Jumpline magazine Q1 2023 - Flipbook - Page 27
Swerdloff, Ret.
SurvivorJack
Stories
Jumpline Editor
Jack Swerdloff, Ret.
Jumpline Editor
Survivor Stories are articles
in the Jumpline where we
will provide a chance to learn
from the journey of others.
Many people get to enjoy a
relatively easy blessed life.
But there are people among
us struggling. Sometimes we
all secretly know their plight,
sometimes we don’t. These
stories are another way to reach out to those who
are struggling and help them through the BrotHERhood of MDFR people that have been there and
done that.
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There was blood everywhere. Based on experience he knew if
he laid down, he wouldn’t be able to breathe. He truly thought
he’d never see his family again. When he woke up at the trauma center, two days later, the new and improved Javi began.
Hysterically he says he thought to himself, “What I’d give to be
running 24 calls and going home in the morning alive and well.
Smelling my kids’ hair after I woke was the best thing I’ve ever
felt in my life. The day I was released, I changed. I stopped
on the way out with Chris Morales, other family and the BrotHERhood to feel the sun light.” Javi says he was given another
chance and he knows he refocused his life at that time.
How do you turn emotionless drive-through meals and too
much time on the phone into devotion to family dinners without phones? Almost leaving your family fatherless, twice. That’s
how.
Captain Javier Valdes, his wife Jackie and his two kids, have
had a new lease on life. After almost losing Javier twice in the
past 10 years Jackie says, “I don’t feel like we do anything different on a day-to-day family basis. The only REAL CHANGE is
my faith. It is deep and powerful now.” Conversely, Javier says
he did change, and after his first near death hospital stay, he
began a new and improved devotion to family time as if he were
living on borrowed time.
I met “Javi” and his wife at their townhouse in Miramar to chat
about this article (Photo of me and them here). Their home is an
average place at the end of a nice cul-de-sac, and they would
not have it any other way! As we sip Nespresso coffee Jackie
happily makes, Javi laughs as he shows me around the modest house. This quick tour is important he says, because this
absolutely perfect home speaks to the misguided mindset they
lived in and his journey to loving this townhome. He says the
townhome used to be rented out and their huge home on a
big lot, on the huge lake is what he thought he needed. Like
so many of us, he thought his family needed and wanted that
life. But as we all would agree, when we stop and analyze our
own lives, all they really needed was for him to survive two near
death experiences and be here on earth. All they really needed,
and that they now better appreciate, is a simple home and time
to spare for family fun every day. He says he is eager to tell his
story anytime anyone asks.
Javi says that stabbing experience was the big change for his
devotion to life. It was traumatic! A fast event with no time to
rationalize it other than it could be his last minutes on earth. His
experience told him it was bloody, and the chest wounds were
bad. He says “After the stabbing, I slowed down and left the fast
lane. I left being on time. I left doing drive-thru’s and not really
listening to kids. I’d stop what I was doing and go play volleyball
if my kids wanted.” He speaks many words to describe how he
felt with his new lease on life.
Jackie gets tissues before she even begins to discuss the stabbing, then says the stabbing was a distant quick memory that
didn’t linger. It did not change her, but she is OFTEN overcome
with bad memories and feelings from Javi’s bout with Covid.
And now with tears she says “Because Javier didn’t see and
hear what I did during his Covid experience. I was broken by
those Covid events, and I have not recovered from that battle.
The doctors asked me, ‘So what do you want to do?’ as if it was
time for Javier to be taken off life support. They told me many
times he would surely die.”
Covid. What a trigger for Jackie. On July 21, 2021,
Javi got a Covid positive result. He’d already been
sick a couple of days and his symptoms were bad,
but life’s tough. So he was handling it. July 26, after many days of unbreakable fever and progressive worsening, he went to the Emergency Department. Reference Covid, no family was allowed
to enter. By that time he was tired, and he was so
sick of fighting so hard to compensate, the doctors
report he’d have died if this didn’t happen today. A
day later he pleaded with the staff not to intubate
him on his birthday. He consulted with Jackie and
a dear friend of theirs who’s a great doctor at the
Two very long near-death stories short…
The first taste of “life’s short” came after what was a
simple altercation with his neighbor in 2013. It ended with the neighbor stabbing him several times
in the front yard of his huge, excessive, beautiful,
unnecessary home on the large lakefront lot. The
so-called American dream home almost became
the place he lost his time with us and left his kids
fatherless. As he sped to the trauma center in the
City of Miramar Rescue, he thought he’d die. Javi
says he asked himself, “Will I ever see my wife and
kids again?” He was confused and not in control.
February 2023 | JUMPLINE Magazine