New article about me: "From Patient to Doctor: Life Rolls On"

Thank you, Chelsea Toledo, for this great piece!  Very well written.

http://www.medschoolproject.com/2012/05/18/hammad-aslam-moving-forward/#more-608

7/19/12
Note: this is same article (with just a few changes) and video that is in Georgia Health News, which you may have already read here.

It's already been 3 years?!

My, my, the time has come.  It's been three years since the date of my accident.

A few weeks ago, I was a little uneasy.  Actually, the past year has been strange for me.  I sit here uncomfortably now, as if someone is watching me.

Three years.

Someone the other day was raining questions on me regarding my accident and disability.  That hasn't happened to me in a while.  I almost never mind talking about things, except when the person questioning me is significantly older and is asking uneasy questions—like "if there's any hope" and things like that.

Sometimes, when I am thinking back to a memory from years ago (e.g., visiting certain places), I catch myself thinking about it from the viewpoint of the wheelchair.  “How did I get around?” I wonder.  Then I quickly realize that when I did that thing or went to that place, I didn’t have any physical disabilities.  Then I try to picture those things from the viewpoint of standing/walking.  I find that increasingly difficult.

Anyone who knows me knows that I never really get truly sad, upset, annoyed, or angry over anything.  There is too must beauty and too much to be thankful for to let any of that get in the way of enjoying each and every moment.

But maybe that’s what it is.  Maybe that’s why I feel so uneasy.

I remember the first time I had a dream where I was in a wheelchair.  For the longest time, my dreams at night would be of various things, but I would always be fully able-bodied in them.  It’s only over this past year that I had a few dreams where things seemed to not be normal or that I was in a wheelchair.

A few other times, I have had dreams of me standing, walking, and doing different things and I woke up with a strange feeling of emptiness.  Perhaps this feeling is akin to an amputee who loses a limb, or a mother who loses a child in the womb.  These dreams were simple.  One dream was of me wearing boots and kicking down a door for some reason.  I woke up thinking about how I miss wearing boots.  I had bought brand new black Rockport boots right before my accident, wore them maybe once, and then just gave them to my brother after my accident.  I would just look goofy in them now, for I have no real use for boots.  Another dream was just of me doing handstands.  I used to love doing handstands whenever there was an open space in front of me.  It’s the little things.

As I've said in more recent posts, I’ve changed a lot over this past year.  I have come to really value time.  I know people say this, but do they really?  Every moment we spend not pleased with our current state of affairs is a moment wasted.  I have always felt like this to a certain extent, and that’s why I’ve always been thankful and have never let myself or others stay upset.  But I feel like this past year has taken everything to a new level.   Now I find peace in everything.  Even when troubles came into my life a few times, I simply accepted them, dealt with them and learned from them.

If something hits you, you take the hit and keep going.  Why waste any moment feeling negative when we can just as easily smile? 

Time has passed by quickly, perhaps a little too quickly.  I know I can never relive those exact memories I made before and that the future holds new memories to be made—but what kind of memories?  I was completely different for most of my life, and now three years have passed by like this.  I have made great strides these past three years but I am unsure of who I will become.

When I see someone running, I remember what it was like to have my legs pounding the pavement and my lungs gasping for air.  When I go to the gym, I remember what it feels like having every muscle in my legs, back, and neck tense up as I deadlift the weight off the floor.  When I go to a friend's home, I remember what it was like to run upstairs or downstairs to see them.  When I see photos of people at the beach, I remember playing in the water, jumping over the waves, and walking barefoot through the sand.

I don't want to forget these simple things, even if they are bittersweet.

I never thought I would have made it three years like this.  Three years of paralysis and two years of medical school have passed.  Sometimes it doesn't seem that long at all.  Other times it seems like it has been forever.  It sometimes feels like I have lived two lives:  one life has passed away, and another one has started.  Now as each valuable moment passes by, I find myself experiencing them as I bear these disabilities.

And I shall continue smiling and valuing these moments.

Tubes and stuff

As someone on Facebook commented, the lion and I have the same hair.

