Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life - Posts Tagged "disability"
Refuse to Lose
I have just witnessed a miracle. And no, that is not a melodramatic statement. Simply true. I just watched my son walk again. Unsupported. For the first time in three and a half years. Five steps.
Yes it has already made the papers. Of course he had been on the phone jubilant the first time, the other day. That alone had me in tears. But today I saw, with my own eyes, through tears I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried, as my son took five steps away from me.
This, we have always been told, is impossible. And when the impossible occurs I think we can safely call it a miracle. Especially when it brings with it such emotion. Such beauty. Such joy.
I don’t suppose it was wise driving home with tears streaming. They are probably not doing the keyboard much good either. The dog is already quite soggy.
For those who do not know his story, my son was stabbed through the brain in an unprovoked attack in 2009. The screwdriver was rammed through his skull, creating a depressed fracture with shards of bone lodged in the brain, causing extensive brain damage, dangerously elevated intracranial pressures and massive subarachnoid haemorrhage. He was in a coma with a GCS of 4 when he was found and, through brain surgery and other traumas, remained that way for a very long time. He had been expected to die.
He woke, weeks later, paralysed down the right side, unable to speak, coordinate any movement, swallow or see. The damage was so severe we were warned to expect little of his mind, language or personality to remain. Yet I had said from the start that he had always been so stubborn that if he survived and woke at all, Nick would be back. He has proved me right.
His motto was always ‘refuse to lose’. A year after the attack he adopted a variant of that and had it tattooed on his arm ‘Possum ergo facit’, I can, therefore I do.
It has not been an easy journey, nor is it over. There is a very long way to go before Nick could be said to be recovered. His sight, clarity of speech and coordination, balance and…well, I can no longer say inability to walk… We have employed everything from common sense to parcel tape and every shade of ingenuity and unorthodox approach that we can and he had worked relentlessly for his recovery.
His mind and his intellect are clear as a bell, though there are a few invisible issues, he handles them extraordinarily well. He has developed a wisdom far beyond his years in many things. He realised some time ago that he would not now change a thing as he has gone from a successful and ambitious young man to being a happy one who appreciates living.
After he had hugged me while I wept all over him, we stood in his garden talking today. He said that after all the biological and mathematical odds against any one of us being born, it was simply a matter of respect for life to do our best with it. He has a point. We spoke of the power of the imagination and how we create a reality in our minds that is mirrored in the world if we allow it to be and work for it. We spoke of the will and the determination to succeed, to hope and to believe in the impossible and to achieve it with all we are, against all odds and predictions. Against all logic. We spoke of having faith in the impossible being possible. His face lit with passion as he spoke of these things with great eloquence and I wished I could record it for you to hear, for it came from the heart.
Then my son spoke of his dreams, if he can now learn to walk. The places he wants to see and the things he wants to do. All the things he never thought he would be able to do since the attack. The things he could have done, perhaps, before but did not think to spare the time or the joy to do.
“You’ll get postcards from everywhere,” he said, “telling you about all the things I’ve done… not all of them sane.” The lunacy must be genetic, as my only response to that, through the mist of tears, was, “Good!”
He has refused to lose… and today I saw the most beautiful thing I have seen since the day I watched him take his first breath for the second time in his life. I saw my son walk.
Be glad with me.
Yes it has already made the papers. Of course he had been on the phone jubilant the first time, the other day. That alone had me in tears. But today I saw, with my own eyes, through tears I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried, as my son took five steps away from me.
This, we have always been told, is impossible. And when the impossible occurs I think we can safely call it a miracle. Especially when it brings with it such emotion. Such beauty. Such joy.
I don’t suppose it was wise driving home with tears streaming. They are probably not doing the keyboard much good either. The dog is already quite soggy.
For those who do not know his story, my son was stabbed through the brain in an unprovoked attack in 2009. The screwdriver was rammed through his skull, creating a depressed fracture with shards of bone lodged in the brain, causing extensive brain damage, dangerously elevated intracranial pressures and massive subarachnoid haemorrhage. He was in a coma with a GCS of 4 when he was found and, through brain surgery and other traumas, remained that way for a very long time. He had been expected to die.
He woke, weeks later, paralysed down the right side, unable to speak, coordinate any movement, swallow or see. The damage was so severe we were warned to expect little of his mind, language or personality to remain. Yet I had said from the start that he had always been so stubborn that if he survived and woke at all, Nick would be back. He has proved me right.
His motto was always ‘refuse to lose’. A year after the attack he adopted a variant of that and had it tattooed on his arm ‘Possum ergo facit’, I can, therefore I do.
It has not been an easy journey, nor is it over. There is a very long way to go before Nick could be said to be recovered. His sight, clarity of speech and coordination, balance and…well, I can no longer say inability to walk… We have employed everything from common sense to parcel tape and every shade of ingenuity and unorthodox approach that we can and he had worked relentlessly for his recovery.
His mind and his intellect are clear as a bell, though there are a few invisible issues, he handles them extraordinarily well. He has developed a wisdom far beyond his years in many things. He realised some time ago that he would not now change a thing as he has gone from a successful and ambitious young man to being a happy one who appreciates living.
After he had hugged me while I wept all over him, we stood in his garden talking today. He said that after all the biological and mathematical odds against any one of us being born, it was simply a matter of respect for life to do our best with it. He has a point. We spoke of the power of the imagination and how we create a reality in our minds that is mirrored in the world if we allow it to be and work for it. We spoke of the will and the determination to succeed, to hope and to believe in the impossible and to achieve it with all we are, against all odds and predictions. Against all logic. We spoke of having faith in the impossible being possible. His face lit with passion as he spoke of these things with great eloquence and I wished I could record it for you to hear, for it came from the heart.
Then my son spoke of his dreams, if he can now learn to walk. The places he wants to see and the things he wants to do. All the things he never thought he would be able to do since the attack. The things he could have done, perhaps, before but did not think to spare the time or the joy to do.
“You’ll get postcards from everywhere,” he said, “telling you about all the things I’ve done… not all of them sane.” The lunacy must be genetic, as my only response to that, through the mist of tears, was, “Good!”
He has refused to lose… and today I saw the most beautiful thing I have seen since the day I watched him take his first breath for the second time in his life. I saw my son walk.
Be glad with me.
