Yeah well true if your life is supposed to be as hard as mine.
Yeah, I'm sure many of us have had it rough.
That isn't limited to just those on the autism spectrum either.
Not to discount anyone, but let's start with having a satisfying lifestyle and very successful career then having the rug yanked out from underneath you.
One minute I was riding my motorcycle home and the next one had me trying to stand it back up to attempt to continue riding it home.
Good thing a nurse was headed home right about the same time, or I would have died on the street, alone and totally dazed.
From there it went on to the point that the lifeflight helicopter ride was cancelled because the EMTs couldn't get me to sit down.
I guess instinct had kicked in by then and being in shock, my mind told me that if I sat down, I was never going to get up again.
That was probably closer to the truth than not.
Yep, next up, the emergency room ordered up having my skull sectioned to relieve the pressure from a severe brain trauma.
Those sidewalks are not very soft.
Let's talk about first being declared clinically dead a couple of times during that procedure followed by laying in a hospital bed in a severe coma after a very traumatic brain injury and having the doctors tell my family that if by chance I were to get out of my predicament alive, I wouldn't be able to do much more that drool on myself and soil myself for the rest of my days in a wheelchair.
I was told that the day they fitted a bumpcap to my head that the first thing I said was "Timmy"
Most in the room didn't get that it was a reference to a South Park character in a wheelchair with the same name.
Yep in spite of all that, I still retained my sense of humor.
From there, my family agreed that I would never want to be like that and were forced to make the decision to have me removed from life support.
A couple of weeks in, out of the blue, I came out of my coma and began to ask questions.
Then there were the exercise sessions that included taking me for walks with a walker around the trauma ward.
One of my very dear friends was with me one day on one of my strolls and said that after we made it to another hallway, I told him no, I can't do that one because the hill was too steep.
Rick told me that after we returned to my room, he left the same way I refused to go and then discovered that the floor was actually wavy enough that if you concentrated on it, you could barely see it.
After being in the hospital's brain trauma unit for several months where the entire staff referred to me as their own special miracle, I was shipped off to a nursing home for the next round of recovery.
From there my recovery began as a long hard journey where I was no longer able to walk and had a left arm that was just a limp appendage.
I remember trying to figure out what was wrong with me as I touched my face but really didn't understand why it felt so very different.
Ever have to learn to read again?
I did.
I remember hating my physical therapy sessions because they were very painful.
Dreaded each morning because of it and was never able to deliver as a result of it.
Then there was the morning that I told myself that if I didn't put in the effort, I would never get rid of the wheels under my butt.
After a rather lengthy stay in the home, I relearned to walk again and did in fact walk out of their facility the day I went home.
Spent about the next half of a year rebuilding my walking strength before being accepted into a live-in brain trauma recovery facility.
If I didn't tell you that the experience there was horrible, I would be lying to you.
My only salvation there was our nurse I befriended while living in the Harmar House.
She believed in me and gave me hope, while the rest of the staff considered me an angry lost cause and added to my discomfort there.
We got to go see two Indianapolis based racecars on display one day, and she clung to my side as I explained what each part of them was as she questioned me to what they were for.
She was always our van driver to and from the day facility, and always gave me the right hand seat after I showed her a cool shortcut thru a neighborhood where I once lived.
At the day facility, there were two other gentlemen I took to, one being a cognitive specialist and the other, our psychologist.
From there, it was back to my sister's home for a couple of weeks until I purchased the home I live in now.
Then my real recovery began.
My next life as a one armed man.
Worked that left arm back into something well beyond the limp flipper one specialist said I would never use again.
Oops, sorry asshole, you were wrong.
Oh, and the never leave the wheelchair part was wrong too.
The fourteen individual types of pills are no longer on the daily menu and I am driving again.
Lately a lot of my time has been spent restoring 100+ year old equipment and running a turn of the century machineshop at our local vintage machinery preservation society.
Not a bad setup for a guy that ran his first metal cutting lathe nearly 60 years ago at the tender age of five.
Pretty cool to let the next generations see the equipment that gave them the world they experience today doing the actual work they were built for too.
Better yet to have a tool and die maker explain any part of it to you if you ask him.
The shop I run, The Fred R Clark and Son Machineworks if just a tiny part of our representation of the industrial revolution of the United States of America.
We have coal mining, blacksmithing, machinetools, steam equipment, farm equipment, oil wells and vintage excavation equipment that we put thru their paces during the two shows we put on each year.
In fact, I totally reinvented my life because I wanted to begin the next chapter, not just resign myself to being broken beyond repair and settling for being lesser.
So look at me today, still a little rough around the edges, very impatient at times, but once again living my life to the fullest.
I don't cry about what life has handed me, because it is simply life.
During my advocacy for my TBI peers days, one of my opening statements was "no matter how bad you think you have it, there will never be a shortage of individuals that would jump at the chance to have it as good as you do"
"Never give up hope for better days because hope is the one thing no one can ever take from you unless you let them"
You need to learn to fight your demons instead of just accepting their beatdowns with a woe is me attitude.
Even if that requires the intervention of a mental health professional
