Most of you know me as RC Lombax. The guy who’s been making videos and breaking Ratchet & Clank for over a decade. But behind the scenes, the last few years have been a fight I never signed up for.

A lot of people ask what happened to me, why I disappeared, or why my voice sounds the way it does now.

What follows is the matter of fact reality of how a hangover in 2021 turned into a nightmare surgery, a brain injury, and a long road back to being able to talk again.
This is my story.

On Sunday the 5th of September 2021, Father’s Day, I was recovering from a night out. I looked physically rough, very pale, and very dead tbh. My dad took a photo of me that morning where I looked like absolute crap.

We went out for lunch, I ordered a beer, thinking the "hair of the dog" trick might help settle me down.

As we walked back to the car after the meal, I realised I couldn’t catch my breath. I shrugged it off at the time, assuming it was just a side effect of the hangover, and continued powering up the hill.

The breathlessness didn't go away. By Monday, I still felt pretty bad. I drove my dad to pick up my little sister from school, and the sensation came back.

I became very short of breath just from walking up the small dirt hill behind her school. It was just a slight incline, and the level of exhaustion I felt didn't make any sense.

My dad noticed me struggling and told me to book a doctor's appointment. I managed to get in for the following day, Tuesday, September 7th.

By Tuesday, I still felt terrible. When I finally saw the GP, he listened to my chest and noticed a strange sound. He described it as the heart working significantly harder to pump. He scheduled a chest X-ray for a week later, though he admitted the situation was pretty odd.

I went home and tried to relax by playing Call of Duty: Cold War (I know… so relaxing!) and taking a bath, hoping it would help clear my chest.

Later that night, while on the toilet, I checked my Apple Watch, my pulse was 148 bpm while I was just sitting there. My dad then used an O2 reader on my finger, which returned a reading of 92%.

Given that 92% is dangerously low for oxygen saturation, we decided to head to the hospital right then and there.

This occurred during the peak of Covid, so my dad wasn't allowed to enter the hospital with me. I went inside, explained my symptoms, and waited for several hours.

During that time, they performed a series of scans, a chest X-ray, a chest CT, and blood work. Once I was finally moved to a bed, the doctors explained what they'd found.

I had developed multiple Pulmonary Embolisms (blood clots in the lungs) and had also contracted pneumonia (somehow). The plan of attack was a daily 20mg dose of the blood thinner Xarelto and a round of antibiotics. I remained in the hospital until September 9th before being sent home to recover.

Life did not go according to the initial plan. As the months passed, my health declined further. It became increasingly difficult to catch my breath, and even the slightest incline would leave me feeling exhausted.

I didn't understand why this was happening, and at the time, no one could provide a specific reason as to why the clots had formed in the first place.

Eventually, I began seeing a lung specialist, Dr. S, who organized several echocardiograms, ultrasounds of the heart. These scans revealed that the right side of my heart was roughly three times the size it should have been.

My heart was under extreme strain, confirming what the GP had heard back in September.

The diagnosis was CTEPH (Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension). This is a condition where the lungs are so blocked by clots that the heart can no longer pump effectively.

A heart as strained as mine typically only has about three years before it fails, either through exhaustion or the thickening of the heart walls. Every visit to the echocardiogram clinic felt like preparing for my own funeral, I would stare at the ceiling and realise that without a change soon, I might only have a year left.

However, Dr. S managed to get me into a prestigious hospital for a Pulmonary Thromboendarterectomy (PTE), an extremely high stakes, life saving surgery that can reverse the effects of CTEPH.

In June 2023, I went to the hospital for the PTE surgery. This is essentially open heart surgery on steroids. To clear the clots from my lungs, the surgeons perform a median sternotomy, cutting my breastbone in half.

I was then connected to a heart-lung bypass machine. This machine takes over the function of the heart and lungs, pulling deoxygenated "blue" blood from the Vena Cava, oxygenating it, and returning the "red" blood through the Aorta. At this stage, a high potassium solution is administered to stop my heart from beating.

To allow the surgeons to work in a "bloodless field," my body temperature is lowered to 18–20°C, they then drain the majority of the blood from my body into a reservoir, this sets the stage for the clot removal process. The core temperature drop is important because it slows the metabolic rate for the brain, minimising the risk of brain damage.

