Hospital Life

It's no secret that I have been paralyzed twice in my life, but each time I reveal that to someone it always surprises me about how loaded of a statement that can be to someone. Both of those experiences taught me so much at such a young age, and in a weird way I'm happy that it happened. Sometimes I'm afraid to share my story because the last thing I want is sympathy for what I went through, but every now and then my lingering issues are noticed so when someone asks I will tell them. I never really know what to make of their reaction, but it's always the same. Either way, the truth is that I really enjoy talking about it because it's something that not everybody gets to go through. 

I was a 10 year old 4th grader getting in line to go to lunch with my class. Usually when you're that young the cool thing to do is to race everyone to the door so that you can be the first person in line, but as soon as I got out of my desk I felt like something was wrong with the way I was walking so I willingly walked to the back of the line where the handicapped/mentally challenged kids usually were. It's a sad truth, but those kids weren't treated very well by my classmates so they were surprised to see a "normal" kid willingly take the back of the line. As we walked down the hall I noticed that I was moving rather slow and I couldn't keep up with the class which at first my teacher started scolding me for, but then she rushed me to the nurse's office when I told her that I couldn't walk properly. 

Being a 10 year old that never had an injury or major sickness, I didn't think anything about what was going on until I was rushed in an ambulance to a hospital. I felt totally normal aside from the fact that I was walking a little funny, so I didn't understand why everyone was so concerned. Many tests were done, questions were asked, and hospital locations were changed until I ended up in Children's Hospital. The doctor I was given thought I was putting on a show just to get out of school and wanted to send me home, but after sending a psychiatrist to evaluate me he decided to give me a spinal tap to see exactly what was wrong with me. Long story short: Guillian Barre Syndrome. 

The best part about the hospital was the opportunity to make so many new friends right off the bat. I remember before I was confined to a wheelchair and I could still make my way around, I'd walk down to the game room and play Super Nintendo or Nintendo 64 with the other kids and just chat about anything in general. Since I grew up in a small town with very few friends and a rather small family, this was a dream come true in a way. Well, sort of. 

My mobility quickly deteriorated to the point that I was confined to my bed. It hurt to move, it hurt to touch the bed rail, it hurt when someone touched me, it hurt to take a bath, it hurt when they took blood from me, it hurt when they forced me to do exercises that my body couldn't possibly do.. everything hurt. It especially hurt when I would try to raise my arm above me and then I'd lose strength and smack myself in the face. No more games, no more making new friends, and since I lost my sense of taste nothing tasted good either which didn't help the fact that I was taking an outrageous amount of medication daily. 

As bad as the pain was, I had to make the effort at 10 years old to endure it because I missed my friends, family, and animals so badly. Unfortunately, this was only week 2 of my 4 months paralyzed. They moved me to a hospital called "Our Children's House" in Baylor and there I met some of the greatest doctors, nurses, therapists, and made some wonderful friendships. I slowly gained my arm strength back and was able to wheel myself around and play video games again, even if it was difficult to press the buttons as quick as I needed to so thank gawd Final Fantasy VI didn't require fast responses. 

While I was away from my family and everybody, my new friends at the hospital quickly became my temporary family. Time passed by so slowly, so after awhile it felt like I knew these people for years after sharing all our stories and spending time together. Everything up to this point I was able to handle fairly well aside from the initial pain I went through that literally made me threaten to kill myself to get out of the pain, until I discovered the unfortunate downside to making friends in a hospital: Some of them don't make it. 

Death wasn't something I was very familiar with at that point in my life, and while it hit me very hard when I lost friends to cancer, heart failure, and other issues.. with the help of the therapists and nurses there, I learned to look at death a little differently. Sometimes I'm not sure how I feel about it anymore, honestly I feel numb to it at times and other times I almost see death as a positive thing in a weird way. That or I just learned how to live with it, I really can't explain why I feel the way I do about it. 

I was eager to get back to school and be with everyone again, but as I left the hospital to go home I definitely felt something tugging away at my heart. I was going to miss being there. Returning to all of my friends was so great and they were so supportive of me. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I was still in a wheelchair and didn't fully start learning to walk on my own until I had been at home for a couple days, I learned first hand how the handicapped kids felt when other kids looked down on them. Some kids didn't want to play with me, some refused to talk to me, some made fun of me.. it made no sense to me, but I accepted it until I was almost 100% and could blend in with everyone again. 

Funny story: The first time I walked with no help after being paralyzed was when I woke up in the morning and had to pee really bad. I stood up and waddled my way to the bathroom and just as I walked out of the bathroom my mom freaked and asked me how I got in there. It was a very happy and silly moment. 

The 2nd time I was paralyzed wasn't all that different of a story, except I was 13 years old that time around. I knew the drill. Unfortunately for some reason leaving the hospital the 2nd time was even harder, so much that I cried all the way home. It didn't help that when I got back to school in 8th grade, a friend's mom spread a rumor that what I had was contagious and that my school is risking everyone's lives by letting me back. Instead of getting that warm welcome I got back in 4th grade, I got a "Welcome back, freak. I thought you died." and I'm not even making that up. I saw the dark sides of even some of the sweetest and nicest girls I thought I knew in school. I felt alienated by the only friends I had aside from Mario, Paulino, and Bobby. 

So I felt some great pain emotionally, physically, and mentally and it taught me a lot. I'm glad I experienced it, because now every time I think about that period of my life it makes me want to be one of those people employed at the hospital that helped me through it all. I feel like that's a career path that I need to seriously consider. 

Anyway.. thank you for reading. 

Magazines

When I was about 10 years old a lot of things happened in 1997. I was paralyzed, learned how to walk again and healed 95%, discovered my love for magazines, got a Playstation 1, and got Final Fantasy VII. Wanna know what's funny about that? It's all related.

