So this is kind of a relationship thread really but it starts a long way before that and I really want to get it all off of my chest, and I feel that perhaps doing this on a fairly anonymous forum is the best way. People I know read this but its only people who already know my situation, so it’s not going to be any shock to them what I say, and they have already given me as much advice as can be said! Bare with it, its long but I am sure it has some interesting parts, that some how everyone can relate to, and some things that people I talk to on here would be interested to know about. I would appreciate people reading about this as it is rather interesting and I would like some type of feedback ultimately to all of this.
I may as well start right at the beginning where this all really starts. November 2001 I was just a normal teenager, at the age of 16, I had the world ahead of me. I had just started a college course that I was doing amazing at, infact was straight from my lecturer’s mouth, the most promising student they had ever had. I have just had the most amazing summer of my life, in between school and college when the world is just starting to really open up for you. I had a great social life and some amazing friends! I had a job I loved doing, and I loved every aspect of my life. I was working as a maths tutor for a boy who was getting ready to do his entry exams to secondary school. I had improved his mathematics skills exponentially! I was also getting on with my family amazingly well and having an all round great time. My social life was booming and well let’s put it this way everything to me was idealistic! November 3rd 2001, I went to my friends’ fireworks party, they live about 4-5 miles away from where I was living at the time and I went with my friend Matt (Matteh on the forums). I had the most amazing time catching up with the friends I hadn’t seen for a while who I had last seen on our exam results day! We saw the world’s crappiest fire works but we didn’t care because life was good, everyone was happy and everyone was having a good time! I would love to say I have some great memories of that night, but you will understand why, when I say I don’t remember much after the fireworks, in a bit.
November 5th 2001, the actual evening of fireworks night, I actually had college that day, and during my programming class started to experience a bit of a headache. Nothing out of the unusual, just a bit of a migraine. I decided not to hang around long after college as I normally do talking to my friends, and cycled home. When I got home I told my mother I was going to do some coursework and go to bed. That is my last memory for the next two weeks, the rest I will have to fill in from peoples testaments. 7th November 2001 I wake up feeling better with no headache a bit disorientated, I look at the time it is 12.30 in the afternoon, it’s a Wednesday and I normally start college at 9am! Damn! How could I have let myself sleep through my first lecture, I love Wednesdays, start with double programming (may sound boring, but I loved my college classes). I throw some clothes on and go downstairs to question my Mum wondering if it is ACTUALLY Wednesday (I am so confused about everything, I cant even remember why I would have slept in, or not set my alarm, I cant remember even setting my alarm, I am not even entirely sure if it is Wednesday). I question the day, she replies its Wednesday, I ask why I am not in college and she tells me because I am Ill… Well fair enough I do feel a bit disorientated and dizzy. I walk out the room because I am so tired and decide to go back to bed since I can. I reach the stairs and my first foot hits it. Confused, I turn around and walk back into the front room where my mother is, my brother is there as well. ‘What day is it? Why aren’t I in college?’. My brother and mother both laughed at me, confused I just asked the questions again. They told me the same answers. This little pattern of reaching the stairs returning confused and asking the same questions repeated, until eventually I just went up to bed, upset, dazed and confused. Things got worse from there on, I would only be awake for about an hour a day, and would hardly make it out of bed, only for a toilet break or something to eat. I saw several doctors, none of whom knew what was going on. They all questioned whether I was on any drugs or anything, which I wasn’t, and my mother had to assure everyone I was not. I have always had a close relationship with my mother so she pretty much knew everything I did anyway. But obviously at my age it was hard for any doctor to believe that my mum knew everything about me. My Mum fought and struggled to get me the medical attention I needed as slowly each day I got worse, my memory lasting literally seconds, not being able to follow conversations. No-one took my condition seriously, the only possible illness I could have had would have killed me by now. The doctors refused to check for it anyway. Eventually after endless hours of complaining