To paraphrase Winston Churchill, nothing gets your attention quite like being brought back from the dead.

For Tom I., the result of that experience was sobriety, but it hasn´t been easy. Tom had spent his youth and adult life as a hard-partyng, hard-drinking, hard-drugging outlaw when it all caught up with him one night in September 1986. He was out in his garage smoking crack cocaine when his heart stopped. He´d been looking for "that ear-ringing sensation that I was always looking for." He learned later that any time one feels that ear ringing, he´s on the verge of a heart attack. He had been at that point many times before, but had always lucked out.

This time, he lucked out again. Fortunately for him, he made enough racket falling down that his wife heard him and called 911. He had a flat line on the heart monitor when he arrived at the hospital, but was revived with the shocking paddles. He´d been without oxygen to the brain so long, though, that when he was revived, the doctor held a mirror to his face and told him to remember what he was seeing because there was no reason he should have any brain activity in the future.

Three weeks later, he went into treatment with a hidden agenda, to learn to drink and drug" responsibly." By the third week of treatment, the fog had lifted enough that Tom got serious about sobriety. "There was no epiphany," Tom said, "just a growing realization that my life was shit and had to change."

He reached that conclusion on Sept. 28, 1986. He has never looked back. He got a sponsor-the same one he still has-and plunged into service work. He went to at least one meeting a day, and sometimes more. He phased through the end of his marriage and began a career-his first legal work in many years-as a silk screen printer. Unfortunately, the job nearly cost him his sight in his one good eye. He´d lost the sight of the other when he was a teenager, from a car wreck.

Nothing daunted, Tom went to the State Department of Services for the Blind, and the good folks there sent him to massage school. Massage is a good profession for the blind, Tom explained, because loss of sight heightens one´s tactile sense, Tom became a highly successful massage therapist. In 1994, he remarried, to another massage therapist . He and his wife have built a highly successful practice, with offices in several cities. Massage therapy has been his career for the past 15 years.

He was also able to save the sight in his one functioning eye with cataract surgery. He now has 20/35 vision with glasses.

About seven years ago, Tom was working with a client who told him of the terrible shortage of medical care in Romania. Deeply moved, he and his wife shortly joined up with Northwest Medical Teams International. Once a year, they go to Eastern Europe with the team to provide massage therapy. In recent years, they have been working with children in Moldova at a burn hospital. Their team of massage therapists, physical therapists and occupational therapists works to restore their young patients to functionality. They also teach families and caregivers the techniques which can relieve some of the pain from scar tissue.

Tom was there with the team last September when he developed intense pain in his shoulder. On Dec. 1 he found it was germ cell cancer which had metastasized to his head, neck, shoulder, pancreas, esophagus, lungs, and behind his heart. "Pretty much all over the place," Tom said.

The oncologist told him he was at stage 4, the most challenging level of the disease. Undaunted, he set out on a course of treatment that drew on every technique known to both conventional and alternative medicine. "From the get-go, my attitude was that I was going to kick this thing," Tom said. He had massive doses of radiation and chemotherapy that kept him hospitalized for the better part of this year. He also used vitamins and followed a recovery regimen recommended by his naturopath. There was polarity therapy, Chakra healing and Reiki massage therapy. "You wouldn´t believe how many pills and powders I take every day," Tom said.

It has paid off. In mid-April, this man whose cancer had brought him to death´s door was declared in remission. It cost him his hair, but that´s in recovery too. Little wisps are appearing on his bald pate.

Tom was without income during his health crisis, but an amazing group of friends and patients mobilized to help out with the medical bills. Within a week of his diagnosis, one friend organized a fund raiser. Others started an online group on Yahoo. People have signed on to help with such things as yard work and car repair. The landlord for one of his business locations has not charged him rent during his recovery period.

Tom doesn´t know if his drinking and drugging led to his illness, but acknowledges that it´s a good possibility. He got into the partying life as a teenager in Ballard, dipping into his parents´ liquor cabinet whenever he could. At 14, he had his first drunk and his first blackout. His brother said he´d been the life of the party, and even though he couldn´t remember anything about it, he decided that was the way to go.

At Ingraham High School, other drugs entered the picture and soon became dominant. At 17, he was kicked out of his house and told never to come back. "You´re a disgrace to the family," his father told him. Tom had just been arrested for drug dealing, but got off on a technicality. He managed to finish high school, but decided it was time to leave his drinking and drugging buddies behind and get to a fresher, cleaner environment.

He got a job in a cannery in Kodiak, Alaska that lasted two weeks when the cannery burned down. A husky, muscular kid, he was hired as the bouncer in a Kodiak bar. "It was great. I got to have all the alcohol I wanted." He also learned to get out of the way when rival Vietnamese and Filipino patrons began hurling chairs and bottles at each other. Other times, when he was throwing a patron out of the bar, Tom used "some pretty good sized guns." Guns? "Yeah, I mean these," he said, holding up his two fists.

That job didn´t´ last long. He signed onto a crab fishing boat which promptly sank seven miles off shore. All the crew made it into a life raft, and 2 ½ hours later, the Coast Guard hoisted them into a helicopter and flew them to Kodiak. At the hospital here, the nurse told them it would cost $32 to see a doctor. "We looked at her like she was crazy. We´d just lost everything." So instead, they headed to the bar where Tom had been the bouncer. It was Oct. 14, 1976, his birthday, and the bartender presented him with a case of champagne.

From then on for the next eight years, it was one Alaska fishing boat after another, with trips home to Seattle to get another stock of drugs to sell to his shipmates. "I always sought out boats where I could drink and drug freely," Tom recalled. "I´m surprised only one of them sank. I worked with some pretty haywire characters,"including, apparently, the captain of his last boat. "He was a full blown coke addict," Tom said, "not that I wasn´t too." While tampering with the engines on a cruise, the captain blew out all the engines except the one controlling the propeller. Although far out at sea off Dutch Harbor, they managed to stagger into port with the stern under water and all their frozen bait thawed.

Tom looked at the repair and cleanup job he was faced with and walked off. "I´ve had it. I´m not gonna do this anymore," he said. He came back to Seattle and settled into a fulltime career as a drunk and a drug dealer until he suffered the heart attack mentioned above that saved his life.

When in meetings, Tom talks freely about all his addictions. He said that in 20 years of sobriety, he has only been taken to task for talking about drugs other than alcohol one time. In his early recovery, an oldtimer castigated him for talking about other drugs. Infuriated, Tom left the meeting, but returned the next week to confront his attacker. "How dare you treat me that way," he demanded. "I have the same right to recovery that you hold so dear, and it doesn´t matter what I´m suffering from. What I say has something to do with what I use, not what you use.

"You know, there are some people who might have gone out and used over such treatment. I´m through with that. I don´t want to go there. But I wanted you to know how you made me feel. A drug is a drug is a drug."

Tom says that Alcoholics Anonymous and its spinoff programs have been and are his light to the future. "I have met the best friends I have ever known in the halls of A.A. and all the other 12 Step programs. They are my brothers and sisters, and we share that hope."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.