instinctively.

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The guy on the right had a knife with a 10-inch blade,

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and he went in under my elbow,

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and it went up and cut my inferior vena cava.

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If you know anything about anatomy,

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that's not a good thing to get cut,

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and everything, of course, on the way up,

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and then — I still had my hands up —

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he pulled it out and went for my neck,

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and sunk it in up to the hilt in my neck,

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and I got one straight right punch

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and knocked the middle guy out.

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The other guy was still working on me,

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collapsing my other lung,

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and I managed to, by hitting that guy, to get a minute.

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I ran down the street and collapsed,

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and the ambulance guys intubated me on the sidewalk

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and let the trauma room know

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they had an incoming.

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And one of the

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side effects of having major massive blood loss

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is you get tunnel vision,

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so I remember being on the stretcher

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and having a little nickel-sized cone of vision,

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and I was moving my head around

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and we got to St. Vincent's,

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and we're racing down this hallway,

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and I see the lights going,

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and it's a peculiar effect of memories like that.

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They don't really go to the usual place that memories go.

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They kind of have this vault where they're stored in high-def,

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and George Lucas did all the sound effects. (Laughter)

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So sometimes, remembering them, it's like,

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it's not like any other kind of memories.

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And I get into the trauma room,

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and they're waiting for me, and the lights are there,

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and I'd been able to breathe a little more now,

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because the blood has left, had been filling up my lungs

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and I was having a very hard time breathing,

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but now it's kind of gone into the stretcher.

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And I said, "Is there anything I can do to help?"

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and — (Laughter) —

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the nurse kind of had a hysterical laugh, and

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I'm turning my head trying to see everybody,

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and I had this weird memory of being in college

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and raising,

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raising money for the flood victims of Bangladesh,

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and then I look over and my anesthesiologist

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is clamping the mask on me, and I think,

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"He looks Bangladeshi," — (Laughter) —

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and I just have those two facts, and I just think,

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"This could work somehow." (Laughter)

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And then I go out, and

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they work on me for the rest of the night,

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and I needed about 40 units of blood to keep me there

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while they did their work,

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and the surgeon took out about a third of my intestines,

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my cecum, organs I didn't know that I had,

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and he later told me one of the last things he did

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while he was in there was to remove my appendix for me,

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which I thought was great, you know,

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just a little tidy thing there at the end. (Laughter)

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And I came to in the morning.

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Out of anesthetic, he had let them know

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that he wanted to be there, and he had given me

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about a two percent chance of living.

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So he was there when I woke up,

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and it was, waking up was like

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breaking through the ice into a frozen lake of pain.

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It was that enveloping,

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and there was only one spot that didn't hurt

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worse than anything I'd ever felt,

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and it was my instep,

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and he was holding the arch of my foot

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and rubbing the instep with his thumb.

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And I looked up, and he's like,

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"Good to see you,"

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and I was trying to remember what had happened

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and trying to get my head around everything,

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and the pain was just overwhelming, and he said,

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"You know, we didn't cut your hair. I thought

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you might have gotten strength from your hair like Samson,

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and you're going to need all the strength you can get."

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And in those days, my hair was down to my waist,

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I drove a motorcycle, I was unmarried,

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I owned a bar, so those were different times. (Laughter)

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But

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I had three days of life support,

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and everybody was expecting,

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due to just the massive amount of what they had had to do

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that I wasn't going to make it,

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so it was three days of

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everybody was either waiting for me to die or poop,

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and — (Laughter) —

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when I finally pooped, then that somehow,

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surgically speaking, that's like you crossed some good line,

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and, um — (Laughter) —

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on that day, the surgeon came in

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and whipped the sheet off of me.

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He had three or four friends with him,

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and he does that, and they all look,

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and there was no infection,

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and they bend over me and they're poking and prodding,

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and they're like, "There's no hematomas, blah blah,

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look at the color," and they're talking amongst themselves

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and I'm, like, this restored automobile

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that he's just going, "Yeah, I did that." (Laughter)

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And it was just,

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it was amazing, because these guys are high-fiving him

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over how good I turned out, you know? (Laughter)

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And it's my zipper, and I've still got the staples in

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and everything.

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And

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later on, when I got out

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and the flashbacks and the

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nightmares were giving me a hard time,

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I went back to him

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and I was sort of asking him,

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you know, what am I gonna do?

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And I think, kind of, as a surgeon, he basically said,

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"Kid, I saved your life.

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Like, now you can do whatever you want, like,

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you gotta get on with that.

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It's like I gave you a new car

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and you're complaining about not finding parking.

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Like, just, go out, and, you know, do your best.

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But you're alive. That's what it's about."

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And then I hear, "Bing-bong," and the subway doors

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are closing, and my stop is next, and I look at these kids,

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and I go, I think to myself,

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"I'm going to lift my shirt up

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and show them," — (Laughter) —

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and then I think, "No, this is the New York City subway,

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that's going to lead to other things." (Laughter)

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And so I just think, they got their lecture to go to.

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I step off, I'm standing on the platform,

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and I feel my index finger

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in

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the first scar that I ever got,

221
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from my umbilical cord,

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and then around that, is traced

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the last scar that I got

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from my surgeon,

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and I think that, that chance encounter

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with those kids on the street with their knives

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led me

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to my surgical team,

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and their training

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and their skill

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and, always, a little bit of luck

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pushed back against chaos.

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Thank you. (Applause)

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(Applause)

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Thank you. Very lucky to be here. Thank you. (Applause)