Behind The Shield Kegan Gill (Surviving the Fastest Fighter Jet Pilot Ejection, Traumatic Brain Injury and The Healing Power of Psychedelics) - Episode 737
In January 2014 I ejected from a US Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet at 695 mph. The fastest survived ejection in the history of naval aviation. The violent ejection left me with a traumatic brain injury (TBI), broken neck, broken arms, broken legs, and a variety of nerve and blood vessel damage. The speed of the ejection shredded my dry suit and I plunged into the icy Atlantic Ocean. A malfunction in my survival gear left my parachute attached to me instead of disconnecting upon impact with the salt water.
The parachute that had just saved my life filled with ocean currents as it sunk and began pulling me beneath the frigid water. With shattered arms I had no ability to disconnect my parachute. My tattered dry suit filled with 37 degree Fahrenheit water and became a sea anchor, further inhibiting my ability to breath. If you’ve ever been held under by a big wave surfing you know the feeling.
For the next two hours I struggled to gasp for air as I intermittently would bob to the surface. While the hypothermia was slowly killing me, the cold water also helped to slow the rapid bleeding from my torn brachial artery and open leg fractures. I was pulled from the ocean by a Navy H-60 Seahawk helicopter and a heroic rescue swimmer named Cheech.
I was incredibly fortunate to make it to a level one trauma center in Norfolk, Virginia where some of the best surgeons on the planet reassembled my destroyed skeleton with titanium rods and steel plates. Over a dozen surgeries later and two weeks in a coma I awoke to face the biggest challenge of my life. Paralyzed and confused from the brain injury and massive amounts of medications, it took months to grasp what had happened. The medical professionals were straight with me. I would most likely never walk again and my career as a strike fighter pilot was over.
Something inside me said, “Fuck that! I will prove you all wrong.” I spent the next several weeks shitting myself and trying to wiggle my unresponsive body. Little by little I regained function. After two years of intense rehabilitation and overcoming prescription drug addiction to the dozens of drugs that just seemed to be given to me by default I was able to max out the Navy’s physical fitness test and returned to flying Super Hornets. It seemed I had overcome it all until about two years later I was diagnosed with delayed onset PTSD. My mental function varied greatly and I started going in and out of psychosis.
In the psychosis I thought I was being hunted by the government and people were constantly out to kill me and my family. The more pharmaceutical drugs the psychiatrist recommended the worse my problems seemed to get. I spent another year undergoing more surgeries and receiving all available conventional psychological treatments before it became clear that my career really was done. I was eventually medically retired from the service. Had it not been for my wife and family support I would have taken my life. I remember wondering what the barrel of my pistol would feel like on my teeth and how the gun oil might taste just before I nearly took myself out of misery.
The only thing that stopped me was when I looked over to see my newborn son sleeping quietly with my wife. To kill myself would have been selfish. As my psychosis worsened my wife found me dressed in a garbage bag. I had shaved off my eyebrows and most of my hair. I though I was going out to fight crime like Batman. My wife drove me to the ER and I was eventually moved to a VA mental health facility. There the only answer seemed to be more drugs. I was injected with Haldol when I tried to resist more oral drugs. Haldol makes your entire body feel like it’s crawling with insects. Your instinct is to run, scream and move to escape to restless urge. Every patient in the inpatient facility was forced to take drugs.