It all started with a bad sinus infection 4 years ago. I was a sophomore in high school when I started getting severe head aces. I went to my family doctor and he diagnosed me with a simple sinus infection and the head aces were being caused by pressure on my sinuses. I took the medication he gave me and I also asked for pain killers for the pain. I went through hydrocodone and oxycodone and the pain still wouldn't stop. I missed 13 days of school and I was in bed for 7 days straight. While I was bed-ridden, I didn't eat anything and my left eye had completely swollen shut. By the 13th day, I was feeling like I could go back to school. I stopped taking my medication because I thought I was ready to stop taking it. I was wrong.

I went to school for a week before I had to go to the hospital. I was refereeing a basketball game the very next Sunday when the sharp shooting pain hit my head. It was almost blinding. I had 2 games to go and I could hardly hear or see. Some how I finished all my games. My dad came to pick me up from the gym that night and I told him that everything had gotten worse and that I needed to go to the doctor the next day as soon as they got to the office. That night might have been the worst night of my life. There was no position that I could get comfortable enough in to go to sleep, I felt like I had daggers ripping my brain apart piece by piece. I stayed up pretty much the entire night crying. My parents stayed up with me and were taking turns massaging my head and shoulders to ease the pain. When I got up in the morning, nothing had changed. The pain was still immense. The first doctor that I went to was actually sick so he sent me to the x-ray people in the same building. I went back to the doctors office after I got them back and he took one look at them and immediately sent me to another doctor in the same building; the infectious disease doctors. By the time I got into the doctors office, the pain had stepped up another couple levels. I had her turn off the light because it hurt my head. She looked at me and my CAT scan and told my father that I needed to be admitted to the hospital as fast as I could get there. She tried to get me a room but the hospital was full. She then suggested that we go through the ER. We waited a good 2 hours before I finally was called back in the ER and it is here where all the fun starts. The nurse was a really nice lady and she helped me as much as possible. I got a shot of morphine for my head and everything felt so much better. I could finally rest with a little bit of peace. When a room opened up, they moved me up to the 6th floor. My mother came to the hospital to help me and take care of me until I fell asleep. Another shot of morphine from the nurse and I was asleep and my parents had left to go home. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, throwing up on myself, going to the bathroom and brushing my teeth. The nurse came in the room and asked me what I was doing and all I could say was “Oh my God” over and over again. She helped me over to my bed and helped me get changed. Once I fell asleep, I had fallen into a coma.

The doctors called my parents once they realized it and moved me to top priority on their list. Luckily for me, Dr. Kathleen French was in the hospital that night. Within the next 8 days, I had 3 craniectomy operations. A craniectomy operation can be used for many different operations and in my case, it was being used to relieve pressure on my skull. They drilled 3 holes in my skull and inserted four tubes draining the infection into removable bags. I was in a coma for about 12 or 13 days and I didn’t know what had happened to me when I woke up. I was completely paralyzed on my left side when I came out of the coma and I couldn’t move anything, including my face. The doctors first started communicating with me by having me squeeze their finger once or twice for yes and no. It was a hard concept to grasp for just waking up because I couldn’t even get my thoughts out and I couldn’t ask questions. As a couple days went by, I could start to say one and two word combinations. I was in the ICU for a total of 17 days. They eventually moved me to my own room which was absolutely great. By about day 21 I had my first solid meal, Wendy’s cheese burger, fries and a root-beer.

My next surgery was probably the worst. Dr. French was on vacation for a week and the tubes in my head were ready to come out. I can’t remember the doctors name but he insisted that it wouldn’t hurt and it would only take a couple minutes and a stitch or two in each of the small holes the tubes were coming out of. He was wrong, it hurt like hell. This was a big step back in my emotional state. I didn’t want to do anything except for cry and sleep. I was in so much pain I passed out. My best friend was supposed to come see me that day and my mom told her what happened and she said she would come another day. This is 1 of 3 downfalls I had while I was in the hospital. Another downfall I had was kidney stones. All the medication they had given me had caused my kidneys to form stones. It took 3 days to pass them and that was a different level of pain because I couldn’t get up to use the bathroom. Luckily they took out the catheter a few days before I developed the kidney stones. Speaking of a catheter, that reminds me that when they tried taking it out… It got stuck! Apparently while I was in the coma I tried pulling it out on a number of different occasions. By trying to pull it out, I guess I pulled it to a sticking point. Anyways, back to the story.

Recovery started slow and progressed fast. After the first day out of bed, I was fueled to do it again and improve my status and get out of the hospital as soon as possible. Every day they had nurses come in my room and help me out of bed. The second time was just a trip to the bathroom and then right back to the couch to sit up straight for a couple hours. After that, they had me put on my socks and shoes and take a couple steps around the room. From there, they had me walking up and down the halls (with nurses on each side of course). By day 30, I was ready to leave Fairfax Hospital and transfer to Mount Vernon Rehabilitation Center. While I was waiting for the transfer ambulance to arrive, my parents surprised me at the front door of the hospital. They brought my 3 year old Boxer and Jack Russell Terrier to the front entrance of the hospital. It was the happiest I had been in a very long time. I got to play with my dog and talk to police officers, doctors, nurses and everyone else about my surgery and my dog. When the transfer ambulance arrived, I was ready to go to rehab and leave the hospital for good!

I spent 6 days at the rehabilitation center and it seemed like an eternity. I was on the floor with about 90 stroke patients. I was the youngest and only person in that section that did not have a stroke. The doctors told me that everything that I had gone through were so similar to a stroke they thought the stoke ward would be an appropriate place for me. I met a lot of nice people and their food was definitely a lot better. I went through rehab like a champ. Instead of waiting for the nurse to come in the room in the morning I got out of bed, went to the bathroom and got everything ready to start a hard day’s work of regaining my abilities. They had me walking around doing exercises, playing with memory games, speech classes and therapy sessions. After the 6th day, they determined that I was ready to leave.

Before I left, they had me go to another floor to have a PIC line inserted into one of my veins. A PIC line is an IV line that can stay on your body as long as the tube is not blocked. Once I got that done, my parents filled out a couple papers for me and they took me out the front door and I was off to my house which I hadn’t been to since the day I left for the doctors; 36 days earlier. The first night I got home a nurse came to my house and showed my mom how to give me the IV medication I needed and how to do it properly. Once she left, I was finally free from the hospital and doctors for a couple weeks.

After I had grown my hair back and was walking perfectly and hanging out with my friends again, I had to go back into the hospital for one last surgery. They had to put 4 steel mesh plates over the 3 holes they drilled out of my skull. The surgery didn’t take long but the anesthesia made me throw up a lot after I came out of the surgery. I left the next day, shaven head again and stitched up like a football.

To this day, I am 99% healthy. The 1% that is not perfect is because my left side is a little bit weaker than my right side. This is probably because the germ that caused all of this was on the right side of my brain and when I was paralyzed coming out of the coma I was only using my right side. It is now almost 4 years since I first went into the hospital and I am extremely thankful to the doctors that saved my life. I attend East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina and I am taking a semester off and studying abroad in Melbourne, Australia starting in February.

OUCH!!