I don’t know if it was bad luck or fate. All throughout high school I never got sick or had a major injury or one set back. But after high school my life and all of that changed drastically. Out of high school I signed with West Virginia to play baseball and pursue Criminal Justice. Everything was going great up until late August when I suffered a knee injury, and it all started to go downhill from there.
From the injury, to knee surgery, to a freak infection plagued my worst semester of college. The day I got injured was one of the worst days of my life.After practice a pitcher wanted to throw a bullpen and none of the other catchers wanted to catch him, so I said I would. On the last pitch of the bullpen I twisted my knee on the turf and felt a sharp pain and a horrible sounding pop. It sounded life two bones crunching against each other.
A couple more days of practice went by and I couldn’t bare the pain any longer. Our trainer set me up with a MRI at our hospital on campus, and my insurance company wouldn’t cover me since I was “out of state”. So that night I drove home to get my MRI.After getting back the results I found out I had a fully torn meniscus, a fully torn ACL, and PCL. That same day I scheduled my knee surgery for September 8th 2011.
It was the night of September 7th and the rain did not stop, the next morning I woke up to a phone call from my doctor saying we needed to reschedule my surgery because of the flooding. A whole week passed before I can finally get surgery. The surgery went well and I felt good to be back at school. It was very difficult making up all the work I missed in the two weeks I was gone from school but I finally got all my work made up.
I was going through excruciating rehab every day to hopefully get back to playing baseball and starting in the spring. But one day after rehab it once again went all downhill. On my way home from rehab that night I had a horrible pain in my side where my appendix would be. I tried to tough it out and let the pain go away, but that night when it woke me up out of my sleep.
It was 4 a. m. and I couldn’t bare the pain any longer. I went to the hospital and they admitted me with appendicitis. They gave me shot after shot of morphine and nothing worked and my pain didn’t go away.
They finally air lifted me from West Virginia back to Philadelphia because they didn’t know what to do. My organs were shutting down and I was near death. The worst thing about the whole experience was seeing my mother after the doctor told her I’m dying. I was no longer concerned about myself I was more concerned about my family having to bury me at 18 years old. After more tests they finally realized I had an infection from surgery.
I had Clostridium difficile or C Diff, the infection traveled from my knee to the rest of my body.After a month in the hospital I finally started to feel better and recover. By that time I was so far behind that there was no way I could possibly pass my classes so I had to take a medical withdrawal. I came home right after packing up my things and the same week I developed kidney stones and went right back into the hospital. After another surgery I felt like there was no way I’d ever recover or ever play baseball again. After months of recovery and taking time off I got better.
I felt that I needed to stay home for a year after everything that happened and that’s why I’m now at Lackawanna.From my experience I now no longer take life for granted. I live my life to the fullest and I make sure I’m happy at all times. There’s too many people who have set backs that give up or even give up on life itself and I was making sure I wasn’t going to do that.
From my injury, to surgery, to my infection it was one hard semester. I wouldn’t wish what happened to me to my worst enemy. My experience taught me to live life to the fullest, not take anything for granted, and to never accept defeat no matter what the circumstances.
