(2/7) “When I woke up I couldn’t see. It’s like: why can’t I...

(2/7) “When I woke up I couldn’t see. It’s like: why can’t I see?  Eyes open, eyes closed. It’s the same thing. And I can’t move. My hands are cuffed behind my back. I can’t even touch my face to find out why I can’t see. Where am I? Why am I shackled up? My feet are shackled to the bed. What did I do? Did I kill someone? Am I going to jail? What if I’m going to jail and I can’t see? I started to panic. But then I heard my mom’s voice. She said: ‘Calm down K, you’re in the hospital. Calm down.’ So I calmed down. I got real quiet and listened. There was beeping all around me. All of these voices started asking me questions: ‘Do you know what happened? Do you know your birthday?’ I was answering them. I kept telling them my birthday, but they were asking me again and again. For a second I thought that maybe I was slow. Am I slow? Is something wrong with my brain? Is that why I can’t see? I can’t see. I kept telling them, I can’t see. And they were like: ‘You’ve been stabbed in your left eye with a screwdriver. That eye doesn’t work.’ And I’m like: ‘No, I can’t see. At all. At all!’ The doctors were confused by that. They were like: ‘We don’t know, we don’t know.’ That’s when I got scared. I knew right then something happened to me crazy. I was the victim of something, but why was I in handcuffs? They took off the cuffs later that night. The officers were acting like they felt bad. They kept saying: ‘It wasn’t us. It wasn’t our shift. You gotta talk to the people who’s shift that is.’ I never got an explanation. It bothered me. Even today it bothers me. Why did they put me in handcuffs? I’m the one who got robbed. I’m the one who got stabbed in the eye. Why was I shackled up like a prisoner of war? I never got an answer for that. I’ve asked myself a million times, what if hadn’t been in cuffs? Would the doctors have treated me different? Did they really do their best, for this John Doe, with no family around? When I was on the operating table, what if my hands hadn’t been cuffed behind my back? What if I hadn’t been shackled up? Like a criminal? Would they have tried harder? Would they have tried harder to save my eyes?”