Jon Stableford ’63 Chronicles his Brush with Death in 'The Longest Run'

Essay featured in the latest edition of the medical journal Dartmouth Medicine

January 14, 2010 —On July 25, 2006, while at his summer home in Vermont, English instructor Jon Stableford decided to take a day off from running in order to stop the beginnings of a cold in its tracks. This attentive care to the mildest of maladies, in this case a scratchy throat, had always served him well: in his 40 years of teaching, he could recall just two sick days. He would be back in his sneakers tomorrow, he was sure of it. For Stableford, who had just completed his 25th consecutive marathon, running was a given, like breathing.

Three days later, however, nothing was a given. Stableford was rushed to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., with acute respiratory distress syndrome. Doctors soon placed him in a coma in order to fight a toxic shock that was causing his lungs to fill up with fluid. The 61-year-old, who four days earlier was the paragon of fitness and good health, was near death.

In the latest issue of the medical journal Dartmouth Medicine, Stableford, now recovered, details his near-death ordeal in an essay titled “The Longest Run.” Drawing from the accounts of his family and friends and from his own notes at the time, the article pieces together the story of his four-week hospitalization, two of which were spent comatose. Stableford also is working on a manuscript, which he hopes to turn into a book.

“Writing the manuscript became a part of my recovery, a way of getting my head together after a haunting experience; not as an act of discovery, but as an act of purging,” says Stableford, who suffered bouts of delusional thinking and horrific dreams as a result of the medications used to treat him. “In the meantime, I wrote this essay for medical professionals, as well as for patients, in order to shed some light on the recovery process.”

Swinging from lucidity to confusion, Stableford spent much of his time in Dartmouth-Hitchcock trying to make sense of time, place, and the actual nature of his condition. Just days after emerging from the coma, he asked a doctor if he could now go home.

I believed I was the same fit though briefly ill man who had been admitted to the hospital on July 28. But to the doctors and nurses, I was a weak old man nearly felled by pneumonia. They saw stick-like arms instead of firm muscles. They saw a drawn face, wild hair, sunken and bewildered eyes, and the stubbled cheeks of the homeless.

Slowly, with the help of his family and friends, and with clarity returning, he understood that the illness hadn’t just robbed him of time, but of his ability to read, to write, to stand, to walk.

…I took my first steps. It was a round trip of 30 feet, and I required the support of three people, a walker, a portable canister of oxygen, a machine to measure my oxygen saturation, and a chair in case I collapsed en route. By the time I got back to my room, I felt as weary as if I’d run a marathon. The next day I was ready to try again, and this time I proudly doubled my distance.

Over the next few days, the chair of the English department set about regaining his ability to write. He started a journal, with entries of often one sentence. With clearer thinking, his entries grew, as did his ability to read books at night when he couldn’t sleep. For the first time, he felt closer to the person he used to be and determined to fully recover.

Although his doctors urged him to go to a rehabilitation facility, Stableford convinced them he could rally on his own. Much to their amazement, after a year of hard work, he made a near-full physical recovery.

I…mark[ed] my recovery by doing the grueling Mount Washington Road Race…in June 2007. The 7.6-mile course has been called “sadistic” for its vertical rise of nearly 5,000 feet. I finished further back than I ever had. But it may have been the most satisfying race I’ve ever run.

Today, when he’s not teaching classes or writing, he’s running, up to 35 miles a week. It has been three and a half years since Jon Stableford nearly lost his life, yet only in the past year has he been able to let regular thoughts of his precipitous descent into infirmity fade. He has come full circle, he says, with no grand epiphanies, just a clearer focus and good health.

To read the entire Dartmouth Medicine essay, click here.