Mike was born February 19, 1971, in Saigon, Vietnam, to Dung (Kim) Vo and John Thomson.
In 1975, the family, including Mike’s older brother Tom and younger sister Sheila, escaped the country on April 29, the day before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.
Flown to safety out of Vietnam in a Chinook helicopter then a military transport plane (with everyone strapped down to the floor since there were no seats), the Thomson family stopped over in the Philippines before arriving in San Francisco.
After living for a couple of weeks in the Tenderloin neighborhood, Mike and his family moved to Florida to live with their father’s brother, Uncle Emmett. They would eventually land in Houston, Texas, where Mike spent the rest of his childhood, until just after his junior year of high school when they moved to El Monte, California, east of Los Angeles.
After Mike graduated from Arroyo High, Mike worked as a lifeguard during the summers and attended Cal Poly Pomona, studying music and playing varsity baseball. Until the first Gulf War started.
The Navy years
In March 1991, Mike signed up with the United States Navy to serve his country. The Gulf War ended soon after he started boot camp, but Bosnia was heating up.
In training to be a medic (hospital corpsman), Mike went through corps school, then surgical tech school in Bethesda, Maryland, then was sent to field med school to prepare for deployment with the Marine Corps. Soon after that, he was admitted to an exclusive (and secret) Army Special Ops medic training program at Camp Lejeune known as “goat school” or “goat lab.”
Everything changes
In October 1994, Mike was serving with the Marine Corps as medic during a landmine-clearing training mission at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia when a delayed C-4 explosion occurred after the men had removed their protective gear. Mike was one of three at ground zero at the time of the blast. The other two men, Staff Sgt. Roy Burt and Lance Corpl. Steven Swearingen, died instantly.
Burned over 40% of his body but still conscious, Mike began administering to the other injured Marines nearby, upholding the “finest traditions of the Navy, Navy medicine, and the hospital corps,” according to the Naval Service Medical News story published two days after the accident.
Medevacked by helicopter to a burn unit in Richmond, Virginia, Mike began a long and painful recovery — it took two years, multiple skin graft operations, and endless physical rehab. The accident left him with extensive scars both inside and out, severe tinnitus, and lifelong disabilities.
Phoenix rising
Despite the trauma, PTSD, and survivor’s guilt he experienced after what was essentially a needless accident, Mike (with inspiration from a fellow injured veteran from the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors) gathered the courage to get better, go back to school, continue to serve others, and live the best life he could.
He was honorably discharged from the Navy in 1995, and when he was strong enough to travel he returned to California to continue his physical rehab and recovery.
To regain dexterity and help his hands and fingers heal, Mike taught himself how to play the guitar. Lying in bed with his eyes closed, wearing tight nylon compression garments to help heal the burn scars on his arms and hands (which he had to wear 24/7 for an entire year), he spent hours each day learning basic chords and eventually complicated picking.
Full circle
Soon after Mike returned home, his father passed away from cancer. Mike was by his side. It was yet another devastating blow.
Mike knew he needed to keep going, and that he wanted to finish college. He applied to UC Berkeley, was admitted, and moved north. Amid the rigor of Cal’s science program, Mike’s PTSD was a challenge even with his intellect, but he worked hard and graduated four years later, earning a bachelor’s degree in Integrative Biology.
Mike loved Berkeley; he met all kinds of friends and had adventures — like working in Cal’s Natural History Museum and spending a summer digging for fossils in Montana — along the way. After graduation, he stayed in the Bay Area.
To keep busy and continue to serve others, Mike worked in the medical field as an OR tech — doing general surgery, gyn-oncology, orthopedics, and some neurology — in hospitals in Oakland and Berkeley.
A few years later he moved to Hawai’i and worked in labor and delivery at Tripler Army Medical Center on O’ahu. And surfed his ass off.
After three years in Hawai’i, Mike applied to Columbia University’s creative writing MFA program and moved to New York. Feeling the competitive program wasn’t the vibe he was looking for, he moved back to the Bay Area a short time later, settling in San Francisco — the same place where his family had first landed on U.S. soil in 1975.
Final years
Over the years, Mike lived in several neighborhoods in SF, including Lower Pacific Heights, the Tenderloin, the Outer Sunset, Inner Richmond, Alamo Square, and the Mission. In 2011 he moved to Pacifica, just south of SF, and lived on a bluff overlooking Linda Mar, one of his local surf breaks. In 2012 he moved across the Bay to Oakland, on a hill just up from the Grand Lake Theater.
While continuing to receive full pension benefits from the VA because of his disabilities, Mike tried to keep busy, whether it was volunteering; taking classes in piano, Vietnamese, and algebra (for fun!); or attending bartending school. He surfed, painted, played his guitar, and traveled to the LA area frequently to visit his family.