my mum managed to get me an appointment for an M.R.I. scan. The date is now the 20th November. A few of my closest friends come round to see me because they all know that after my appointment in the hospital I may not be coming home for a while. They all made me a get well soon package which I still have now. None of them had any money as they were 15 and didn’t really have any jobs so they all scraped together and made this package with things full of sentiment. For that time in my life and my age, it was, and still is, one of the most touching things. I don’t know how long they were there for, what we talked about, or if it even happened. I just have the package still and that is my only evidence of that evening happening. The next day I was taken into hospital and had my MRI scan. I don’t remember any of the waiting or anything but I have a vague recollection of being in this huge long noisy tube and having to keep perfectly still. My memories are then blank until I was walking out of the hospital with one of my family members to go home. Obviously had just been sent home, when a nurse came out in a very flustered state and asked me to come back in. I was immediately put in a ward and admitted. Because of my age and my condition I was stuck in a geriatrics ward, and I was in tears and scared for my life, I had no idea what was happening, I had no idea where I was. I saw an elderly man trying to escape the clutches of some heavy-set nurses, the whole time screaming for help. I broke down into tears and had no idea what to do with myself. I had been neglected for 15 days already with no idea what was happening. My life had already crumbled into pieces, this I was not aware of… I still thought it was November 5th, all the calendars and anyway of me finding out what the date was had been hidden. I had been in a state of disillusion, cut off from everything, stuck in my own world slightly disorientated but completely unaware of my own condition. I just assumed I was off college because I had headaches. It wasn’t unusual for me when I was tired to get migraines. I just assumed everything was fine. And now here I am in my own right mind I am not ill, ignorant to my own near-death situation, witnessing a horrific display of nursing. My Dad who was with me at the time saw my distress and immediately talked to whoever he could find in authority to get me moved into my own room. I was moved to an out of the way unit and carted in, in a wheel chair into a square room with one window and a bed. I was then put on a drip and the first of my thirty sets of treatment started. I spent my first night alone in the hospital with a drip on my arm and not being able to bend it. I was still so unaware of my situation or what was happening. My Dad stayed with me until he thought I was asleep, the truth is I was really nowhere near asleep when he left. He placed a letter on my bedside as he went out. It explained what was happening to me and what was going on with me. Most importantly it reassured me I was going to be alright. I had contracted what is called HSV Encephalitis, no-one really knows how you get it, but all that is known is how it can affect someone. Normally with in 48 hours if you are not diagnosed and treated you can say goodbye to your family. Something or someone was looking out for me I believe as I should really not be alive right now! I spent the next few days in Epsom General Hospital where there was **** up after **** up, and the negligence towards me was inadvertently continued. I was due to have a lumber puncture, which is the extraction of spinal fluid for testing. They decided that they would get a trainee nurse to perform this procedure on a boy who had no idea what was happening. The trainee nurse tried to anesthetise me but when I jolted in pain dropped the needle and from then on could not anesthetise me because the needle was now unsanitary. She then continued to perform this test on me with no anaesthetic, which basically involves putting a needle in between the bones in your spine and extracting fluid directly from the spinal chord. The result is a small amount of fluid which then can be used to determine very specifically what is wrong with someone. It is near impossible to quite describe the pain involved in someone probing a part of your body which deals in sending messages to the brain, especially with no anaesthetic. I guess the only way to possible describe it would be to explain all that was happening inside my body, I had a foreign object invading my spinal chord, and my body in an instinctive way to protect itself was sending messages straight to my brain. The message being sent was just PAIN. Nothing will come close to the pain I felt then, not even the headache I got when I first got ill. That itself is hard to explain. My brain swelled when I got encephalitis, it swelled to a point where its habitat was to small for it. In short my brain became too big for my head. That was pretty painful, I am glad my memories of the pain are so blurred now.
