About Me

For those that don’t know me I would like to share a little more about me and my life with you.






I grew up in the small Virginia Town of Rich Creek, which is located in the beautiful southwest part of Virginia in Giles County.

As a child I was very active in out Boy Scout troop and reached the level of Eagle Scout and Junior Assistant Scout Master. As part of my Eagle Scout project I helped start the Giles Junior Lifesaving Rescue Squad and at an early age I was able to become an Emergency Medical Tech. During high school instead of playing sports I was on the field every home game with an ambulance to treat any injuries that may have occurred during the game. The Junior Rescue Squad was an awesome place to be because I was able to help people on a regular basis.

Shortly after I passed my EMT class I never will forget the first dead person I ever encountered. I was driving to high school one morning and could see a couple of cars stopped on the side of the road and one car was upside down. Of course being an EMT I had to stop and check this out for myself. I ran to the car, climbed right in and new the lady was from our area (people called her the crazy lady – I never knew why till this accident and someone told me she had an extensive psych history) but she was seat belted in her car hanging upside down.

I checked for a pulse and of course there was none; rigor mortis had already set in so I knew she had been dead for some time before anyone found her. I went to my car and radioed the other responders so they could slow there response to the scene. From that moment forward I could see the crazy lady looking at me. I was freaked out and every where I went to on the scene it was like she turned her head to look at me. Finally all of our other units arrived and I left for school.

One of the most beneficial things about being in the Junior Rescue Squad was being able to witness first hand how stupid things could lead to very serious accidents or illnesses. Watching the drunks crash and kill people, watching smokers not able to breath because of a life long history of smoking. Watching people die from cancer was the worst because if was usually a long and drawn out process. We would transport people to a cancer center that was about an hour away from our area and I hated that trip more than any other ambulance call we had because I knew no matter what I would probably never see that person alive again.

Then right after high school I started to work for the Giles County Ambulance Service and still was a volunteer rescue squad member now I started to advance with my medical training. I took the Virginia EMT-Shock Trauma class and then I was allowed to start IV’s and give a select few medications. As my career advanced so did my training and dedication. I ran call after call along with some other dedicated volunteer members along with co-workers for the ambulance service. We handled every single call given to us. Unlike in Florida, the ambulance paramedics would have to call the Fire Departments for a rescue type calls. I became a scuba diver at a young age and was 1 of the first people on our rescue squads dive team. Still to this day I can remember every detail of the bodies I have recovered. One drowning call was right after a bad storm and not in our county and we were called in for backup because at the time our team was one of the few with all members trained in Underwater Investigations. But as we were diving the visibility was so bad that holding my hand in front of my mask I could barely see the outline of my hand so pretty much this is called zero visibility. We were swimming along the rope doing our search and first my spare regulator fell out of the pocket it was in and got stuck on a tree limb. I stopped and followed the hose to the regulator and almost had a heart attack because it felt like I grabbed someone’s hand. I looked and it was only a tree branch in the shape of a hand. None the less it scared the crap out of me. As soon as I freed my regulator from the branch I gave a tug on the rope and started again and the second I looked up I was face to face with the victim we were looking for. This time I shot straight to the top and called for help and told them he was under me. They asked if I placed the float on the victim so he could be found again and screamed NO, get me out of here. The victim had his eyes open, mouth was open and hair was floating around and I did not want to stick around long enough to do things the right way, I wanted out of the water and right then and there. Anyway, diving was awesome and a friend and I went diving almost daily for a long time.

As I worked with the ambulance service, I started to get strange feelings and would tell my co-workers we are going to have a call, it will be a trauma call, and sure enough 10 minutes later the tones went off for a tractor accident. One day I told my co-workers that I felt like we were going to have a really bad car wreck and no sooner than I said that our tones went off for a traffic accident in my home town of Rich Creek. It was a 10 minute emergency response to get to the scene and as we arrived, I was in a state of shock. I looked up and seen my moms car with heavy driver side damage. My sister was driving and took most of the impact and was unresponsive, my mom had traumatic amnesia and kept telling me to call Blake he will take care of this, I kept saying mom I’m here and she was transported to the hospital, then my grandmother was in the back driver side seat and was also in serious condition. My sister and grandmother both ended up in the trauma center for a month. My other sister was in the back passenger seat and was shaken up but ok. I worked on all of my family; I was going ambulance to ambulance crying in between the ambulances and then would return to work on my family again. I was the only shock trauma on the scene and they all required IV’s and advanced care. This was on of the most horrible calls every in my life. Even though they all eventually recovered it’s an event that I will remember vividly for the rest of my life. The person that hit them was drunk and driving with no headlights on and the police officer on scene done such a poor job investigating the accident, he never even charged the drunk for dui, nothing he let him go. At that point I decided I wanted to become a police officer and ensure people never had to encounter something like this again.


