Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Time heals all wounds”? If you have then you very well might know that wounds heal, but scars, they remain the same. I lost the ability to walk for a brief time, three days to be exact, but for that brief time I had plenty of questions to ask myself:
Is there a god? If so, what have I done to deserve this?
Will I ever get better?
And most importantly, who am I as a person?
The last question might sound odd, but in a sense, during the period where I lost mobility I had plenty of time to think, and I came to the conclusion that I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Being thirteen years old at the time, when I lost the ability to walk, I don’t think there were many other kids that had this identity crisis. I was put in an atypical circumstance.
Apparently I had a very rare condition for my age, in which I had a herniated disk in my back that was cutting off my nerves. Still, I struggled to fight against it only to be “gifted” worse results than when I had started.
The defining moment was when I tried to walk down the school hallway to the elevator. There was no one around at the moment. The hallway was empty. No one was around, save the few classrooms I passed by. Even if people would have been around me when I made my daring walk, I doubt anything would have been done, other than giving me their usual look of curiosity as to why I was walking the way I was, or a look of shame that I was even trying. In their opinion, I’d be much better off if I just gave up. At times, my own thoughts resonated with that opinion, more than they ever should have.
My thoughts started to resonate with that feeling one day when I had to walk outside the school up a large hill in the fashion of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and most kids ignored me except the few that stole a glance of disgust, or wonder as to why I even bothered to get up in the morning.
However, during that walk down the hall, I couldn’t stand upright and had to grip the wall for balance. I then steadily stepped my way down the hallway while breaking into a torrential sweat from the burning sensation going up my legs and into my back. It felt like what I imagine being lit on fire would feel like… not pleasurable to say the least. After somehow getting to the elevator, I managed to get down one floor only to have to do the exact same thing to get to the lunchroom. At this point, I had gotten into the rhythm of walk, shutter, and grunt in pain. It was as if it were wash, rinse, and repeat. Throughout this, I was determined to prove to everyone that I could do it. After all, if there’s one thing I can’t stand more than my legs feeling like they’re on fire, it’s being told I can’t do something. I was not about to be told I couldn’t walk by anyone other than myself.
However, my efforts to prove everyone wrong were cut short by the school nurse. I was quickly forced into a wheelchair and hauled off to her office. Thus, my cycle of pain was cut short before I even walked down the hall to the lunch room. Oddly enough though I don’t regret forcing myself to go down that hallway. I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. As much pain as I went through it was worth it, because despite what everyone said, I walked down that hall. This led me to the first thing I discovered about myself. I’m determined when there is no other choice for me. This is when I truly understood that anyone ever called brave isn’t truly brave, they were just presented an opportunity where saying no was a much worse fate than saying yes.
After the hallway incident I was basically told I couldn’t go to school. My only escape, until I saw a doctor about my worsening condition. I was basically left to rest at home and stare at the same four walls I had stared at for the four months prior to that day. Boredom had set in long ago. At this point, I was deciding whether I considered the walls more of a paste white color or ivory white color. Either way, it didn’t matter, but it was at least something to distract my mind with. The most interesting part of my life was going to school because at least there was an aura of spontaneity to my life. I had never really been one to enjoy school, but going in to get assignments every day gave me something to do rather than contemplate what shade of white the walls were. In the two days I awaited my doctor’s appointment I was rewarded with more time to stare at the ceiling and speculate the aforementioned questions. As introverted as I was, I had few friends before the incident. After the incident, the line between friend and acquaintance seemed that much more blurred. I couldn’t connect with my friends at all. Even if I had friends it didn’t matter, because I never got to see them.
That was when the sudden realization that I needed to be more of an extrovert came to me. To use the terms introvert or extrovert often misconstrues people to think that you’re either one or the other, when in fact, you contain aspects of both. To be a pure introvert, one would have to be completely fine with no human contact, and I’ve never met a single person like that in my entire life. I contained aspects of both. I valued my alone time to recharge myself and do the things I like to do. At the same time though, doing the same things I like to do gets old. That is when I value having friends, because they bring new perspectives and expose me to a whole new world of ideas, that I otherwise would have remained oblivious too. In this understanding of that dichotomy, I am very much an extrovert.
No person is a pure introvert or extrovert because either extreme would be unhealthy and drive even the most stable person mad. I was an introvert to the point of almost living under a rock. However, I was dissatisfied with my current state of being. I had reached the point of introvert that made me feel coldness, not unlike the depth of winter. Life felt like one long hibernation of just waiting to wake up and somehow magically become the person I wanted to be. Sadly, as I discovered, I was no bear waiting to wake up from a long slumber. I had to orchestrate my own awakening. Winter was over. To this day I will talk to anyone about anything. If you want to talk about your makeup then unfortunately, I’m there. If you want to talk about religion then I’m there, however, hesitantly. If you want to talk about Hockey, I have never watched a game in my life, but I’ll try to stumble through the conversation. Being an extrovert was exhausting but a necessary part of the warmth I wanted to feel. Meanwhile, being an introvert comes natural to me, which is why I still cling to it from time to time. Yet, every time I start to return to my hermit-like ways, I try to break out of my shell and go right back to engaging people by talking about whatever topic they enjoy talking about. Years later, I would come to realize how inauthentic this approach was.