The shocking treatment in this hospital carried on until I was eventually transferred to a specialist brain injury hospital known as Atkinson Morley in Wimbledon. My treatment from there on improved and I was in a hospital with people who understood my condition. I was told once I got out of hospital the prognosis seemed as if I would be fit to go back to college in a few months. This prognosis proved to be very inaccurate. When my treatment was finished in the hospital I was free to go home. Life from here on was completely different. I was trapped in a world where I had no freedom and had to be permanently supervised in case I turned on the gas to cook something and forgot I turned it on, or ran a bath and forgot I was running it. If you remember my original description of my life in comparison to now you can then only begin to imagine how I felt. Christmas day was difficult to deal with, the confusion and the hustle and bustle of everything, everyone asking how I was; I could barely deal with any of it. I would start conversations with someone, and then two sentences into it not remember a word I had said. My memory was comparable to a goldfish. I would be given a list of five items and not remember the first three by the end of it. My memory simply was beyond anything you could understand unless you yourself have had to deal with it. Eventually my 17th birthday came around, I didn’t do much for that, other than spent a lot of it in my room crying depressed about what was happening to me. A week earlier in frustration of everything that was happening in my life I decided to try and run away from everything. I grabbed a couple of bits and jumped out of my window. As soon as my parents realised they called the police out. My whole situation wasn’t helping my home situation at all. My parents were on the edge of a divorce, it hadn’t been said yet but it was on the cards. My mum always short tempered due to worry from me, and my step dad having to work extra hours to now have to pay for my living expenses, which increased due to me being home all the time and eating more (a side effect of my illness). I was eventually picked up by either the police or my Dad at about 4 or 5 in the morning. I was then taken to a psychiatrist the next day who said there was not much they expect to be able to do for me. My depression was not due to any chemical imbalance and that anti-depressants should not be prescribed to a 17 year old who was suffering with such an illness as my self. They did however despite this, saw the way I was feeling, and saw the cuts all over my hands and arms from stupid attempts at cries of attention and thoughts of suicide; decide that anti-depressants may help in the short term. They also prescribed sleeping pills to make sure that I kept to a normal sleeping pattern. I had pretty much turned nocturnal, having spent all night on the internet in chat rooms trying to find someone who I could turn to, to help with how I felt. Suddenly things weren’t ‘as bad’ my sleeping pattern was sorted and I felt better. But my true feelings were hard to explain, I was happy in such a false sense, I talked about things in a different way, and my personality changed. The anti-depressants were not making me feel better just giving me a false sense of happiness. My depression went up and down, and one day I just stopped taking them with out telling anyone. I went down hill very quickly and was quickly sent to the psychiatrist again, and my psychologist sessions turned quickly into sessions of psychiatry as well. Everyone knows what an emo kid is, that was pretty much me, but I felt like I had a reason.
My prognosis turned from promising to not promising very quickly. I was due to go into rehabilitation to get me to change the way I lived and to deal with my illness. I didn’t want to change, I just wanted my memory back. I was told I would need to change my life style to be able to get back on track. I was 17, I did not want my freedom taken away by always carrying round a notebook and a diary. I didn’t want alarms continuously going off telling me what I was supposed to be doing, I just wanted to leave a completely normal life. Where everything is decided at the time, and there is no need to plan everything a week ahead. I didn’t want to schedule everything so I knew what I was doing at what hour exactly. I didn’t want have to get up at exactly the same time everyday, eat at the same time, read at the same time, watch TV at the same. I wanted to be going out with my friends, trying to get into a pub even though I shouldn’t be there, going to college and expanding my knowledge. My first visit to the potential neuro-rehabilitation centres involved me walking around a building full of people in wheelchairs with brain diseases that left them seriously handicapped, mentally and physically. Physically I was fine, a little fatter from my increased appetite but other than that I just needed help remembering things. After 3 or 4 months of avoiding the fact that this was my only way to get better I eventually bit the bullet and was admitted to a week of testing to see what was the best rehab for me, at the end of it I got the answer. Unfortunately this was another shocking blow for me. I had been hoping to restart college in September. The rehabilitation they had to offer me was a minimum 12 week course starting at the end of July, and would run through until the end of November. The only thing that had kept me going through all of this was the hope I would be able to return to college and be normal again. I spent the next week or so to myself in tears and it was something yet again no one would ever understand. I had lived through a very deadly illness, something most people would be happy about. However everything that made me happy was taken away.
