From the Beginning

I remember waking up in the hospital bed, how disjointed and confused my thoughts had been, how sometimes I couldn’t even recall my own name. The anger at not being able to express myself or be understood. The dawning realization that a part of me was never going to be the same. I spent nearly eight months in the hospital going through the hell of physical rehab, and getting speech therapy and learning to cope.

At first I slept most of the time, but gradually it got were I didn’t need but three or four hours of sleep. So I began to read. Every spare minute was taken up with reading, it didn’t matter what the subject matter was, it was all grist for the mill.  Romances, technical journals, law books and fiction it was all the same to me. It was words, put down in order so that people could understand them, something I needed desperately if I was to prove the doctors wrong.

I also began to use a wheel chair that an orderly would use to take me to the break room or various appointments – physical therapy, speech therapy, getting fitted with braces and my own wheel chair. It was a state of the art electric one with a toggle switch to control it with the fingers of my left hand. I could even change the seat position from upright to laying supine. It was a marvel of technology… and I hated it.