Soon I went to work for the Giles County Sheriffs Office. I started working in dispatch and then was promoted to work in the jail. This was an interesting turn of events in my life. I grew up in a Methodist Church and was an Eagle Scout and lived with high moral and standards set forth in the church and scouts. Now all of the sudden I was exposed to the worst of the worst. Of course I could tell you many tall tales from the inmates we housed in our county jail, but 1 of them really sticks out in my mind.


Being a member of the Volunteer Fire Department in addition to the rescue squad we had a couple of fires one was a body covered with tires and set on fire in the woods and then there was a house fire in a very remote area of our county in White Gate. Even though my fire department was not the first due in, since it was all volunteer up there, we were the first unit on scene. We lost the house because of the long response time and the amount of fire in the home but of course it was fully involved when we arrived. And there was a stranger on the scene out in the middle of no where and it turned out to the guy that murdered these 2 people and set them on fire. It was a creepy scene to start with and then the murderer just vanished in the night as the police started to arrive after we found the body. Later in jail this inmate told me he was at the scene of both fire calls so he could watch these people burn in hell. Something about a drug deal gone bad and he wanted revenge. For whatever reason while this inmate was in jail I was the only person in our jail that he would actually talk to, any other jailor if he needed something he had a pre printed form that said Inmate Richard Myers would like to request and then had check boxes for whatever he want and that’s how he communicated with the rest of the jail staff, except for me for some reason and I don’t know if its because I was at both fires or what the deal was. But this guy was something and right before he went to the Virginia Department of Corrections he told me if I ever needed anyone taken care of to let him know and he would take care of it for me. He is one inmate I will never forget.


After several years of the jail, I went to work for the Town of Glen Lyn as a police officer. I was hard core and strict. People knew if they ever seen me get out of my police car with my uniform hat on it was not a good time to mess around. And it’s amazing how much respect a uniform hat would command from people, but it did. People would curse and talk all kind of crap when I wasn’t wearing the hat, but if I had that hat on it was always yes sir, no sir, it was truly amazing the difference a hat made in a uniform. After going to work for the Town of Glen Lyn I lead the county in DUI arrest for many years and that was 1 offense I never gave anyone a break on, regardless of who it was. I even arrested our district court Judges son for DUI. He was in college and they went to a party in West Virginia and came back through my area and was stopped for speeding and eventually took him to jail for DUI, I almost fainted when I first seen his name and thought this is just my luck.

Soon tragedy struck again. I had been to the doctors office and was told I was going into kidney failure in my early 20’s the doctors assured me I had nothing to worry about until I was in my 60’s, man how I wish they were right, they missed that estimation by 40 years. The night I went into complete renal failure I was working that night and the night started like any other night. I made a DUI arrest and took that person to jail and often at the jail the night shift would cook food and that night was no different after I processed the DUI I went to eat and while eating I started feeling really sick and said I needed to go home. On the way home I followed another drunk driver I ended up stopping and sure enough took him to jail. By now I had extreme nausea and really needed to get home. And wouldn’t you know it by the time I got within a mile of my home there was another DUI right in front of me and sure enough I took him to jail as well. By the time I was done with this DUI I had to call my family to come to the jail to drive me home. My brother drove my police car home and on the way home I started to vomit a bright yellow material. It was awful.


Then since our local hospital did not do dialysis there, I had to be transferred to another hospital an hour away. A great friend of mine in the Rescue Squad called ahead in every jurisdiction we went through and had a police escort or at least they stopped all the traffic at the lights so I would have no delay in getting to the other hospital. Then on the way Bill Davis said is there anything you want before we get there, I said I needed one last dip of skoal or chew of tobacco and sure enough he gave me some tobacco and I was chewing away on this emergency trip to the hospital. Little things you never forget and this was one of them. Not just the tobacco, but every officer in every jurisdiction taking time away from their work to stop traffic for me. We made that trip in 40 minutes instead of an hour.

