going to share something with you i haven 't talked about probably in more than ten years so bear with me as i take you through this journey when i was twenty two years old i came home from work put a leash on my dog and went for my usual run
i had no idea that at that moment my life was going to change forever while i was preparing my dog for the run a man was finishing drinking at a bar picked up his car keys got into a car
headed south or wherever he was
i was running across the street and the only thing that i actually remember is feeling like a grenade went off in my head and i remember putting my hands on the ground and feeling my life 's blood emptying out of my neck and my mouth
what had happened is he ran a red light and hit me and my dog she ended up underneath the car i flew out in front of the car and then he ran over my legs my left leg got caught up in the wheel well spun it around
the bumper of the car hit my throat slicing it open i ended up with blunt chest trauma
your aorta comes up behind your heart it 's your major artery and it was severed so my blood was gurgling out of my mouth
i had no idea what was going on but strangers intervened
kept my heart moving beating
i say moving because it was quivering and they were trying to put a beat back into it
somebody was smart and put a bic pen in my neck to open up my airway so that i could get some air in there and my lung collapsed so somebody cut me open and put a pin in there as well to stop
eighteen months later i woke up i was blind i couldn 't speak and i couldn 't walk i was sixty four lbs
i
i had so many surgeries to put my neck back together to repair my heart a few times some things worked some things didn 't i had lots of titanium put in me cadaver bones to try to get my feet moving the right way
and i ended up with a plastic nose porcelain teeth and all kinds of other things but eventually i started to look human again
but
it 's hard sometimes to talk about these things so bear with me i had more than fifty surgeries but who 's counting so eventually the hospital decided it was time for me to go they needed to open up space for somebody else that they thought could
so they basically put a map up on the wall threw a dart and it landed at a senior home here in colorado
and i know all of you are scratching your head a senior citizens home what in the world are you going to do there but if you think about all of the skills and talent that are in this room right now
they eventually started matching their talents and skills to all of my needs
but one of the first things they needed to do was assess what i needed right away i needed to figure out how to eat like a normal human being since i 'd been eating through a tube in my chest and through my veins so i had to go through trying to eat again and they went through that process
and then they had to figure out well she needs furniture she is sleeping in the corner of this apartment so they went to their storage lockers and all gathered their extra furniture gave me pots and pans blankets
everything
and then the next thing that i needed was a makeover so out went the green scrubs and in came the polyester and floral prints
you 're a kid you take things for granted you learn things unconsciously
but the men had a better idea they were going to make it fun for me so they were teaching me cuss word scrabble at night
so i 'm going to just leave it to your imagination as to what my first words were
when sally finally got my confidence built
the redundancy was actually good for me so we 'll just keep moving on
one of the pivotal times for me was actuallylearning to cross a street again as a blind person so close your eyes now imagine you have to cross a street you don 't know how far that street is
and you don 't know if you 're going straight and you hear cars whizzing back and forth
and you had a horrible accident that landed you in this situation so there were two obstacles i had to get through
one was post traumatic stressdisorder and every time i approached the corner or the curb i would panic and the second one was actuallytrying to figure out how to cross that street
so one of the seniors just came up to me and she pushed me up to the corner and she said when you think it 's time to go just stick the cane out there if it 's hit don 't cross the street
but by the third cane that went whizzing across the road
so that i could go to the braille institute and actually gain the skills to be a blind person and also to go get a guide dog who transformed my life and i was able to return to college because of the senior citizens who invested in me and also the guide dog and skill set i had gained
ten years later i gained my sight back not magically i opted in for three surgeries and one of them was experimental it was actually robotic surgery they removed a hematoma from behind my eye
the biggest change for me was that the world moved forward
how you feel about things and how things sound and how things smell
so one day i was in my room and i saw this thing sitting in my room and i thought it was a monster so i was walking around it and i go i 'm just going to touch it and i touched it and i went oh my god
everything is different when you 're a sighted person because you take that for granted but when you 're blind you have the tactile memory for things the biggest change for me was looking down at my hands and seeing that i 'd lost ten years of my life
i thought that time had stood still for some reason and moved on for family and friends but when i looked down i realized that time marched on for me too and that i needed to get caught up so i got going on it
we didn 't have words like crowd sourcing and radical collaboration when i had my accident but the concept held true people working with people to rebuild me people working with people to re educate me
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