Last week we learned a few different medical procedures in preparation for our third year in the hospitals while on medical rotations. As I learned about why and how to insert a nasogastric tube into a patient, a few memories came back and things that I had experienced in the past started to make sense.

I have been told my family and friends that immediately after my accident, I had a multitude of tubes attached to my body.  As I awoke but was still in a daze, I kept trying to pull the tubes out, so the nurses strapped my arms down and severely tightened the mask on my face.  The scars that the mask left were visible on my face for over a year.  One of my good friends said that I seemed very uncomfortable being strapped to a bed, so she told me that she would loosen them up as long as I didn’t try to remove my tubes or make it obvious that she had liberated me when the nurses were around.  Although I didn’t know what I was doing or how I agreed, I obeyed her guidelines after she loosened the straps for me.

After I was moved to the Shepherd Center, I finally regained conscious awareness of my surroundings.  Why were all these tubes in my mouth and nose?  I had no idea.  I remember the medical team took out a few of the tubes fairly early.  They removed the last tube after a few days.  I believe one of them was a nasogastric tube—a tube that is inserted through the nose and ends at the top of the stomach for feeding purposes.  Removing that was not a pleasant experience.

I can’t remember if it was before the tube was removed or after that I had tape on my nose.  I remember seeing it in the mirror after I regained consciousness and thinking that my nose had broken in the accident, too.  “It’s okay, I’ll just get plastic surgery,” I told my mom and my friends.  They had no idea what I was talking about.  I remember thinking I looked like a chicken.  I kept picturing a strange cartoon chicken with a white puffy nose.  It only recently occurred to me as I remembered that period that what I had mistaken for a “chicken nose” was probably just tape that was there to secure one of the tubes.

While we were learning these procedures last week, I also thought about how I wasn’t able to breathe properly during the initial weeks of regaining consciousness.  My punctured lungs as well as possible irritation due to the tubes made my voice raspy and I was only able to speak a couple of words at a time before I would have to take deep breaths to breathe properly.  “I sound like the Dark Knight,” I kept telling my friends, referring to Batman’s hoarse voice in The Dark Knight.  Later on, my friend told me that because I sometimes had to take breaths between each word, he thought I sounded like Stevie, the asthmatic boy from Malcolm in the Middle, instead.  I still tried to make all my visitors in the hospital feel welcome and talked to them as much as I could when they would come by because I appreciated their thoughtfulness.

After the tubes were taken out from my mouth and nose, the next things to be removed from my body were the staples from my neck.  The staples that had been put in to close off gaping lacerations in my lower head and neck pulled on my skin and hurt me whenever I slept.  I woke up every morning with blood on the pillow.  I asked my nurses when they would be taken out and they were surprised that I still had them in me.  This went on for about a week.  The morning the staples were to be removed, a nurse applied a local anesthetic that would take effect in one hour.  By the time the doctor got around to seeing me, it was already sometime in the mid to late afternoon.  The anesthetic had worn off.  I held my cousin’s hand tightly as I explicitly felt the doctor remove each staple.  For this reason, I became wary of anyone coming close to my neck and I got in the habit of cutting my own hair, which I still do.

I still had the neck brace and the chest brace that had to be removed.  They dug into my skin throughout the day and gave me a lot of pain, no matter if I was moving or sitting still.  But it would take another month and a half to two months before I was allowed to remove those.

I am not sure why I remembered these things all of a sudden.  It’s been a while since I thought about them.  But as I said in an earlier post, I think it’s good to not forget these in order to gain perspective.

New video + a thoughtful blog post

This morning, I told myself that I needed to write a post about how I haven't posted anything in a while and that the next couple of months may not produce many new posts.  We have our big medical board exam, the USMLE Step 1, this summer so I will be--or at least should be--busy preparing for that.

During the day, I received an extremely nice email with a few links. One of them was a new video with parts of the interview I did last month.  The other link was to the blog post by the creator of the video.  I was very touched by what she had to say in her own recent blog post, which you can read here.  Thank you, Chelsea, for the heartfelt words.

The video and a few others were screened today during a thank you lunch that my med school had with the Health & Medical Journalism program of Grady College of the University of Georgia.  This video can be seen here:
http://youtu.be/OewpIQCY_Go


The previous video from fall 2010 can be seen here:
http://youtu.be/RRx7vr8RNgY

Still.