I was in my late 20’s when I started on hemo dialysis. I still worked full time as a police officer though this and one day I was running radar and stopped a car for speeding and got out of my car and made it to the hood and collapsed. I was lying on my hood and the speeder ran back to me and asked if I was ok, and I could not even talk at the moment, I had become so dizzy I was down and out. I finally recomposed and told them to slow down, thanked them for helping me out and let them go with a warning on the speed. I drove straight home and then decided that days I had dialysis if I was going to work, it would have to be for the office work part of the job. But I never stopped working even though I should have. I was insulted people keep calling me telling me I was disabled and needed to stop working and yet I refused to stop. I then went on to PD dialysis and life was so much better. I felt like I was alive again and could function as a person and do anything I wanted to do, except scuba dive in fresh water.

Then a transplant date came and I was so excited and scared. I went to the hospital on Dec. 18 which was a Wednesday and was there at 0400 I was so tired when I got there. But the nurse came in my room and asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with the transplant this close to Christmas and I told her yes, that if they re-scheduled, I would probably never come back because I was so nervous. This was the first major surgery I have ever had and was really scared the day of the surgery. The nurse god bless her soul asked me about 15 more times throughout the morning if I was sure I want to do this now and not wait until after Christmas to have this done. I finally had to tell her to stop asking me I was already a nervous wreck. For example on PD when you drain all the fluid out it would usually take me 10 minutes to drain, this day it took over 45 minutes to drain the fluid out and come to find out it was because of my nerves according to the doctors.

Anyway, she asked 1 last time as we were getting on the elevator going to surgery and as we started up to the surgical floor, the power in the entire hospital went out. We were stuck in the elevator. My nurse panicked she was screaming and banging and finally the doors opened and she took off running and left me on the stretcher in the elevator, so here I go all alone up and down the elevator until someone else finally came to get me, then the doctor was upset because I was late getting to surgery. They already had started on my brother, taking his kidney out to give to me and he was ready to get going. As soon as I arrived I was knocked out and that was the last thing I remember until I woke up in ICU.

I had one heck of a nurse when I woke up in ICU. She could not stand me and I hated her. The bed settings were so uncomfortable I would wake up long enough to change the bed to where I was comfortable and then go right back to sleep. Even though I was still drugged up from the surgery, I remember telling my mom, I feel so much better already.

The nurse would come in and scream and wake me up because I changed the bed again, so I asked her to call my doctor and ask him to change the bed orders because I could not stay like she wanted me to, it hurt to much at the surgery site and was really uncomfortable. She of course refused to do so and she set the bed and then un plugged the bed so I could not change the settings again. So in order to get even, I knew how to operate the blood pressure machine that was taking a blood pressure every 5 minutes and I cleared the history and then turned off the machine. This was done not only to get even, but I had asked her to change arms because it was taking my pressure so often my arm was turning purple every time it took my blood pressure and she even refused to change the cuff to the other arm.

Then later that day I had woke up and told her I needed something to eat, that I was starving. She told me no and walked out. I finally spoke to the nursing supervisor and had her call my doctor and my doctor came in and said it was not normal to let someone eat after surgery like this but he would try me on a liquid diet and if I done ok with that he would let me eat something for dinner. Of course anyone that knows me knows that I love to eat and when its time to eat, its time to eat so I got to eat and everything went well. The following day I was moved to a regular room thank god I never had to deal with that nurse again. They came in and told me that I needed to start walking and the more I walked the quicker I could get home. I tried to jump right out of bed and screamed in pain from the surgical site but finally got up and ended up walking over a mile.

Now during this time my mom, God love her, she tried to kill me. Yes it was a very traumatic event in my life. I had a central line stitched in my neck/chest area and I had several IVs running along with the morphine pump on my IV pole. We started walking and I had called my brother and asked him if he wanted to walk and he said no, so I had no plans on stopping at his room. I walked around the corner and kept going and my mom with the IV pole that was connected to the central line that was stitched in decided to stop and not tell me; of course it did not take long for me to fall backwards and down to the ground I went. All the nurses came running and I finally made it back to my feet and started walking more. The nurse told me not to over do it and I wished I would have listened, later that night I had severe cramps in my legs and there was nothing they could do about it. So even though I told the doctors my moms cooking was the cause of my kidney failure (if you ever eat her cooking you would understand) but this time she took it to the next level and really tried to kill me. It was all in good fun and I think the doctors and nurses thought we were all crazy but I was having a great time because the second I woke up and wasn’t drugged up I felt so good I was ready to go. I had the surgery on Wednesday and by Friday they said I was ready to go but the doctor decided to keep me over the weekend because I lived so far away and if there was a problem I could be there and not have to drive an hour to get there. So I ended up staying the weekend and every day I was walking more and more and the pain was becoming a little better.

