Take a breath. You will get through this.
All I could do was hold on and endure until it was over. In the end, I lost almost a third of my blood as a result of the basketball accident. Luckily, Milford had a large community of blood donors that literally saved my life.
After an hour of draining blood, tests, and assessment, the doctors then informed my distressed family that I would have to undergo life-saving surgery to remove my spleen.
I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. Everything was a blur, coming at me in surreal slow motion. I was in a daze…but the pain was very, very real.
I was rushed to a pre-op room and prepped for surgery.
“Count back from ten…nine…eight…,” the anesthesiologist whispered to me. That would be the first time I heard those words, but it wouldn’t be the last.
I woke up several hours later in the recovery room. The surgery had been a success, and the doctors expected a full recovery. However, I was still in excruciating pain.
My family was overcome with joy and rushed in to hug me and provide me with encouragement. I was moved to another room, where I would stay for the next two weeks.
Within an hour of being moved to my recovery room, a nurse came in with a clipboard. She checked my four vital signs: body temperature, pulse, breathing rate, and blood pressure. She must have known I was suffering deeply because she looked at me with a kind, compassionate expression and asked, “Are you in pain, honey?”
Those words…
Yes, God, yes, I’m in pain.
I struggled to respond, but my suffering was too acute to speak. Instead, I nodded.
“Okay, sweetie,” the nurse said. “Can you tell me how much pain you’re experiencing, on a scale from one to ten?”
“A lot,” I blurted, my voice hoarse. “Ten.”
“Aw, don’t worry, sweetie. We’ll take care of that.” She gave me a comforting smile.
She turned and screwed a vial of liquid into my IV line. I watched as a small clear bubble began to mix into the line, soon to push into my veins through the tiny needle attached to my arm.
After a few moments, the nurse checked on me again. “You shouldn’t be feeling any pain now.”
She was right. A warm feeling of euphoria had begun to envelop my senses. My body and mind relaxed as a calm blanket of peace descended upon me. All the pain drained away, replaced by a powerful, radiant sense of well-being.
Later that day, a doctor came into my room with a larger pouch of the same substance, which turned out to be liquid morphine. The medical staff attached the pouch to my IV line, and I was given a button so I could self-administer pain meds every half hour as needed.
Every half hour, I did just that. I pushed the button and all the physical suffering went away…and along with it, all the worries, bad thoughts, stress, and anxieties.
Gone.
That release, that instant gratification foreshadowed things to come.
One day, after my extended time in the recovery room, a nurse rolled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair into the bright spring sunshine.
A few weeks ago, I’d been an otherwise unremarkable fifteen-year-old kid. Now, I bore the results of a horrible accident: traumatic emotional memories from my surgery, hospital experience, and pain; and a massive abdominal scar as the physical reminder of what I’d been through.
For the first week after I got out of the hospital, everyone did the best they could to act like a family. My father spent some time at the house with all of us, and my sisters and my mom worked hard to take care of me.
The fresh scar on my stomach required constant cleaning, and I managed my pain with prescribed Percocet. I got into the habit of taking the pills at even the faintest sense of pain. I figured, “Why be in pain when these pills could make it all go away?”
Since I was mostly bedridden, I spent much of the first two weeks at home watching TV and listening to music. It was already April, and school was almost out, so I figured I would just leisurely recover and then spend my summer hanging out with my friends.
One night, three weeks after the surgery, I awoke screaming in pain. My abdomen felt as if it were on fire. Stabbing pain pulsed through my stomach like an unrelenting drill. My mother called my father, and he rushed over with a shopping bag full of antacid tablets and milk of magnesia. But the pain was nothing that Pepto-Bismol could alleviate.
I sat on the toilet for an hour, writhing in agony. Something was terribly wrong. I knew I had to go back to the hospital.
The doctors ran tests and discovered I’d had a “post-surgical relapse.” As a result of the surgery to remove my spleen, my intestines had become entangled in a knot and were blocking the digestion and passing of food through my body.
There I was, right back in the same Milford Hospital operating room I’d left just a few weeks before, and with the same surgeon who’d done my original procedure. As I thrashed in excruciating pain, the team went back in, cut me open, untangled my small intestine, and sewed the incision up for a second time. I was lucid for the operation, enduring a torturous, unmedicated agony that seemed like it would never end.
Pain, pain, pain was all my mind could chatter until it was over.
Family members later said that the doctor told them that my first incision was still so fresh that he was able to open it back up with his thumb, with no need for a scalpel or scissors.
When I came out of surgery, I was dismayed to learn that the thin, straight scar from the first procedure had now manifested into a wide, oblong eternal keepsake of trauma.
After my second surgery came another two weeks of inpatient recovery, more gray hair for my distraught mother, and of course, another two weeks of intravenous morphine drip. The door in my life that had been cracked open for future drug addiction had just been propped open a little bit wider…
five
“Fuck you, Koch!” someone yelled as they hid under a chair. Someone else in the audience threw a rolled-up wad of paper.
It was the first day of my sophomore year at Foran High School. I had been directed to the school’s auditorium for what was supposed to be a welcome-back ceremony and orientation.
Within minutes of taking our seats, the audience grew restless. That’s when the shit-talking started, and the shit-throwing as well. The assistant principal ducked and dodged projectiles. The crowd got more and more rowdy until finally the orientation was cancelled. This was a reoccurring theme at Foran—a student body that didn’t respect authority and hurtled toward bigger problems in the future.
Foran had a reputation in Milford as the wilder of the town’s two public schools—lenient in its policy on parties, skipping class, and alcohol and drug use. Even during my time at Notre Dame, I’d heard stories about Foran escapades. Like other high schools, there was cigarette smoking in the bathrooms, students ditching school early, and fights in the lunchroom, but Foran was known for taking it to another level. There were even stories of seniors having keg parties on campus during school hours.
With all that I’d heard about the school, nothing could prepare me for the things I actually witnessed and experienced while attending Foran High.
During the first week of my freshman year, I’d gotten shoved up against a wall because I failed to call out “straight” when I walked into the bathroom. That was how people doing drugs in the stalls knew that it wasn’t security coming in. A week later, on my way up the stairs after gym class, I’d stumbled upon a girl from a lower grade giving head to a senior right there in the stairwell.