Family
Mike’s nephew Ryan (Tom’s son) was born in 2010. Ryan was Uncle Mike’s pride and joy and the center of his universe. Mike also spent a lot of time with his mom in Riverside and visited Tom and Sheila whenever he could. The Thomson kids met and grew close with another side of their family from back east, sibs Maureen, Jean, and Chris and their own families, who also meant the world to Mike. Family was everything to him.
Henrietta
During the late 2000s, Mike undertook the monumental task of rebuilding a 1964 Ford Falcon, with expert guidance and assistance from Tom (aka “Dad”) Meenan.
“Henrietta” (named for Henry Ford) was painted Wimbledon White and turned heads wherever she went. Mike was so proud of her.
To prove her mettle, he once drove her all the way to the Oregon border, a 6.5-hour drive at 55 mph…then turned around and drove right back.
Writing and volunteer work
And Mike continued to write: short stories, poetry, songs, and a novel that he was never able to finish. He attended City College of San Francisco for several semesters so he could work on its literary magazine, Forum, as a contributor, fiction editor, then general editor.
Mike’s volunteer work included helping adults learn to read, assisting people living with blindness by taking them shopping and helping them with chores around their homes, and, ironically (as it turned out), providing comfort to veterans in hospice care during their final days,
The worst diagnosis
In the fall of 2017, Mike started noticing weakness in his arms and shoulders. He went to the gym, but no amount of working out made him any stronger. He went to the ER at the VA on three different occasions, but no one thought it was neurological, let alone something terminal. Finally, he went to see a physical therapist, who told him to see a neurologist as soon as possible.
After three more months of tests and agonizing bureaucratic delays, Mike was diagnosed in March 2018 with probable-to-definite amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS (here’s more about Mike’s diagnosis).
He couldn’t accept that this beast had a hold of him. He was accustomed to throwing himself into workouts, building his muscles and strength through discipline and determination. Now he was being told that he couldn’t work out, that he’d never regain the use of his arms, that he’d soon lose the rest of his muscles. And that, no matter what he tried, he was going to die of this disease.
Still, he threw himself into researching, hours and hours every day, late into the night when he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t believe there was really nothing that could be done, thought surely he could find something that might help at least slow things down and buy him some time. But there was nothing, at least nothing proven by science to do much.
Read more about ALS and how little has changed since Lou Gehrig died 80 years ago,
Moving to SoCal
In the fall of 2018, Mike and his girlfriend, Holly, moved down to Southern California to be near his family and Cedars-Sinai, where he had finally been admitted to participate in a promising stem cell clinical trial. They lived at his brother Tom’s place in Desert Hot Springs for a couple of months, then at his mom’s in Riverside.
Sheila drove down from Santa Maria, four hours north, every weekend for months. In January, she arranged her life and work so that she could help Mike rent an accessible apartment in Rancho Cucamonga and move in to help with his care 24/7. She wanted to spend as much time with her brother as possible. Tom and Ryan visited often and stayed at the apartment whenever they could.
Sharon and Renee Meenan, who’d both known and loved Mike for 30 years, took care of him at their home in La Verne whenever Holly and Sheila had to be away. After Mike was wheelchair-bound and travel was more difficult, Sharon, Renee, and Renee’s daughter Fallon were always around to help and spend time with him until the very end.
With the help of generous donors through his GoFundMe campaign, Mike began making plans to travel to South Korea for stem cell treatment that’s commercially available for ALS patients (at a steep price tag of $100K). Unfortunately, his disease progressed too quickly and the decline in his breathing soon prevented him from being able to undergo the treatment and travel overseas.
Last days
Mike finished out the NurOwn clinical trial at Cedars-Sinai, braving the long drives in hellish traffic and costly hotel stays in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood for the numerous appointments.
He never really knew whether he’d received placebo or actual stem cells injected into his spinal cord fluid. After each of the first two transplantations, he saw a very slight improvement in some function and no change after the third, but he always wondered whether his disease had simply progressed too far for stem cells to make much difference. (The trial will be unmasked later in 2020 when it concludes.)
In April, Mike went on hospice care, and he lived out his remaining days with family and loved ones nearby, trying to soak up all the love he could. There was so, so much love, both for him and from him.
On Sunday, July 14, 2019, at 3:38 p.m., Mike took his last breath and was released from all the suffering, pain, and paralysis. The Phoenix flew free and soared high above the ashes.
His funeral and military honors ceremony took place on July 24 in Riverside.
Listen to the playlist Mike created for his funeral services.
We were all honored to love him, to have known him, and to have taken care of him. It is not an exaggeration to say Mike changed the world, on so many levels and in countless meaningful ways. He had something, a spirit and a life that seemed to come from somewhere else, somewhere amazing and beautiful. If you knew Mike, you understand.
As he would often say after learning of his fate, “In the end, love is all that matters.”