[I'll go ahead and apologize for this post being dumb and how it seems to repeat things I've already said before.  I was just frustrated when I wrote this.  It only describes a very, very small fraction of what I was thinking.]

Still.

I was being interviewed for something today, and when the camera was briefly turned off and the interviewer was about to pack up, I decided to let down my guard.  I was all smiles before that moment, as I almost always am.  Even as I discussed the true state of the last two years, I continued to smile and spoke of it as if I was summarizing a book I had just read.

“These past two years haven’t been all smooth sailing for me.  I’m not sure if you are aware of this or not, but I also suffered a traumatic brain injury at the time of my accident,” I said and discussed the extent of the injury for a few minutes.  This is not something anyone can physically see. 

“During my first year of medical school, of course there were times when I questioned if I should be there or not, if I was going to make it or not.  Somehow I made it,” I continued.  “There were times when I was really depressed.  It was as if everything I had ever known was gone.  I was a completely different person now.  My mind worked completely different.  I didn’t how to handle it.”  I know everyone has experienced working hard and not having the results to reflect the effort, but I don’t know too many people who can say that they would have been able to get results before an unexpected incident occurred in their life.  That now, they will have to relearn how to learn, relearn how to function, and relearn how thrive.  It was like being born again.   The frustration that came with this was almost unbearable.  “Why can’t I just be normal, or at least the way I used to be,” I would ask myself.

I continued, “Second year, I was much more relaxed.  But again, in the beginning, I was struggling.  So I finally decided to get myself checked out to see what exactly was going on.  It turns out, I wasn’t dumb.  I mean, I wouldn’t be surviving medical school if I was dumb.  I scored fairly well on all sections of the neuropsychological tests, but still there was something lacking.  I had to make more changes.  I took the recommendations that were given to me by the neuropsychologist, and now, I am seeing progress.”

I realize that I have mentioned this all on here before, but I don’t think I can truly express these thoughts in a way that can be fully understood.

Still.  After so long, there are still some things that make me ask, “Is this real?”

I was watching a video of myself today and I couldn’t help but feel… somewhat embarrassed.  That’s what happens when I see photos or videos of myself:  I get to see myself in the way others see me.  Do people even remember what I looked like standing, walking, running, exercising, and being crazy?  I know I have a real hard time remembering.  A lot of people I talk to now, including all my classmates, only know this current state.

I recently made another new friend and I realized I am embarrassed of my disability around her.  Although I think I have a feeling I know why, I still do not like this friend seeing me transfer off and on my wheelchair from different places.  I am also embarrassed by how skinny my legs have become.  I saw my legs in the video of myself that I watched, and I was disgusted.  I remember I used to do heavy squats and deadlifts because my relatively small frame and years of running left me with fairly thin legs, but my current state is enough to leave me self-conscious.  Wearing shorts all day and stopping by the gym whenever I take a break from studying is something that will have to be postponed for a while.

Who have I become?

I had many plans for my life.  We all know life doesn’t always go as planned, but I wish there was a way I could have anticipated this.  I know everything I have ever experienced has prepared me, but now, like everyone else, I just wish I knew what the future will have in store for me.

Will there be more turmoil?  Will more things be thrown at me?

I have to remind myself that this is who I am.  This is who I have become.  There is no way to reverse time.  Everything in the past has passed, never to return again.  

Making grand plans for it

So in the end, was it worth it? Jesus Christ. How irreparably changed my life has become. It's always the last day of summer and I've been left out in the cold with no door to get back in. I'll grant you I've had more than my share of poignant moments. Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it. Throughout my lifetime, I've left pieces of my heart here and there. And now, there's almost not enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. There are no more white horses or pretty ladies at my door.

         -Blow

I sometimes think about how much my thoughts, views, and actions have changed since the start of my predicament.  Well, more than those is just the change in feelings I have had.

Over time, I have become incredibly used to things.  Things are no longer out of the ordinary and I’m not self-conscious about people viewing me strangely anymore.  I honestly don’t feel any different from anyone else.

