Stories from the road

The power in knowing

David Harkins

Her favorite doll was Red Fraggle. Red received extra special care after surgery, too. Note the bandages.

I don’t share this story often. But, it has been on my mind lately and a message exchange with a friend this evening made me think it’s time to share it in writing. This is the streamlined version.

In the fall of 1991, my 18-month-old daughter began to tilt her head a little to one side after a long car trip. At first it looked like muscle stiffness from the ride, but a few weeks later she started having difficulty maintaining her balance and then she stopped walking.

Her regular pediatrician didn’t seem too concerned, but her mother and I knew something was wrong. Our next stop was an orthopedic surgeon and although he didn’t find any muscular or skeletal abnormalities, he agreed that something was going on. He recommended a second opinion from different pediatrician, one whom within moments of seeing her saw pressure within her eyes and admitted her to the hospital for an MRI.

A neurologist confirmed our fear a few hours later—a golf-ball-sized tumor in the right ventricle of her brain. A neurosurgeon arrived the next morning to prepare us for surgery and to talk about options for ongoing treatments. In his words, “I have not ever removed a tumor this size, from this part of the brain that was not malignant.”

The surgery took nearly eight hours.

When the surgeon came into the recovery room, we were relieved to learn the tumor was benign—a Choroid Plexus Papilloma—and he had reduced it to the size of pea, successfully cut-off its blood supply in hopes of killing it completely over time.

Five days later, she came home from the hospital. After three days at home, a high-fever took us back to the hospital late one night.

After hours in the emergency room and multiple tests, a young intern successfully diagnosed her with meningitis. She was immediately transported to the Children’s Hospital across town where intensivists and infectious disease specialists converged on her room. We waited for several hours in the waiting room before the doctors shared, her meningitis was caused by the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium, and they had never successfully treated an adult with this strain of bacteria, let alone a child.

Six weeks in an intensive care unit with many touch-and-go-moments, a shunt, hours of physical therapy, and another shunt two months later, finally put her on the road to recovery. There were difficult times as she grew up but today at 22, she’s a college student and learning to drive. She’s kind-hearted, determined, and a truly amazing young woman who strives to overcome the challenges life sets before her every day with a smile. She knows her limitations, but more importantly, she knows what she’s capable of achieving.

Life is not always easy.

Still, knowing and understanding our own personal limitations today should not limit who we become tomorrow. Instead, armed with this knowledge we should consider ourselves empowered to find new ways to achieve success and happiness in our lives. Best of all, we understand that we should not define ourselves, or be defined by others, on assumptions of what we cannot do; we do it anyway, just differently than everyone else.

Knowing such things about ourselves emboldens us and allows us to live, love, and pursue happiness on our own terms.

I can’t think of any better way to live. Can you?

____

Her favorite doll at the time was Red Fraggle from Fraggle Rock. The picture above shows Red in the hospital bed. Red received extra special care after surgery, too. Note the bandages on her head and hand.

Life observations

Star light, star bright

David Harkins

It’s cold in the mountains tonight. I have a fire burning in the stove to take the chill off the room. I glanced out the window and suddenly felt compelled to step onto the deck to look at the sky. The night is clear, and the stars seem to float in layers, each star pulsing brightly against a pitch-blackness of the sky. I have not seen the sky as dark, or the stars as bright in years. There’s a three-dimensional feeling to it, and I almost believe that I can take a few steps forward, pluck one from the sky, and stuff it in my pocket before anyone notices it’s gone.

It makes me smile just to think such childlike things, and I’m glad to know a little boy still breathes inside this aging body.

Somewhere along my life journey, though, I took these stars for granted.

The night lights of even the smallest cities in which I have lived for much of the last thirty-years have turned the deep black sky to gray, creating such a dense fog of light pollution that all but obliterated the stars from my view. The sky that I—most of us, I think—have come to accept looks more like a piece of gray construction paper with mini Christmas lights—some with burnt-out bulbs—poking through in random places. It makes for a dull and one-dimensional view of what lies ahead, or beyond.