This process, which is called Deep Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest (DHCA), is crucially when the heart-lung bypass machine is switched off, providing 20-minute windows to remove the clots before the machine is switched back on and blood flow is restored.

I underwent four rounds of DHCA during my surgery.

And by the time the fourth round of DHCA was complete, I had been chilled, drained and restarted four separate times. It's crazy to think that there were 80 minutes where I just... wasn't there.

While the surgery was technically a success, the recovery was complicated to say the least. I suffered from VAP (Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia) and T1RF (Type 1 Respiratory Failure) post surgery.

It was during this time that a low oxygen event likely occurred, resulting in the hypoxic brain injury. My memories of this time are a blur of reality and crazy hallucinations.

I remember staring at a glass table with jade furniture from above and then hearing two nurses mention that "they usually do lung transplants on people this bad," which sent me into a panic.

I also recall being fed blue goop through my NG Tube which I promptly threw up (after the nurses begging me not to throw it up) still cracks me up.

The hallucinations continued to feel incredibly real. I "saw" my nurse walking up non-existent stairs in my hospital room to a second story office. I also hallucinated a doctor in a radiation suit lowering giant static balls over my exposed lungs.

For a while, I was CONVINCED I had a metal orange box in my back that was functioning as my bypass machine, I even had my then girlfriend take a photo of my back to prove it wasn't there.

And don't get me started on Steve Carell! Have you ever been forced to watch Get Smart while the walls are literally melting? I did! He was not funny in the slightest and it overwhelmed me and sent me into yet another panic.

I was frequently out of it, extremely thirsty, and, according to everyone there, screaming at the top of my lungs for days on end. After a week of this behavior, the doctors finally ordered a brain CT and MRI, which confirmed that I had, in fact, suffered a hypoxic brain injury.

I spent a month in the hospital before returning home. Dr. S visited to review my medications, tapering off my anti-psychotics (used to control the screaming fits) and doubling my beta blocker dosage.

A week or two later, is when my voice decided to nope out! I had been talking to my friends on Black Ops III the night before with no issues.

The next day, while in the car with my then girlfriend, my tongue suddenly felt heavy and I couldn't form words correctly anymore. We were initially worried it was a mini-stroke, but an MRI confirmed the existing hypoxic injury to the Caudate Nuclei and Lentiform Nuclei, which are the primary components of the Basal Ganglia, the control centre for coordinating muscle movement in the brain.

While the speech therapy I had wasn’t very effective, I found that eliminating the dose of Metoprolol (the beta-blocker that had been doubled) significantly eased the slurring.

Despite this, my voice still sounded strained, and I couldn't form plosives (P, B, and M sounds) because my lips wouldn't close properly.

In August 2025, I saw a rehab specialist, Dr. N, who prescribed me the anti-depressant Amitriptyline. After three months, the vocal strain and uncontrollable laughter, which I had also been suffering from, improved significantly.

By March 2026, I realised my remaining muscle issues and the inability to close my mouth might be solved with Baclofen, a drug Dr. N had previously mentioned for spasticity, a condition where muscles remain contracted or 'stiff' due to the brain injury.

Before we start looking forward, let's take a moment to look back. The last five years have been hell on earth for me, literally. From losing my ability to breathe to losing my ability to even talk.

I still never got an official answer as to why I even got blood clots in the first place. But according to my records they could've been there for years, silently plotting my demise.

But I'm just happy to even be here still!

Anyway... looking forward.

In late March 2026, I talked to my GP and she started me on a low-dose trial of Baclofen. Since starting the medication, I have seen further improvement in being able to close my mouth. I'd say my voice is currently at about 60-70% of its original capacity.

The slurring and strain have both been largely addressed, and I am now working on regaining the full use of my plosives (which if you watched my video, I don't think I did too bad!).

It has been a long and difficult recovery, but I am still here, still creative, and finally feeling confident enough to talk to my audience.

If you made it this far, thank you! Genuinely. It means the world to me that people are actually interested in hearing my story.

Any questions or if you just want to chat feel free to DM me on Discord @rclombax

Stay safe out there! RC Lombax signing off. Peace.