But occasionally, I am given reminders.  Someone will say something to me that really knocks me flat.  When I am reminded of how different I am from everyone else and how adjustments have been made and will have to be made, and how much it not only affects me, but other people as well, it is indeed a setback.  “How irreparably changed my life has become,” and the rest of the above quote goes through my mind.

The truth is:  yes, I am different.  I am not like “normal” people.  I can’t do some things and I have to do other things in a slightly different way.

So, does writing that make me feel strange or exposed for who I really am?

No, no it does not.

Almost exactly 2 years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Compensate ”.  In it, I describe how because I cannot do certain things like others, I must compensate in other areas of my life.  For example, I am living completely alone and going to medical school and working 3x harder than most people I know just to sort of “prove myself” to the naysayers and doubters.

Although I still feel like I have to compensate and work harder just to be treated a certain way, my views have slightly shifted.

Changes happen.

Obstacles come up.

For some people, they are large, and for others, they seem almost petty.

The early 20th century lawyer Clarence Darrow said it best, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”

Things have happened.  I am different.  There is no avoiding the obvious.

In poker, when we are dealt a certain set of cards, we have the choice to either fold the hand or keep playing.

Keep playing.

Some people expect peace of mind and happiness to be a destination.  “I can’t be happy with this in the way.  I have this thing going on. Other people don’t have to deal with it,” they may say. They really wish and pray that a certain thing will happen—whatever it is—so they can be happy. 

Things in life don’t always happen as we expect. I never would have guessed I would be like this and be where I am now. Like everyone, I also sometimes feel like nothing in life is going my way.

“But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent,” I have to say to myself, repeating the quote from above.

Do not ever wish for so much that you stop being thankful for what you have.  Do not wish for different circumstances.  The ones you have are good enough.  Find peace in this, for finding peace when you have nothing is better than chaos when you have something.

As Clarence Darrow said, it is the one most adaptable to change that survives.

Let it in

I was reading some of the things that political candidates, journalists, and news broadcasters have said recently on various topics and all I could do was shake my head.

It surprises and saddens me how easy it is that people are united under the banner of ignorance, intolerance and/or hate.

Is anger really a much stronger emotion than love?

I can take my case as an example. As I have mentioned before, people who have lived lives able-bodied and are then confined by a disability may be hot-headed and angry. They lash out at spouses, parents, children, friends, strangers, and God.
Why is this happening to me?
Why me, God?
You people will never understand what I am going through.
You will never know what it's like.
You all live such happy lives.
I’m sick of not being able to do things.
This is so emasculating.
Stop your whining.
Those are just some of the things that people may think, say and believe.

Likely, on a much broader scale, when the nation was in economic turmoil and the morale of the people very low, Hitler was able to unite people through intolerance and hate. I also have to shake my head when I see how history repeats itself over and over again and how people are so blind to it.

As a friend in my class said to me once, "People always need someone to hate. Right now, it’s the Muslims and the homosexuals." 25 years ago, it was the Russians. Before that, it was the Communists. Tomorrow, it’ll be someone else.

Society is so easily brainwashed into hating a fellow human being that the most primal, animalistic emotions are expressed, even by those who are considered “educated”.

Anyways, I could go on and on about intolerance in society and how futile and childish (yet very effective in motivating masses of people) it is, but I want go in lightly different direction that I have touched on before.

Why do we even have hate?
Why do we talk bad about others?
Why do we consider ourselves better than other people?
Why do we stress?
Why can’t we accept circumstances, no matter how different they are, and carry on?

We may feel like those things empower us and drive us, but they enslave us. They control us. Even simple things that everyone feels—stress and/or worry—can and will control us.

Stop blaming other people. Stop blaming God. Stop blaming yourself.

Even the toughest situations—like a traumatic brain injury, a complete spinal cord injury, intense pain, endless adaptations and reminders of how unusual you are and what you can’t do, insecurities, emotions of others, betrayals, intolerance because you are different, and more—will all be just a simple, cool breeze.

Relax. Stop fearing. Stop worrying. Stop stressing.

Open your heart. Let love in.