We build monuments to achievements we believe to be so grand we light them both day and night. And yet we have become so afraid of the dark, or what may occur in the dark; we choose to light every building from dusk-to-dawn in unsuccessful attempts to eliminate theft or injury. I don’t think these artificial lights serve many purposes. All we seem to achieve with this showmanship is a bit of visual misdirection that does nothing more than blind us from the real beauty we should be drawn to when the darkness falls each day.

I wonder why we do such things to ourselves.

The stars hold hope, I believe. These beautiful layers of bright lights twinkling against the darkness of the night gave promise to the journeys of millions of men and women over thousands of years. It’s humbling to look at these same stars, thinking about how many have relied upon them to light their way, and how many of us look to them still for guidance. All too often I think we miss the depth of opportunities along the path these stars light for us because we’re surrounded by the pollution of our vanity.

Yes, it has been a long time since I’ve seen these stars with such clarity and depth. I’ve missed their beauty. While I know they were there all along, I lacked the motivation, or maybe desire, to look for them. Until tonight.

It seems all I needed on this cold night was the courage to step outside a fog of my own creation, and just look up.

What do you need to do, to see the stars again? Will you do it?

Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight;
I wish I may; I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.

—–

Photo Credit::Day 277 by brianazimmers
It got me to thinkin', Life observations

You are not now, who you will become

David Harkins

Not long ago I sat in the bleachers looking down on a class of eighth-grade students taking their seats for a middle school graduation. They walked into the room in alphabetical order, but it was easy to spot the jocks, the geeks, the nerds, the goths, the cheerleaders, the mean girls, and the band kids not by what they wore, but by the way they carried themselves. As they took their seats, I wondered what they were thinking about as they marked this milestone in their life.

Were they thinking about going to high school? I was certain most were. Many of them probably had chosen a college, selected a career, and planned the size of their future family. I imagined when they thought of themselves as adults they simply saw an adult-version of who they were on this day. This self-awareness, if they possessed it at that time, had a far greater potential to be life limiting than they surely realized.

I’m sure they didn’t understand that each of us should constantly be growing.

I can’t imagine now that any of them really knew how every-day living would shape them far beyond the vision they had of themselves that day, or how each person they would encounter in their lives—from that day forward—would help them become, or in some cases make them, different people.

We do become much different people as we grow older and not just in the physical sense. Our hopes change, and so do our dreams. Our goals, achievements, memories, and feelings each have a different meaning than they did when were younger. I like to think we get a few gifts, too, as we add the years: We all gain experience, many of us gain wisdom, and some us are fortunate enough to earn a little more respect, if not by our accomplishments, most certainly by what we have endured.

I hope that we’ve found a wider sense of our own purpose, too.

Somewhere along the way, if we have listened closely to life’s teachings, we should have also learned that while our lives are ours to live as we see fit, we are most fulfilled when we share our lives with each other. I have always believed that some people come into our lives to teach us, while others come to learn from us. We will encounter very few people who can balance the teaching-learning scale and we we do find them, we should make sure we never let them leave. Of course, we have to balance their scales, too.

Here’s a secret I’ve learned: We are defined not by the events of our lives, but by the people whom we have known.

The people we meet, the people we choose to invite into our lives, the people we love, and the people we lose; all of them make us who we are and they never stop coming or going as long as we’re breathing. No matter how old we are at this very moment, we are not now, who we will become, because of this never-ending stream of people who touch us in ways that we often never realize in the present.

It’s the people in our lives who fuel our perpetual state of becoming.

My grandfather always told me, “Time flies; the older you get, the faster it goes.” We all know that time moves at a constant speed throughout life, so it is not that the seconds click by faster. Instead, I think what he meant was that as we get older we begin to understand how precious the moments of life are because age grants us a higher sense of appreciation and purpose for the gift of our own lives, and for the lives of others we have come to know.

No, you are not now, who you will become. Neither is anyone else.

What are you going to do about it?

Remember, time flies.

_____

Photo Credit: The Old Grandfather Clock by sburke2478