It was a Friday in late October, and it might as well have been Friday the 13th for me at that time. This day was when I was finally going to go see the doctor to discover what had caused my condition to worsen. My father pulled up to the hospital door. He told me to get out and wait on the bench out front for him, while he parked the car. Suddenly, I felt like I was five again and needed to wait for my parents for further instruction. Why not tell me not to talk to strangers as well? I understood his reasoning, but this sudden regression of treatment as far as maturity goes seemed insulting, no matter the reasoning. My father finally came to the front door after I had inspected everything from the number of cracks in the sidewalk to the overcast sky. That skyline somehow seemed familiar and vaguely comforting to my frame of mind at the time. My father finally arrived from parking the car only to tell me to wait while he went to fetch me a dreaded wheelchair. I would have rather crawled like a child, or done the worm, or even moonwalked to the doctor’s office, but sadly this is what was the most acceptable form of transportation. After plopping down in the wheelchair, I was escorted to the doctor’s office in yet another elevator, which was something I was quite familiar with at this point. If I never have to use another elevator again, I’m alright with that, I’d rather take the stairs any day of the week.
I get to the office only to have them ask me to walk down the hallway to demonstrate the issue. Internally I’m screaming, “I can tell you the issue - I can’t walk.” To my dismay, I still had to walk in front of the doctor. I started struggling in my normal, or in this case abnormal, baby step manner. I realized that unlike prior times, my head seemed to be unwillingly cocked to a forty-five-degree angle. I found it strange, but I attributed it to helping me balance. I was then told I had to wait and get an M.R.I. which, for those who do not know, is basically a gigantic tube that they put you in for about thirty minutes usually. While in the tube, you have to remain still the entire time. However, I was way past getting half hour sessions with the machine, I was in the big leagues now, and this one was going to be three hours long. One thing I learned quickly about the machine, is after an hour, it overheats and suddenly turns into a gigantic oven. I was basically in the position of Hansel and Gretel at this point, only I didn’t get any candy first. Eventually, I was pulled out of the machine, after three hours. Then I was made to wait an additional two hours for the results to be processed before I could leave.
I never leave the hospital that day. Instead, I get the grim, but not surprising news, of finding out a disk ruptured. Essentially, the reason my nerves now felt like they were on fire was because rather than being only partially cut off, they were almost entirely cut off from the rest of my body. Which explains why my head was cocked at a forty-five-degree angle, it was to offset the severe balance problem of my brain not being able to communicate with my leg. So, surgery was inevitable, however, you’d think I’d be afraid at this point. The thing is, I wasn’t. At no point did them putting me under, or performing surgery around my spine even phase me. It just seemed like a necessary thing at this point. It was do or die for me.
I couldn’t picture the world for me without walking. This is not to say I wouldn’t have found happiness eventually, but not in the foreseeable future. This was something I would have never wished upon even my worst enemy, it was a horrid experience. This led me to discover the third and final thing about myself: that I desperately want to help people so when they go through rough times they aren’t alone, like I was. I felt isolated from society, and there was a deep loneliness that seemed like it would never be filled by anyone.
Out of this experience, I rose like a phoenix. These discoveries helped me become who I am today. I wouldn’t take back the experience for a second, if it weren’t for what happened I would be radically different and might have never decided to pursue my passion to write. Every experience is worth having, even if you don’t think you get something out of it. Even if it doesn’t have an immediate impact it will affect you someway, somehow, later on. After the surgery I regained my ability to walk, and though I do have small relapses from time to time. When I push myself too hard physically I get a backache, and then have to take a rest for a few days, but that’s a necessary scar to bear. The wound never truly healed. It scared over, but the scar remains as a souvenir, a reminder of why I cannot ever turn back, and why I have to continue to do all the things I enjoy in life. I was given a chance to evaluate my life, and make it mean something. If I’m going to squander it by letting life pass me by, then I will not have only failed myself, but all the people who put in the time and work to make me better. I can forgive failing myself, but failing others is something I cannot allow to happen. It’s simply unacceptable and disrespectful to them.
The way I see my life is in three parts: pre-adolescence where I was extremely ignorant, but extraordinarily happy, or at least I had the sense that I was. I was blind to the world and how it worked, and in a sense everyone is blind to that which they cannot know, but I was blind to a lot of things, including myself. I never noticed how I had depression and anxiety until after I endured the second part of my life. The first part for lack of a better term, I’d call ignorance. The second part was the incident where I felt detached from myself, people in general, and the world around me. It was the hardest part of my life because nothing made much sense, every question had another question behind it and each answer had three more questions behind that. During that time, I wasn’t sure if questions needed to be answered because they seemed more bothersome than another unanswered question. For that reason, the second part is called detachment. The third part I consider to be the best, even though it isn’t always happy. At least I know the reason why I am not happy, and can address it. I’m no longer blind to the world, maybe deaf or mute, but no longer blind to it. The third part doesn’t even have a name, because it’s still happening, but if I had to name it something, I’d call it acceptance.
Sean recently graduated from Duquesne University with a major in Psychology and Multiplatform Journalism. “With Psychology I focused on why people do what they do and with Journalism I focused on how they communicate that. The intersection of my studies was people. While I am interested in video games, films, music and many other forms of art, for me, nothing beats an authentic story grounded in the human experience.”
For more information about Sean, visit: www.seanachaidh.me
Cover Photo: Danny Quirk