What was I worrying about while in the hospital?
Whether I would survive my AVM?
Whether I would ever get to go home again?
Whether my memory would ever recover?
Whether I would ever walk again?
Yes, all of that and more. Two weeks before my AVM burst my
wife and I and one daughter had visited New York city and
had visited the site of the fallen World Trade Center Towers. That had happened two months before our visit and
you could still see steam in some places coming up from
the site. I picked up some fragments of documents which
had come from the stricken buildings. It was something
to remember the terrible event. I stowed them in a "secret"
pocket behind my jacket side pocket. It was still in there
when my AVM burst and I was sent off to the hospital. My
wife was a very efficient cleaner, and still is, and I
feared there in the hospital that she would clean my
jacket and throw away my disaster relics. Now, you
would think that I had enough to worry about with out
even thinking about that, but you would be wrong!!
And yes, there was no real reason to assume that I would
ever see my home or my daughters again, or survive the
year without dying.
When I came home, with a mind that was surely "shattered"
for the time being at least...after a couple days I checked
on that jacket and as I feared it was cleaned and my
fragments of papers from the WTC were gone, and trashed.
But I am not complaining! They may be gone, but I am back!
All of us survivors are back, hopefully to a new life as
good as our "first life". We may not live thirty years, but
we survived our disaster.