Chapter One
The Boy Before the Fall

An excerpt from AFTER SURVIVAL

These opening pages return to my childhood, when days were spent outside and consequences usually occurred to us after the adventure was already underway.

“When I met Shane, I knew he was the alpha male type with a strong sense of direction and great moral values. He had a handshake that carried something of value and commitment. As time went on, and our friendship progressed, I learned of some of the traumas that Shane had faced in his life, and I began to see that his character was built out of perseverance, and the incredible decision to allow these events to make him stronger and never a victim.”

Matt Staite

Read Excerpts from AFTER SURVIVAL

Before the accident, there was a boy who rarely sat still, a best friend named Danny, and more imagination than good judgment.

Chapter One introduces you to that boy. Chapter Two takes you into the November night that changed his life.

I invite you to read a few pages and get to know my story.

Shane Neilsen

From an early age, it was clear I was not built to sit still.

I was always in motion, running, climbing, and testing things I probably didn’t need to test. The outside world felt like something to be explored, not avoided. Every wall was climbable. Every open space invited adventure. Every day carried the possibility of something happening.

At that age, the idea that there could be consequences for my actions felt distant, almost fictional. I knew people got hurt, but I moved through life with the quiet assurance of someone who thought there would always be another tomorrow.

During the school year, my best friend was my neighbor, Danny Antonino. We spent most of our time outside. If there was daylight, we were out in it. If there wasn’t, we usually stayed out longer than we should have anyway. We didn’t need much to keep us occupied. A ball, a stick, a stretch of dirt, or even a handful of marbles, and anything could turn into an adventure. We played cops and robbers. Cowboys and Indians. Whatever we had seen or imagined, we acted out. There was always something to do, noise filling the air and some new competition or adventure underway.

Danny always matched my energy. We didn’t have to explain things to each other. An idea rarely needed more than a few words before we were off. Weekends often meant the desert.

We played soccer and baseball, but the real games began after the uniforms came off. We roamed with our Crosman 760 pellet guns slung over our shoulders like something out of a war movie neither of us fully understood. Our canteens knocked against our hips as we walked. The hot desert air smelled of dust and creosote. The silence out there was wide and endless, broken only by our footsteps and the sharp crack of pellets striking something or the poof of air released when the trigger was pulled.

We hunted lizards and snakes and anything else reckless enough to cross our path. Sometimes I returned home with my pockets full of trophies I felt deserved recognition. My mother learned to approach those pockets carefully. One afternoon, she reached in and pulled out a dead baby snake. Her scream startled me. She informed me, in terms serious enough to finally get through, that if I ever brought another critter home in my pocket, she would cut the pockets out of every pair of pants I owned. I had no doubt she meant it, and that particular chapter of my life ended right there.

Not all our adventures took us into the desert. Sometimes we found enough excitement right in the neighborhood.

One afternoon, Danny and I were playing with an older boy named Robin. We were acting out some kind of battle, its details long forgotten but the outcome apparently important enough that I decided my character had been shot.

I told Robin the bullet was lodged in my knee and that he needed to cut it out. To a ten-year-old boy caught up in the moment, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable addition to the story. What I didn’t realize was that Robin took the suggestion literally. Before I had time to reconsider, he pulled out a knife and went to work. I felt something warm running down my leg. Looking down, I saw blood. That was the moment I understood we were not pretending.

Read an Excerpt from AFTER SURVIVAL

Before there was a memoir, there was an ordinary November night in Las Vegas.

I was ten years old. I climbed a six-foot block wall I’d climbed before, following my best friend into the front yard.

What happened next changed the course of my life.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 2, “The Fall,” shared as it appears in AFTER SURVIVAL.

Shane Neilsen

Chapter 2

The Fall

Excerpt lightly condensed for length. Bracketed ellipses indicate omitted passages.

It was a warm November night in 1975 in Las Vegas, Nevada, the kind of night where nothing feels dangerous because nothing around you suggests it should be.

Nothing about that evening seemed unusual. It settled in much the way countless others had, familiar and unremarkable. Children played, neighbors talked, and life moved forward without the slightest hint that anything was about to change. Had the night ended differently, it likely would have disappeared into memory with all the others, remembered by no one and significant only because it happened.

It was just a wall. A six-foot block wall. Ordinary and familiar. I had climbed walls like that before. I had jumped from higher places in the past, crossed narrower edges, run faster than I should have, and taken chances that didn’t feel like chances at all. Risk didn’t feel like danger then. It felt like movement. It felt like freedom. It felt like being ten years old in a world that still seemed wide open and forgiving.

[…]

My attention was on the top of the wall, not what waited beyond it. I didn’t see the exposed rebar near the base on the other side, and I had no way of knowing that the next sound I heard would remain with me for the rest of my life.

[…]

Then my balance disappeared before I had any chance to correct it. There was no time to reach back, no time to think, only that sensation of falling. The ground has not reached you yet, but safety is already gone.

As my foot slipped and my weight carried forward, the sky tilted, and the wall disappeared behind me. Before I felt the impact, I heard it.

There was a split second where everything went silent, as though the world itself had pulled in a breath.

Then came the sound of metal meeting bone, a dull, heavy force that did not belong to anything I recognized. It was not a crack exactly. Not a snap. The sound was deeper than that.

My head did not hit the ground as it stopped before it got there.

The rebar entered through my cheek, passed through my eye socket, and penetrated my brain. My body jerked to a stop violently, but not completely. My legs slapped toward the ground unevenly while everything inside me kept moving, as though my body had been interrupted mid-motion and left suspended between falling and landing.

For one terrible instant, pain overwhelmed everything. It exploded through my head with such intensity that it erased every other sensation. There was no room for thought, only shock and the immediate awareness that something catastrophic had happened.

[…]

I was still there though. I was still conscious and aware, but I was not fully inside the world the way I had been a moment earlier. Sounds softened. Edges blurred. The evening around me moved farther away, even though I had not moved at all.

[…]

That was when I knew I was stuck.

[…]

Something was terribly wrong.

I did not understand the brain. I didn’t even know what the rebar had done. But I knew death was close.

I was afraid, but I was not screaming inside myself. I was not thrashing or begging either. Instead, something in me became very still, as though the child I had been only seconds before had stepped into a place where fear could not be wasted.

[…]

I wanted someone to help me, but I was afraid they couldn’t.

That was when another awareness came over me and I have carried it with me my whole life and still do not know how to describe without making it sound smaller than it was.

I felt love.

It felt familiar, almost like family, though it did not come from anyone standing there in that moment. It surrounded me in a way that steadied my mind. It did not remove the danger or take away the injury. It did not promise me I would live, but somehow, it helped me stay.

That love gave me room inside the terror. It held my thoughts together when they could have scattered. It gave me enough calm to understand that I had a choice about whether I would keep fighting for the next breath, the next moment.

Still, I could feel myself slipping, and there was a part of me that understood how easy it would have been to let go. Holding on required effort. It required intention.

I did not want to die, though that had little to do with any sophisticated understanding of death or what might come afterward. I was ten years old. I knew that I wanted my mother and my home. I wanted the life I had been living only moments before, the ordinary life where walls were just walls and evenings like this ended with nothing more remarkable than going to bed.

More than anything, I wanted to stay.

The story continues in AFTER SURVIVAL

Available September 17, 2026