On August 16th, 2006 I was admitted to a hospital ER in Albuquerque, NM, dying. Not knowing what the cause was, my brother Dan had taken me there after I was found at home passed-out for several days. The ICU scared me but I was able to describe what it was like, and who was there. Outside of my door was a dark harbinger who, I discovered from Lupita the cleaning lady, was Señor Muerto (death). A dialogue with the Grim Reaper ensued.
My story progresses with visits from The County Health Department, spiritual advisors, friends, then some indication of perhaps the cause. On day 10 the physician in charge of the Infectious disease team stated that I had the Bubonic Plague. In some ways, my physical recovery was just the beginning of a re-awakening and the joy of working with others.
Several chapters are devoted to how I may have contracted it. Included are several chapters about the history of the three pandemics of the plague. Then a rude awakening to my incapacitation, and a dialogue with the insightful cleaning lady. I express thoughts about my family back east not visiting, nor any close female friends coming to see me. Once I began to heal and walk again, conversations are had with others in the facility, a move to long-term care, then circumstances of pending discharge.
Sandwiched in are a couple of chapters about the process of change including a discussion regarding recovery from substances abuse. Once released, I faced going back home alone and starting a work life re-awakened to a new life-purpose. Work is ultimately obtained in correctional facilities; and there are several tales of interactions with inmates. The final chapter is a conversation with Death/Life. There is an underlying theme about not taking the catastrophe so personally, integrating the experience and moving forward with life. Sprinkled with humor as well as serious moments, it is one of the few personal accounts about surviving a death encounter from this rare disease.
About the Author: In the throes of dealing with a life threatening disease, Bubonic Plague, Michael Ferguson received a blank journal from a concerned sister to help him in his recovery. In the process of writing, Ferguson found that he was recovering, or uncovering, the story of his life, a story of surviving and thriving that honors the millions who were swept away by the plague, and that serves as a model of courage and determined faith for all of us during these times of increasing uncertainty.
Michael Ferguson is not particularly remarkable in the circumstances of his early life. His parents, as he says, were good people-a somewhat emotionally withdrawn father, a histrionic and controlling mother-well meaning folks feeding children and getting them to school and church, meeting life in the '50s and '60s as best they could. Your basic co-dependent American family. What is remarkable is the story of what Ferguson was moved to do with his life.
Just out of college Ferguson took a job in juvenile probation and, side by side with managing construction projects, has continued a woven path in the helping professions. Throughout his career he worked with tough and marginalized populations that put him in direct relationship with convicts and addicts, and that eventually led to opportunities in public speaking and training. There was only one small problem-he was caught up in the increasingly unsuccessful game of hiding his own chemical dependencies. His successful and ongoing recovery with his own addictions that began in the late 1980s has provided Ferguson with experiences of deep surrender and the concomitant tools necessary for rebuilding lives. So in 2006 when he contracted Bubonic Plague, a disease that most people believe belongs to a dark age far removed from our modern society, Ferguson reached even deeper into that wellspring of spiritual waters. Some would site this second recovery as a "comeback," but in Plague No More the reader is shown a process of more than just surviving the mundane, rather a remarkable experience of being catapulted into a fourth dimension, a higher ground where life, all life, takes on new meaning.