Going back a bit, that January the Lord of the Rings films were released, I saw the first one seven times in total, and each time was like watching it new. I couldn’t follow the story line on the screen and had to rely on the fact I had read it long ago when I was younger to follow it all. These films became a bit of a big thing for me, with each year they were released I could almost measure my progress with how much I remember by the end of it. The second film was due out at the end of my bout of rehabilitation. I had the choice of doing the rehab or hoping for the best and returning to college. I decide I was going to take all the help I could get and then prove everyone what I was made of. All of these doctors were saying my case was so unique and no-one had ever seen someone survive with encephalitis for over a week let alone the 15 days I was experiencing it. It was time to make a point, I needed to take control of my own life. I started the rehab and quickly made some amazing friends, to who this day I regret I don’t keep in touch with, after rehab finished I kept in touch with them for a while, but for all of us, we were moving to a new stage in our life and wanted to leave our old life behind us. During my rehab I met some amazing people and was touched greatly by everyone I met. These people who I once viewed as retards I learnt to appreciate, they are truly amazing people and still to this day I believe more capable of achieving than anyone else I have ever met. My luck was turning and so was my attitude, it was more of **** you attitude, my turn to take back my life. I won a holiday through our local rotary group (generally a bunch of rich business men who want to give something back to the community). I was to go sailing on a tall ship for a week around the Algarve on one of the only ships in the world designed to be manned by a disabled crew. The Jubilee Sailing Trust ship the Lord Nelson was my home for one week, and was a life changing experience. That again proved to me that the word disability is misleading, because someone is disabled in one area does not make them retarded with everything, it only strengthens the person they are in other areas.
September that year came round very quickly, and soon I realised that I would not be fit for college that year. I had another down period full of tears and I decided to take some anti-depressants again, which I never really told anyone about. I did get some positive news that October though. The college I was going to decided they wanted to start the course I was originally on every term, so one course would start September, then January, then April. This was an amazing opportunity for me and suddenly the last few weeks of my rehab was heavily focussed on me returning to college in January. I was so unprepared for how much of a struggle it was going to be. My college were great and bought me a laptop and Dictaphone.
<cont>
I may as well start right at the beginning where this all really starts. November 2001 I was just a normal teenager, at the age of 16, I had the world ahead of me. I had just started a college course that I was doing amazing at, infact was straight from my lecturer’s mouth, the most promising student they had ever had. I have just had the most amazing summer of my life, in between school and college when the world is just starting to really open up for you. I had a great social life and some amazing friends! I had a job I loved doing, and I loved every aspect of my life. I was working as a maths tutor for a boy who was getting ready to do his entry exams to secondary school. I had improved his mathematics skills exponentially! I was also getting on with my family amazingly well and having an all round great time. My social life was booming and well let’s put it this way everything to me was idealistic! November 3rd 2001, I went to my friends’ fireworks party, they live about 4-5 miles away from where I was living at the time and I went with my friend Matt (Matteh on the forums). I had the most amazing time catching up with the friends I hadn’t seen for a while who I had last seen on our exam results day! We saw the world’s crappiest fire works but we didn’t care because life was good, everyone was happy and everyone was having a good time! I would love to say I have some great memories of that night, but you will understand why, when I say I don’t remember much after the fireworks, in a bit.