Finally I was discharged and was home. I tried to do everything the doctors had ordered me to do but I felt so good I could not just sit still and when the fire alarm went off, of course I responded and ended up being the officer in charge of a multi alarm fire scene. The home we saved a lot of it but in the upstairs floor they had remodeled and instead of knocking out the old walls, they built around them, so there was literally fire in the walls. At first the attack crews called and said they had the fire knocked down so I went in to take a look around to determine the starting point of the fire. I went upstairs first and there was a hole burnt through the roof and I was standing there with my head out of the roof looking to the back of the house and all of a sudden someone one the ground screamed to watch out for the fire, the fire in the walls busted out and here I was with no air pack fighting a major structure fire days out from my transplant. If my surgeon would have seen that, he would have died on the spot from heart failure. The fire was knocked down for good finally and we determined it started as a flu fire and spread into the area between the walls up stairs.

Then of course there was trout fishing that I wasn’t suppose to be doing to prevent infection in the surgical wound, but I was in the creek every day I was not at the hospital for blood work. I had to have blood work done 3 times a week for a long time post transplant. Finally that did reduce to once a week, to every other week to once a month to once every 6 months.

Then tragedy strikes again. The Town of Glen Lyn never added me to the insurance so I went through all of this with no medical insurance. There was nothing I could do as far as suing them because I was told that insurance was not a mandatory benefit and no one took the case so I ended up filing bankruptcy. My attorney promised I would not lose my house or car and what was the first thing the courts took, my house and my car. Not only did I lose my house and car, I also lost my business, New River Sporting Goods, Inc.

I lost everything because of the lies the Town of Glen Lyn told me and I was told there was nothing I could do.

It really sucked knowing that everything I had worked so hard for was now gone because the Town forgot to sign a paper years ago adding me to the insurance. Even though every time there was an update from the insurance company they would put a copy of that update in my mail box. Before I became ill I never even tough they would lie about something like that, but they did lie for years straight to my face.

Finally I decided that I could not afford to keep working as a cop and making no money. In 1999 my last year as a police officer and part time ambulance attendant, I made a total of 19,500.00 working 2 jobs. The police job often times I would work 80 hours a week, I was on call 24/7 and never could really plan of having a day off. So thought out all of this I decided I would go to paramedic school and that I did. I went to Bluefield State College and attended the National Registry Paramedic Program they had and when I passed, I started applying everywhere I found hiring paramedics.

I ended up taking a job at Sunstar Paramedics in Largo, FL. They pay was awesome and I even was paid overtime, which was something new for me the town refused to pay any overtime at all. So I went to work for one of the busiest EMS systems in the USA. It was awesome. I lived in a great area and the job wasn’t that bad at first.

Years later I changed jobs and went to work for another ambulance service and ended up losing my insurance coverage. During this time I was spending 2000 a month to buy my kidney transplant medications. Not one single agency would help me then with any medication cost because I worked so I ended up spending a lot of money before the insurance started to cover my medications again. This wiped out every thing I had saved.

With the return of going to Sunstar, I was insured again and started to get back on track with my financial situation. I bought my truck and was trying to buy a house with the money I had saved, the house deal fell through but I did not mind, I had an awesome truck and did not mind living in an apartment.

Now I wished I would have bought the house at least I would not have been threatened the last few months with eviction.

But now is the time to buy anyway, I have found 3 and 4 bedroom homes now on sale for 50,000 and back then they wanted 190 thousand for a 3 bedroom that I wanted to buy.

Anyway, with the medication cost while working at Sunstar for many years I had to work 7 days a week and 12 hours a day just to make it with the medication cost. In those days there wasn’t a generic medication available and buying brand names was very costly. Since working at Sunstar for years straight with no days off, I never had a vacation every once in a while I would take a couple days off and go home to Virginia to see my family and now I cannot even do that before this transplant.

After leaving Sunstar I worked for St. Anthony’s Hospital. This was the worst mistake of my life. Don't get me wrong I worked with some awesome people, but working there proved to be a big mistake. My problems started when I went to day shift, yes I went to a day shift for a short period o time and finally had to go back to nights. The main reason for going to the ER was to go to nursing school through the hospital and that never happened. Then I started to get wrote up for doing patient care things that I had never done and come to find out the charge nurse was romantic with another female nurse and every time I helped that female nurse she would get upset thinking I was trying to take her away from the gay lifestyle. I finally had enough and took a job at Universal Studio’s.

