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In the minutes after the incident, Roy was rushed to University Medical Center in Las Vegas with two gaping puncture wounds to the neck. Before passing out, he recalls, "I said, 'Leave Montecore alone. Bring him back to his brother and sister. Let him be happy.' " Suffering from severe blood loss and shock, he was considered medically dead at one point when his heart stopped. He also suffered the stroke that would ravage the left side of his body. Roy says he even had an out-of-body experience in the O.R. "I stepped out of my body and looked over the surgeon's shoulder, and I sat while he was cutting me up," he says. "And my mom [who died three years ago] is sitting in a chair, and in front of her is one of my lions I had before, and my Siberian tiger was laying there, and my brother who had passed on years and years ago. And I know everything is going to be fine." Indeed, he survived, but "there were many nights where I cried myself to sleep, that's how much pain I had," says Roy. In his four weeks in the hospital, he drifted in and out (mostly out) of consciousness and suffered clots and a terrible brain swelling. Unable to speak, he tried to express himself by writing after he had been transferred to UCLA Medical Center. At the beginning, his messages were just illegible scrawls (one of his first coherent notes, says Van Herle, was "Please take care of Mr. Siegfried"). Though he has since regained the 30 lbs. he lost, he says even now, "there is pain. Everywhere. My entire body."