November 5th 2001, the actual evening of fireworks night, I actually had college that day, and during my programming class started to experience a bit of a headache. Nothing out of the unusual, just a bit of a migraine. I decided not to hang around long after college as I normally do talking to my friends, and cycled home. When I got home I told my mother I was going to do some coursework and go to bed. That is my last memory for the next two weeks, the rest I will have to fill in from peoples testaments. 7th November 2001 I wake up feeling better with no headache a bit disorientated, I look at the time it is 12.30 in the afternoon, it’s a Wednesday and I normally start college at 9am! Damn! How could I have let myself sleep through my first lecture, I love Wednesdays, start with double programming (may sound boring, but I loved my college classes). I throw some clothes on and go downstairs to question my Mum wondering if it is ACTUALLY Wednesday (I am so confused about everything, I cant even remember why I would have slept in, or not set my alarm, I cant remember even setting my alarm, I am not even entirely sure if it is Wednesday). I question the day, she replies its Wednesday, I ask why I am not in college and she tells me because I am Ill… Well fair enough I do feel a bit disorientated and dizzy. I walk out the room because I am so tired and decide to go back to bed since I can. I reach the stairs and my first foot hits it. Confused, I turn around and walk back into the front room where my mother is, my brother is there as well. ‘What day is it? Why aren’t I in college?’. My brother and mother both laughed at me, confused I just asked the questions again. They told me the same answers. This little pattern of reaching the stairs returning confused and asking the same questions repeated, until eventually I just went up to bed, upset, dazed and confused. Things got worse from there on, I would only be awake for about an hour a day, and would hardly make it out of bed, only for a toilet break or something to eat. I saw several doctors, none of whom knew what was going on. They all questioned whether I was on any drugs or anything, which I wasn’t, and my mother had to assure everyone I was not. I have always had a close relationship with my mother so she pretty much knew everything I did anyway. But obviously at my age it was hard for any doctor to believe that my mum knew everything about me. My Mum fought and struggled to get me the medical attention I needed as slowly each day I got worse, my memory lasting literally seconds, not being able to follow conversations. No-one took my condition seriously, the only possible illness I could have had would have killed me by now. The doctors refused to check for it anyway. Eventually after endless hours of complaining my mum managed to get me an appointment for an M.R.I. scan. The date is now the 20th November. A few of my closest friends come round to see me because they all know that after my appointment in the hospital I may not be coming home for a while. They all made me a get well soon package which I still have now. None of them had any money as they were 15 and didn’t really have any jobs so they all scraped together and made this package with things full of sentiment. For that time in my life and my age, it was, and still is, one of the most touching things. I don’t know how long they were there for, what we talked about, or if it even happened. I just have the package still and that is my only evidence of that evening happening. The next day I was taken into hospital and had my MRI scan. I don’t remember any of the waiting or anything but I have a vague recollection of being in this huge long noisy tube and having to keep perfectly still. My memories are then blank until I was walking out of the hospital with one of my family members to go home. Obviously had just been sent home, when a nurse came out in a very flustered state and asked me to come back in. I was immediately put in a ward and admitted. Because of my age and my condition I was stuck in a geriatrics ward, and I was in tears and scared for my life, I had no idea what was happening, I had no idea where I was. I saw an elderly man trying to escape the clutches of some heavy-set nurses, the whole time screaming for help. I broke down into tears and had no idea what to do with myself. I had been neglected for 15 days already with no idea what was happening. My life had already crumbled into pieces, this I was not aware of… I still thought it was November 5th, all the calendars and anyway of me finding out what the date was had been hidden. I had been in a state of disillusion, cut off from everything, stuck in my own world slightly disorientated but completely unaware of my own condition. I just assumed I was off college because I had headaches. It wasn’t unusual for me when I was tired to get migraines. I just assumed everything was fine. And now here I am in my own right mind I am not ill, ignorant to my own near-death situation, witnessing a horrific display of nursing. My Dad who was with me at the time saw my distress and immediately talked to whoever he could find in authority to get me moved into my own room. I was moved to an out of the way unit and carted in, in a wheel chair into a square room with one window and a bed. I was then put on a drip and the first of my thirty sets of treatment started. I spent my first night alone in the hospital with a drip on my arm and not being able to bend it. I was still so unaware of my situation or what was happening. My Dad stayed with me until he thought I was asleep, the truth is I was really nowhere near asleep when he left. He placed a letter on my bedside as he went out. It explained what was