I Am a Paraplegic
I had experience riding/driving motor vehicles since the age of five. Starting out on a 1985 Honda TRX 125 four-wheeler, driving my parents stick-shift cars on the farm and by the age of twelve trading up to a two-stroke 1993 Honda CR 125 motorcross bike. I knew how to ride!
I was in a motorcycle accident June 15, 2009 on a 2002 Yamaha YZF 600. According to the police report it was a clear, sunny day. I had not had a drink of alcohol in over six months. I've no idea why I was out on the road that I ended up crashing. I had just quite satisfactorily finished an exam that morning in a class of summer school; I am a 31 year old old man who finally made it back to college and into a great university, the University of Virginia, to study mechanical engineering.
I don't remember the actual cause of the accident (which frustrates the living hell out of me), but I remember almost everything else. I remember sliding accross the road with the knowledge of impending doom. I remember the first impact of my body against the first of three trees and the resulting revolution to impact of the remaining. I remember the deafening silence following the ceasing of my progress.
I ended up on the side of a road on a hill out of view of traffic (the little bit that there was.) I remember trying to climb up this hill with my hands, realizing I wasn't getting much, or rather any, help from my lower appendages (later it was found that I had also broken both of the bones in my left forearm, yet did not feel a thing at that point.) I could do nothing at that point but cry out in the weakest of voice for help. Turns out I broke my left hip and forearm, multiple, multiple ribs, my back and my neck. Luckily enough the neck break did not result in the severing of my spinal cord.
Help did come in the form of a woman who happened to hear my bike coming, to this apparently notorious turn, yet did not hear it leaving. She was henceforth referred to as my guardian angel.
I remember little after that but random voices here and there. Ended up in an induced coma for ten days and when I woke recall having had the most vivid and quite disturbing dreams of my life. I won't get into those right now ;) I was in the hospital for about a month and then went to rehab at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta for about another month. Things seemed okay, or at least manageable, for a while thereafter.
Thinks did not continue to be okay.
Surprisingly enough, it was not so much the loss of mobility that really got me down but, rather, the incessant issues with bladder and bowels (I'm a T6, by the way.) That, coupled with being taken off of narcotic pain killers after nine months of continual use, has put me in a state of mind that I would not wish upon anyone.
I don't want to continue to go on, yet I cannot afford to quit. I'm not one to go the suicide route, probably just out of fear, and I obviously cannot go back to the manual labor jobs to which I was qualified before the accident. I guess I have to continue with my studies even though it has become exponentially more difficult.
I get relatively little pleasure out of life and instead am riddled with chronic pain. Let me ask the obligatory question, "Why has God forsaken me?" Know what?, I believe that I have lost my belief in the man I for so long held so dear.
Love and respect to anyone going through similar circumstances!!
