What Happened in 2001?
On October 22, 2001, Scott had a "stressful day." At day's end, he felt awful. Something was wrong; he could feel his heart thumping in his chest. He drove himself to the hospital where an examination revealed a dissecting aortal aneurysm. He was lucky to have made it. He was sedated on the spot and flown to another hospital for emergency open-heart surgery.
"I was dead for 45 minutes," Scott recalls. "I went to the other side...I saw some stuff. I saw my mother...I had dreams. I felt all kinds of crazy things"
After 11 days in a medically-induced coma, he returned to life with a new sense of purpose. "It was getting me ready for what I'm going through right now. I don't think I would have been prepared if I hadn't gone through something like that, " he says. "I'm on that last trimester of life, you know, I'm about to be 50 [in 2005]. I got a good 30 years...I'm ready now."
"The Derek Trucks Band: Finding Their Way" from Hittin' the Note, Issue 44 (2005)
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