My Story
I would like to use this space to explain my personal connection to the topic of this web document. I have learned a great deal from the texts we have convered in class, yet the most interesting relates directly to the events of my senior year in high school. The following passage will describe an event that has become the single greatest determining factor in who I have become and subsequently explains why I find this assignment so interesting. To preempt this story I would like to say that I have learned that sometimes the only thing you can depend on is the unwritten rule of nature that; nothing stays the same. Death is tragic, change is ineveitable, and maintaining a stable perspective is important. Therefore, I wish to share a story that parallels the novels we have read all semester, after all, it is only by sharing and talking about the crazy stuff that happens in life that we will be able to look through another's eyes and expand our perspective.
The Summer before my senior year was the calm before the storm. In August we left for the annual Virginia Beach family vacation, without a doubt some of the best memories I have to recall from this life. That week seemed exceptionally wonderful we would take long walks on the beach as a family. I talked them into stopping in Washington on the way home to get a glance of Georgetown, we took the tour and I snapped a picture of the three of them sitting on a bench in front of White Gravenor. Little did I know that it would be the last time Mom saw me at Georgetown. We returned and the next day Mom was admitted to the hospital for a migraine headache. On Tuesday night, August 18th, I got my senior picture taken and returned to the Hospital to see Mom. Within an hour she had a seizure for no apparent reason. It scared Laura so I took her to her grandparents, Dad stayed with Mom and I returned home. At seven o' clock Dad called and said that they were moving her to ICU, her heart rate was irregular and constantly increasing. I told him I would talk to him later on my lunch break at one o' clock. The events of that day follow so that by two o' clock in the afternoon I was told that my mother had obtained a virus that had attacked her heart and shut down the left side of the heart. She had a fifteen percent chance of ever leaving the hospital and there was only one procedure that could save her life. The last time that I looked at the monitors as they wheeled her to surgery her heart rate was 180 beats per minute, her blood pressure was 55/30 and her temperature was 104.5. I was in shock, it was like everything in my life had unraveled in twelve hours. Mom was on full life support for five days in the hope that by relieving the stress on the heart that it may regain strength. Incredibly it did just that and Mom became the second person since 1972 to survive the procedure, she was written up in every journal and newspaper across the country and after a forty five day hospital stay she left to begin the physical therapy needed to restore life to her body after laying dormant, for nearly two months. By Thanksgiving it looked as though somehow life was going to be normal again. Yet the week after Christmas Mom returned to the hospital, something was wrong, I didn't know what, no one knew, but it was evident that she was getting sicker by the hour. Three days later, January 19th, 1995, Mom died of systematic failure of the kidneys, liver, GI tract and lungs. Every system in her body simply shut down, it was her time. Officially, it was the delayed trauma on the body from the ordeal with the heart. My senior year my mother died at age 39 leaving a black hole in the core of my life. From August 19th, the day of her first surgery my life was never the same, never again so simple, never exactly complete.