Twenty-five years ago today I was lying on a mall floor motionless, a gaping hole in my chest, a constant ringing in my ear. A bullet fired from a .44 magnum had just pierced my chest, collapsed my lung and severed my spinal cord. My breathing was labored and I was losing a lot of blood. Surely I would have expired if I didn’t get medical attention in a hurry. I was airlifted to the trauma center at NCMC slipping in and out of consciousness. I would awake to the voices of EMT’s reassuring me that I would be ok and asking me what I thought to be stupid questions. All I could do at that moment was to try my best to stay awake. I managed to do that until I heard the anesthesiologist counting me out. I came out of surgery with my life but soon after realized I had lost a lot. There was a doctor at the end of my bed asking me to wiggle my toes. When I wasn’t able to do it, I knew what that meant. The bullet lodged in my spine had paralyzed me. I lied there thinking about the implications. I made some bad calculations up to that point and this was a day of reckoning. What I had done preceding that day and what I would do going forward consumed me. This day was the demarcation of a time in my personal history that changed everything for me. I knew I had a lot of rehabilitation ahead of me; physical, mental, and emotional. In retrospect I was still a kid, only nineteen, but I had to grow up fast. I became more circumspect, more studious, more judicious, but my experiences at that point still limited the ways in which I was able to apply my new discipline. A new journey began... #ThisDayInHistory
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:53:33 +0000
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