10 year anniversary

So here i sit. Today 10 years ago, is the day my life was drastically changed. For a year after the accident I was barely able to do much of anything. My left eye had no control and would only look to my nose. That with the inability to actually blink caused me to have to keep the eye patched. One day after going to Syr. to a plastic surgeon to address the lid not working i was given the option to put a small amount of gold into the top lid which would cause it to close naturally with gravity and i would have to learn how to actually keep it open. That was all great until that money grubbing bastard denied any procedure because the workers comp case had been put under review. So I came back home, so disgusted that I spent an entire week doing nothing but sitting here concentrating and trying to make the lid work, sometime during the 2nd week of this it worked and I was able to open and close my eye naturally. This left only the “lazy” eyeball which got addressed by a fantastic dr at Guthrie in Waverly N.Y. The rest of my face on the left side no longer functioned as well because of nerve damage much like what happens to people with Bell ’s palsy. To the average person looking at me, there really does not appear to be anything wrong. To me on the other hand, it is a drastic change to the way I look and perceive myself. After the eye was addressed I still had to battle vertigo for the next 2 or 3 years. Any time I would go near something as simple as a flight of stairs I would get dizzy and have to hold on to something to keep my balance. This issue continued and still does to some extent even just to look at someone climbing a tower or sky diving on TV. Once all of the surgeries were completed and I had been deemed recovered, I went back to work in the same business I had been in before the day I fell. I was a Cable Tech sub-contractor for companies like Time Warner. It seemed only right to get back on the horse that kicked the hell out of me and changed everything. I worked in that industry for over a year until the bottom fell out of it and it became hard to make a decent living. This is when things really started to get interesting, because no one told me that there would be long term effects of the Traumatic Brain injury that nearly killed me that day. My wife was told when she got to the hospital that day, 3 hours away from our home that I had a 5% chance to survive. That opinion didn’t have anything to do with the level of an actual recovery. Just the chance I would live. It would be nearly 2 weeks before I came out of coma and be able to have things tested to see if they would work again. My neck was fractured, my skull was fractured as well and I had to have a Decompression Craniotomy to alleviate the swelling taking place inside the fractured skull. They cut my scalp from temple to temple and peeled my face down. They then drilled several holes into my skull and then, connected the holes with a saw. This left the piece to move on its own so the swelling was not put under pressure, which was sure to kill me or leave me in a vegetative state. That surgery saved my life albeit drastically changed forever. During the next 4 weeks I broke my wrist while in the hospital, I also contracted aspiration pneumonia. Because I was given plain water when I was only allowed to drink a liquid thick like honey for several weeks because of the tube that had been down my throat for too long.
Once I was awake and could move I was keep in a room with round the clock supervision. I was not allowed to get up, I had to wear a neck brace, I was basically kept sedated to the point of not caring about anything until it was time for yet another shot to keep me even further sedated. I spent the entire month of Feb of 2008 in this state. This “care” I was given turned out to be very bad for the guy who had changed his life some 13 or 14 years prior by making a conscious decision to stop doing all drugs as well as alcohol. Feeding me those drugs turned off everything around me to the point I would ignore people who were there visiting me because it was time for another shot. I somehow became aware of how I was acting and told the nurse I would no longer be taking any more shots of the meds they were giving me. It was pretty amazing how my recovery advanced from that point further. That was of course after a serious argument when they kept telling me Hey you cannot just quit taking this medication. I would sit there and tell them I could if I chose to. After a series of these fights they gave up. At 34 years old I was faced with the fact that, if I did not make that choice I would certainly be dead and dead very soon because of the way I was living. That life change was my choice and welcomed. This life change had not been by choice and was very unwelcomed. It has changed the entire way I look at everything in life. Things which were important like paying bills and working, or for a better term, chasing the American dream were no longer a priority. I have found through stories of others who faced life threatening accidents and recovery the same type of change. Things that are simpler are more important now. The pictures that follow are of me while in a coma. It should be noted that at the time of the fall I was 200 to 220 lbs. 47 years old, I worked every day from the time I got sober in 1994. I had a good life; I made good money and did it honestly. Six weeks later when I was released from Albany Medical center I weighed 160 lbs. soaking wet and I was emaciated from the terrible food served to me while there. That is the end of th rant for this year. I forgot about it for a couple of years but it came back this year and it is bothering me more than ever before. I don’t know why, it really doesn’t matter. It is what it is. The day my life was changed for the worse, through no fault or cause of my own. I should also state that the effects of the TBI are becoming more and more difficult.