This job also proved to be devastating to my financial situation. I took the job thinking it paid a lot more than what it did and after I was hired HR gave me a paper to sign that stated I understood what the pay was for the position and I refused to sign it and asked them if that was a joke. Since I had left the ER, I really had no choice and ended up signing the paper and taking the job at Universal Studios.

Working there proved to be a strain in many way, they lied to me when I first started working and the manager told me if I took the class to do audiograms I could work overtime and make up the difference for the low pay. There was no overtime available. They monitored time sheets daily and if there was seconds of overtime on your time card, they would automatically delete it.

So with the money I made at Universal Studios, I had 50 dollars a month to spend on food and gas. Need less to say at this time I was spending anywhere from 300 to 700 a month on medications depending on what all I had to get refilled. This started to wipe out my checking and savings once again. I did not make enough money to buy medications and had to get a second job.

I eventually took a second full time job at Osceola Regional Medical Center. I was back to working 7 days a week.

On top of working 7 days a week, I was getting sicker and sicker. My H & H dropped to a 7 and I had a hard time functioning. I had a syncopal episode at Universal in June and was transported to the hospital and was there for a week. They wanted to start me on dialysis then and I refused. I wanted to go straight to transplant and never could because my doctor would not sign the authorization for me to go so the insurance would cover it.

So I never got to go to transplant. I had returned to the hospital again for another week and again the same outcome. Finally they started to treat the low H & H and I was feeling better even though the kidney function was continuously dropping.

I tried to work out a new schedule that would allow me to keep working 2 full time jobs and Universal refused to work with me. Now there is pending action through the EEOC.

And now I was only working at Osceola Regional. Which worked out better, I could work 15 hours of overtime and make more than working all week at Universal. So I was working 1 overtime shift a week at Osceola Regional and finally had days offs. I had forgotten how awesome it was to have a day off and to be able to do anything I wanted. But of course by this time most of the time I was so tired, all I wanted to do was sleep during my days off.

The kidney function still continued to decline and my doctors changed my medications and added more medication in order to try to save this transplant and even though some how I always ended up with medications, I was rapidly wiping out everything again in order to get that medication in order to save this transplant. Sadly none of our efforts paid off.

Then if February 2010 I started with a terrible cough and it was all the time. I was getting ready for work 1 day and I had called my doctor that morning to let him know what was going on with me and he called as I was leaving for work and told me I needed to be in the hospital right away.

I tried to drive myself to the hospital and made it to another hospital, Florida Hospital Kissimmee and almost crashed when I passed out while driving. I did not want to risk driving a couple more miles to my hospital so I stopped at another hospital.

I ended up in the hospital the entire month of February. I had pneumonia in addition to starting hemo dialysis and surgery for the PD catheter. I was pretty sick but I think If I had it all to do over again, I would still reuse the dialysis and go straight to transplant.

But because I felt dead, I needed help and thought dialysis would help me feel better.

That pretty much brings us up to date. I have been out of work since February and not really sure at this point when I can return to work. Now with the transplant within sight of happening, I’m not sure if I should even try to return to work right now or just stay out on medical leave.

One of the reason I wanted to get back to work was so I could keep my truck but not that it has been repossessed it really makes no difference to me at this time.

I miss my co-workers and yes I even miss some of our regular patients. Half of the time I even miss the homeless drunks. (Well not really I could live the rest of my life without seeing some of our homeless drunks) But some of them were pretty funny to deal with from time to time.

So that’s a brief version of my life and how I’m on the verge of becoming powerless since OUC wants to turn off my power and on the verge of being homeless since the apartment complex still wants to evict me. And not a single agency will offer me assistance since I don’t have HIV or a drug addict or have a drinking problem.

Working for Sunstar I often wondered how so many people became homeless and now I know first hand how it could happen to anyone. I have always been a hard working person and worked lots of hours in my life to buy medications and try to live and be a responsible person but our system is so out of whack it’s not even funny.

I even emailed the President of the United States and gave him a very brief version of this story and told him our disability system is in serious need of updating. Does it really take 8 months to figure out that I was in kidney failure? Even though they told me it would only be 6 months, it took 8 for me to get the first payment. Did they think my kidney function would just return 1 day and they wanted to make sure I was really sick before trying to help, because of the delays in getting disability I have lost my truck and was really close to getting it paid off and now its gone because the bank could not have waited a few more days to get a payment.

What a world we live in these days.

But all of this has lead to my web site

Help Save My Life

www.blakeneedshelp.com