happening to me and what was going on with me. Most importantly it reassured me I was going to be alright. I had contracted what is called HSV Encephalitis, no-one really knows how you get it, but all that is known is how it can affect someone. Normally with in 48 hours if you are not diagnosed and treated you can say goodbye to your family. Something or someone was looking out for me I believe as I should really not be alive right now! I spent the next few days in Epsom General Hospital where there was **** up after **** up, and the negligence towards me was inadvertently continued. I was due to have a lumber puncture, which is the extraction of spinal fluid for testing. They decided that they would get a trainee nurse to perform this procedure on a boy who had no idea what was happening. The trainee nurse tried to anesthetise me but when I jolted in pain dropped the needle and from then on could not anesthetise me because the needle was now unsanitary. She then continued to perform this test on me with no anaesthetic, which basically involves putting a needle in between the bones in your spine and extracting fluid directly from the spinal chord. The result is a small amount of fluid which then can be used to determine very specifically what is wrong with someone. It is near impossible to quite describe the pain involved in someone probing a part of your body which deals in sending messages to the brain, especially with no anaesthetic. I guess the only way to possible describe it would be to explain all that was happening inside my body, I had a foreign object invading my spinal chord, and my body in an instinctive way to protect itself was sending messages straight to my brain. The message being sent was just PAIN. Nothing will come close to the pain I felt then, not even the headache I got when I first got ill. That itself is hard to explain. My brain swelled when I got encephalitis, it swelled to a point where its habitat was to small for it. In short my brain became too big for my head. That was pretty painful, I am glad my memories of the pain are so blurred now.
The shocking treatment in this hospital carried on until I was eventually transferred to a specialist brain injury hospital known as Atkinson Morley in Wimbledon. My treatment from there on improved and I was in a hospital with people who understood my condition. I was told once I got out of hospital the prognosis seemed as if I would be fit to go back to college in a few months. This prognosis proved to be very inaccurate. When my treatment was finished in the hospital I was free to go home. Life from here on was completely different. I was trapped in a world where I had no freedom and had to be permanently supervised in case I turned on the gas to cook something and forgot I turned it on, or ran a bath and forgot I was running it. If you remember my original description of my life in comparison to now you can then only begin to imagine how I felt. Christmas day was difficult to deal with, the confusion and the hustle and bustle of everything, everyone asking how I was; I could barely deal with any of it. I would start conversations with someone, and then two sentences into it not remember a word I had said. My memory was comparable to a goldfish. I would be given a list of five items and not remember the first three by the end of it. My memory simply was beyond anything you could understand unless you yourself have had to deal with it. Eventually my 17th birthday came around, I didn’t do much for that, other than spent a lot of it in my room crying depressed about what was happening to me. A week earlier in frustration of everything that was happening in my life I decided to try and run away from everything. I grabbed a couple of bits and jumped out of my window. As soon as my parents realised they called the police out. My whole situation wasn’t helping my home situation at all. My parents were on the edge of a divorce, it hadn’t been said yet but it was on the cards. My mum always short tempered due to worry from me, and my step dad having to work extra hours to now have to pay for my living expenses, which increased due to me being home all the time and eating more (a side effect of my illness). I was eventually picked up by either the police or my Dad at about 4 or 5 in the morning. I was then taken to a psychiatrist the next day who said there was not much they expect to be able to do for me. My depression was not due to any chemical imbalance and that anti-depressants should not be prescribed to a 17 year old who was suffering with such an illness as my self. They did however despite this, saw the way I was feeling, and saw the cuts all over my hands and arms from stupid attempts at cries of attention and thoughts of suicide; decide that anti-depressants may help in the short term. They also prescribed sleeping pills to make sure that I kept to a normal sleeping pattern. I had pretty much turned nocturnal, having spent all night on the internet in chat rooms trying to find someone who I could turn to, to help with how I felt. Suddenly things weren’t ‘as bad’ my sleeping pattern was sorted and I felt better. But my true feelings were hard to explain, I was happy in such a false sense, I talked about things in a different way, and my personality changed. The anti-depressants were not making me feel better just giving me a false sense of happiness. My depression went up and down, and one day I just stopped taking them with out telling anyone. I went down hill very quickly and was quickly sent to the psychiatrist again, and my psychologist sessions turned quickly into sessions of psychiatry as well. Everyone knows what an emo kid is, that was pretty much me, but I felt like I had a reason.
