Apology

I am sorry I have not posted anything in a few weeks. I have wanted to write some things but I have been very busy. I may be busy for the next couple of weeks but I will be posting something new soon. Stay tuned!

Finding Will

After my three year accident anniversary, I decided to message a friend of mine. He was my roommate in the hospital and we occasionally exchanged Facebook messages and kept in touch about what was going on in each other’s lives. I had been caught up with med school and I hadn’t heard from him in a while, so I decided to send him a message saying, “It’s been threen years for us. How do you feel?”

Whenever someone says something nice to me, I am so thankful and I am not sure how to respond. I have thought about writing posts about the people who have had a positive influence on me. Let’s start with Will Archibald. Some of you who visited me in the hospital may remember him.

I spent two weeks in the traumatic brain injury (TBI) unit of the Shepherd Center before they decided that I seemed competent enough to be moved one floor up to the dual traumatic brain injury/spinal cord injury (TBI/SCI) unit, provided that I continue seeing a neuropsychologist and speech therapist.  I went from having my own room on the TBI floor to sharing a room with someone else on the TBI/SCI floor.  My friends and family weren’t too happy about this at first, but we were greeted by a big smile by a blonde-haired guy just a couple of years older than me.

Those first couple of weeks of having to wake up early every morning, realizing this is isn’t all just a dream, and then going down the hall for a long day of physical/occupational/speech therapy were rough.  But Will never stopped smiling.  I was lazy at first when it came to therapy. I would just go through the motions and look forward for it to be over so I could go back to my room and hang out with any visitors that came by. I always had many visitors every day, including my mom and my two best friends who were there almost 24/7, but Will was from up north, so he didn’t have any visitors while I was there—not even his family members. So he talked to me.

I was surprised to see how hard Will worked in therapy.  My best friends were shocked too and told me I should be more like him, for I had no desire to do anything except lie in bed and talk to friends or nap with a blanket over my head (sometimes at the same time, as seen here). But Will pushed himself. When he was doing certain exercises with weights, I saw him ask the therapist to add more weight. I can’t exactly remember the inspiring things he would say to me, but my two best friends did and they would repeat it back to me whenever they wanted me to push harder. He soon got movement back in one of his toes, so this was proof that anything was possible.

Will was in an accident just a little while before I arrived there. He was riding his motorcycle with his backpack on and one of the straps from his backpack somehow got caught on a stop sign as he was riding by, lifting him up and slamming him. He too had to he wear a neck brace and chest brace for a while to stabilize the cervical and thoracic vertebrae, respectively, and prevent further damage to the spinal cord. But those had been removed by the time I met him. He told me how even after they remove the chest brace, the digging pain will still be there for a while.  I stayed in the hospital for another two months after he was discharged and then continued coming back there from home for some time afterwards, so Will and I kept in touch with occasional Facebook messages.

My friends and I considered him like an experienced older brother or teacher to me, so I always questioned him with different things. I said something to him once when I went back to therapy and his reply showed me that no matter how hard something seems, other people have it worse, so we have to do the absolute best we can with what we are blessed with:  I know what you mean about the attitude you show on the outside versus what you are really feeling on the inside. As we both know the situation we are in plain sucks, but the thing that kept me going was seeing quads (quadriplegics). We have it hard don't get me wrong, but imagine being in there shoes with no use of arms or hands sheesh. When I looked around and saw they were working hard and the attitudes they showed I thought to myself. I can do it if they can. It wont be easy, but I will work hard and be positive.

Will didn’t stop working hard. Eventually, he got leg braces and learned how to ambulate with those using whatever muscles he could use. He told me how incredibly hard that was, but of course was always positive:  Nothing has changed with me, but this other patient who goes to therapy when I go just started to be able to move his leg and he is a year out. Its hard not to compare yourself to others because every injury is so different, but it sorta gives me some hope of movement. At the same time too it makes me think that everyday that goes by something will change. When I wake up every morning I still try and see if anything is different and it never is. I still try though. Who knows if things ever will. I'm not stuck on beleiving things will, but I still try and put a good effort towards trying.

I went from being lazy for a little while in the hospital to pushing myself to the limit, thanks to Will and my family and best friends. When Will complimented me and was proud of me for going to med school, that meant more than the compliments from my other friends. Will and I went through almost the same things. He kept up with my blog and told me it was “awesome” and it seemed like he even looked up to me. Words can’t describe how it feels when someone who was your hero starts admiring/complimenting you.

Will sent me this message one time with his frustrations upon making the decision to go back to school too:  I have just come to this feeling about being so overwhelmed I don't even know where to begin. I don't know what it is but the smallest things I have such a hard time dealing with now and it drives me mad. I try and not blame it on the brain injury, but is it the problem? What are your thoughts on this. I mean I did follow up neuro psych testing and everything was normal so it should not be an issue. 

“You’re the man for going through with med school. Congrats again and all the power to you,” he said to me in a recent message.When I read that, I did feel like the man.

I just got on Facebook and noticed that I received a reply from him. I smiled. I knew I had to study but it would be good to hear from an old friend of mine. 

It wasn’t Will. It was his sister. Will passed away a few months ago, she told me, unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism. My hero was gone. The person who greatly inspired me to work hard at a time when I was the weakest and most vulnerable was gone. We had shared the same experiences, and he was gone.

My best friends joke that I’m abnormal in that I do not cry. I have been through a lot of things since my accident, as can be expected, but I actually never really cried. The last time I remember crying was when I was a little kid. I had accepted the fact that I was unable to cry, and I kept this as a secret so people wouldn’t think I was insane or mentally unstable.

For the first time in a long, long time, I cried tonight.

Update #1:  I just remembered I posted this note and this awesome video of Will back in March 2010. It's well worth the few minutes to watch:
http://mindofhammad.blogspot.com/2010/03/wills-video.html
Update #2:  I just watched a little bit of the video again and I realize I got some of the facts in this post wrong. Oh, and I forgot that Will got into an accident while on his way home on Mother's Day.

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.