See when I was paralyzed I was mostly stuck in a bed or a wheelchair and I only had limited movement of my arms and head for a couple months so mostly all I did was watch movies and such until my mom had the great idea of putting a SNES controller in my hand and letting me learn how to use my fingers again while playing games. All I can say is thank Celestia that Final Fantasy VI's Active Time Battle system was optional because my reaction time was terrible due to the fact that I could barely press the buttons. Yes, video games taught me how to use my fingers again. Anyway I got better and had to visit with the doctors fairly regularly for checkups and my main doctor since I was a baby was Dr. Corn. Well I had an appointment with him one day and while we were in the waiting room there were video game magazines stashed next to my chair. I was amazed that they even existed! I had no idea, I grew up in a little country town and wasn't aware of any type of media acknowledging video games aside from commercials.

Then I saw this page.

A new Final Fantasy game was on the way.

I was floored. It was nearly impossible to get me to read anything when I was younger outside of text boxes in video games but I studied every centimeter of this page, and quickly told my mom the good news. My mom and I have always loved Final Fantasy II and III (or IV and VI) and were always wondering when the new one would come out, not to mention why the numbers were out of sequence. I specifically remember pointing out the caption where Barrett swears saying "Rufus! SHIT! I forgot about him!" and my mom told me to not let her boyfriend see me playing the game because he was Catholic and would freak. We left the doc's office, I left the magazine there... regretfully, and I had my grandpa buy me every video game magazine on the magazine rack every month.

I had a pretty successful birthday in November that year with Super Mario RPG, a couple turbo Controllers, and so on.. but not even a week later I saw Final Fantasy VII sitting on a shelf and I begged my mom to get it.. and keep in mind, we were pretty poor and pretty much lived off of what little my mom made and child support checks. She said no. D=

Well, a couple weeks before Christmas I walked into the kitchen for some cheese and I saw a funny looking box wrapped in several Wal-Mart bags and I inspected it. IT WAS EVERYTHING! Final Fantasy VII, a Playstation, and a FFVII Strategy Guide!! Guess what I did? I opened it without permission, blamed the Rat (my cat, I miss her :'( )for opening the bag, and had a blast playing Final Fantasy VII.

Say what you want about the game being blown out of porportion and being overrated, which in some ways it was later on in time.. just like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64. At the end fo the day it lived up to the Final Fantasy name in terms of story, characters, length, music, dialogue, beautiful backgrounds, gameplay.. and it successfully brought it to 3D. It's not my favorite Final Fantasy game, but of its time it was definitely one of the biggest games of the year right from the start. Best game ever? No. Great fucking game? Yes. Look, I hate the annoying FFVII fanboys and girls as much as the next person, but don't let their annoyance take away from what is a solid game. In a lot of ways that's how I feel about Pokemon fans sometimes, but I know that's not the game's fault.

Oh, anyway my whole reason I wrote this blog was because remember that magazine I read in Dr. Corn's office? I actually got it a couple weeks ago by total chance when Meese's Pieces (an awesome thrift shop that is getting shut down) gave me a whole stack of old magazines for free when I pointed out to him that they were not strategy guides. I'm so nostalgic right now reading all these articles 15 years later.

Tire Swings

When I was about 3 or 4 years old, I loved tire swings to death. I'd wake up in the morning, watch cartoons, play NES games, and then go outside to donk around. Let me try to list all the things I can remember doing.

- Play with our dogs and cats.
- Dig for treasure, ususally with my bare hands.. and the treasure was usually a stump even though my mom told me that before I started.
- Drive my little monster truck around and help my mom bring branches to the burn pile.
- Play "golf" with any ball I could find, one of those cheap white rods people use to hang their curtains that is sorta shaped like a putter, and a hole I dug in the ground.
- Climb on things and jump off, because of course I thought I was invincible.
- Wait for my Grandpa to pull into the driveway so I could talk him into giving me some of the ice cream he bought from the store.
- Chase the mail man down the road after he took off.
- Go to our neighbor's house that my Mom told me to stay away from and fool around with the carpet that had become a part of the ground outside. It fascinated me for some reason.
- Snoop around in this very old house behind ours that still had someone's belongings in there, but I had to be careful because the place was falling apart eventually had to be demolished.
- Pick "flowers" for my mom, which honestly.. were weeds and that's the only reason my Mom let me keep picking them.

Well, that's all I can think of aside from the title of this blog. TIRE SWING! I loved that thing, my dad had the rope set up so high in the tree that I could swing super far and I would do that for hours and not get sick of it. One minor problem though, this tire swing was not too far from the trailer we lived in and also was kinda close to the tree itself. Basically after awhile the swing would change direction and I ended up becoming a ping pong ball between our house and the tree and it beat me up pretty bad to the point that I had some people thinking that my parents were abusive to me. Eventually my parents had to take the tire swing down due to hurting myself too much, but it was fun while it lasted.

A Reminder to Myself

I will forget, so I'm putting this here so I can come back to it later.

A quote from Yahtzee:

"Why? Because people are shit. Whenever I'm in a crowd, I think to myself, "Who left this shit all over the place?" I'm shit, you're shit, the world is shit, and if you're sitting there thinking, "Yes, it's true, everyone is shit except me," then you're a double-bacon shit with fries, Mr. Shitface."

I don't have many pictures of my Dad for several reasons. We didn't take many pictures of my childhood, we can't find them, or my Mom (or I) cut him out or blacked him out of the pictures. I kinda wish I didn't do that, because as much as I question his actions (or lack of action) throughout the years, one day he will not be around and those are going to be the only memories I have of him. I don't know why but this makes me really upset right now. Oh well.