My prognosis turned from promising to not promising very quickly. I was due to go into rehabilitation to get me to change the way I lived and to deal with my illness. I didn’t want to change, I just wanted my memory back. I was told I would need to change my life style to be able to get back on track. I was 17, I did not want my freedom taken away by always carrying round a notebook and a diary. I didn’t want alarms continuously going off telling me what I was supposed to be doing, I just wanted to leave a completely normal life. Where everything is decided at the time, and there is no need to plan everything a week ahead. I didn’t want to schedule everything so I knew what I was doing at what hour exactly. I didn’t want have to get up at exactly the same time everyday, eat at the same time, read at the same time, watch TV at the same. I wanted to be going out with my friends, trying to get into a pub even though I shouldn’t be there, going to college and expanding my knowledge. My first visit to the potential neuro-rehabilitation centres involved me walking around a building full of people in wheelchairs with brain diseases that left them seriously handicapped, mentally and physically. Physically I was fine, a little fatter from my increased appetite but other than that I just needed help remembering things. After 3 or 4 months of avoiding the fact that this was my only way to get better I eventually bit the bullet and was admitted to a week of testing to see what was the best rehab for me, at the end of it I got the answer. Unfortunately this was another shocking blow for me. I had been hoping to restart college in September. The rehabilitation they had to offer me was a minimum 12 week course starting at the end of July, and would run through until the end of November. The only thing that had kept me going through all of this was the hope I would be able to return to college and be normal again. I spent the next week or so to myself in tears and it was something yet again no one would ever understand. I had lived through a very deadly illness, something most people would be happy about. However everything that made me happy was taken away.
Going back a bit, that January the Lord of the Rings films were released, I saw the first one seven times in total, and each time was like watching it new. I couldn’t follow the story line on the screen and had to rely on the fact I had read it long ago when I was younger to follow it all. These films became a bit of a big thing for me, with each year they were released I could almost measure my progress with how much I remember by the end of it. The second film was due out at the end of my bout of rehabilitation. I had the choice of doing the rehab or hoping for the best and returning to college. I decide I was going to take all the help I could get and then prove everyone what I was made of. All of these doctors were saying my case was so unique and no-one had ever seen someone survive with encephalitis for over a week let alone the 15 days I was experiencing it. It was time to make a point, I needed to take control of my own life. I started the rehab and quickly made some amazing friends, to who this day I regret I don’t keep in touch with, after rehab finished I kept in touch with them for a while, but for all of us, we were moving to a new stage in our life and wanted to leave our old life behind us. During my rehab I met some amazing people and was touched greatly by everyone I met. These people who I once viewed as retards I learnt to appreciate, they are truly amazing people and still to this day I believe more capable of achieving than anyone else I have ever met. My luck was turning and so was my attitude, it was more of **** you attitude, my turn to take back my life. I won a holiday through our local rotary group (generally a bunch of rich business men who want to give something back to the community). I was to go sailing on a tall ship for a week around the Algarve on one of the only ships in the world designed to be manned by a disabled crew. The Jubilee Sailing Trust ship the Lord Nelson was my home for one week, and was a life changing experience. That again proved to me that the word disability is misleading, because someone is disabled in one area does not make them retarded with everything, it only strengthens the person they are in other areas.
September that year came round very quickly, and soon I realised that I would not be fit for college that year. I had another down period full of tears and I decided to take some anti-depressants again, which I never really told anyone about. I did get some positive news that October though. The college I was going to decided they wanted to start the course I was originally on every term, so one course would start September, then January, then April. This was an amazing opportunity for me and suddenly the last few weeks of my rehab was heavily focussed on me returning to college in January. I was so unprepared for how much of a struggle it was going to be. My college were great and bought me a laptop and Dictaphone.
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