Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff (18 page)

I was getting ready for school one morning when Jamie called me from the hospital. “Um, do you want to get over here?” she asked.

“It's only another sonogram. Besides, I can't miss class,” I said.

“Well, I think you might want to get over here, 'cause I'm having the baby!” she shouted.

I ran out of the house and darted to the hospital. At the hospital, the nurse handed me scrubs and I entered her room. She lay there as I sat next to her.

“Well this is it,” she said. “Nine months, and it's finally here.” She grimaced with pain and moved her head back and forth. Doctors were in and out of her room every two seconds with medication. She was about to give birth. After a few hours of getting Jamie settled, she was fully dilated.

“Okay, here we go. When I say ‘push,' you push,” the doctor said.

She acknowledged him while grabbing my hands and nodding her head quickly several times. Jamie gave three pushes of strength and, with one final push, she breathed life into a new baby. The doctors cut the umbilical cord and cleaned the baby off. I sat in awe. Every possible human emotion struck me like a freight train.

“It's a boy,” they exclaimed.

I smiled, and tears of joy ran down my cheek. No more fear, no more chores, just pure happiness. The baby was handed to Jamie, and she spent the first moments of the baby's life holding him in her arms. She looked up at me, and I looked at her.

“You did it, kiddo,” I whispered in her ear.

The doctors left with the baby to run tests and weigh him. Jennifer and Ben came in with the birth certificate. “What's his name?” Ben asked. Jamie motioned for him to come closer, and she whispered in his ear. Ben smiled and went into a different room. I walked outside to get a drink. I came back in a few minutes and saw the completed birth certificate. It read Blake Jonathan.

I smiled and cried. The doctors brought Blake back in. They passed Blake to me, and I held new life in my hands. I thought about the dads in birth class. Then I thought about Blake's future. His first steps, peewee football games, the first day of school and his first broken heart. All the dads' talk finally caught up with me. Jennifer and Ben looked at me and smiled. Tears rolled down their cheeks. I gave Blake to Ben and received a gracious hug from Jennifer. They were his parents now. They were his keepers. Jamie still lay there, crying but filled with delight. I went over to her and gave her a big hug.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Fine. Absolutely fine,” I whispered, and kissed her softly on her forehead. I would never be the same.

Jonathan Krasnoff

Unstoppable

When I was fourteen, my life was pretty normal. I chilled with friends, worked to keep my grades up and played hockey. Everyone thought I was a shoo-in to be the goalie on the junior-varsity team when I started school in the fall. In fact, I'd attended goalie camp in Canada right before leaving for summer camp in late July.

It was my third summer at Camp Becket. We were about halfway through the session, and “Dad's Weekend” was about to start. I was psyched. My dad works a lot in Manhattan, and at home I was always on the ice—my dream was to play in the NHL one day—or hanging with my friends, so this weekend was one thing we always looked forward to.

On August 5, the day before my dad was supposed to drive up, I started feeling really weird. At dinner I didn't have much of an appetite, and I was totally freezing. I dug through the lost-and-found for a sweatshirt, then lay down on the Ping-Pong table until the rest of my cabin was done eating. I felt really achy and tired, as if I had a bad case of the flu. My legs felt like they were made of ice, and I couldn't stop shaking.

When I checked myself into the infirmary, the camp doctor told me I had a 102-degree fever. I puked my guts up all night. The next morning, I was so weak I could barely get out of bed. When I did finally make it to the bathroom, I passed out for a few seconds and hit my head on the sink. When I came to, I couldn't stop throwing up. As I was getting back into bed, the counselor on duty noticed two huge purple splotches on my stomach. She radioed the doctor, and two minutes later they'd started an I.V. of antibiotics and called 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, there were splotches all over my body and my skin was turning blue.

The trip to the hospital is a blur. All I could focus on was how cold I was. I had no idea that I was close to dying, or that halfway through the thirty-minute trip to the hospital, the ambulance had to pull over and wait for another ambulance that had life-support equipment.

I'd contracted meningococcemia, a type of rare bacterial infection called meningococcal meningitis that's usually fatal in the first thirty-six hours after you catch it. Even if it doesn't kill you, you've still got a huge chance of going deaf, having your organs shut down or being permanently brain damaged.

Meningococcemia can be spread through saliva, so I might have contracted it from sharing a water bottle on a hike two days before. People can be a carrier of the disease without getting sick. It's so rare that not every hospital has the equipment to treat it—including the one I was first taken to. The doctors in the ER put me in a drug-induced coma to help fight the infection and because my pain was so intense. Then they arranged for me to be airlifted to another hospital. By the time we got to the pediatric intensive care unit at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, I had no pulse.

Since my organs had stopped working, I was hooked up to all kinds of machines, including a ventilator that breathed for me. As a doctor explained to me later, the infection was burning me from the inside out. My parents, Gary and Nancy, my little sister, Olivia, and all my friends were constantly by my side, but I didn't know it.

I also didn't know that after two weeks in Springfield I was taken by ambulance to the burn unit at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. The infection had caused my blood to clot too much, and my veins were collapsing. Although my inner organs were getting better, gangrene was turning my hands and feet black. The doctors told my parents that unless my arms and legs were amputated, I would die.

During twelve operations over the next two months, while I was still unconscious, doctors removed layers of dead skin. By the time they'd gotten rid of all the gangrene, my knees, lower legs, lower arms and hands were gone. Skin was removed from my back and surgically grafted over where my arms and legs now ended.

In October, my condition was stable enough that the doctors decided to bring me out of my coma. I saw that my forearms and lower legs were gone before my parents told me. I was just so drugged up that I didn't care. Gradually, as I came out of sedation, my parents explained what had happened and showed me pictures of what the gangrene looked like. It was pretty intense—the skin on my legs was literally turning to ash. I felt lucky that I was still alive.

People who don't know me might think it's weird that I didn't fall into a huge depression or get pissed off about what happened. But sitting around thinking “Why me?” is just not my style. For one thing, I'm not into worrying about what other people think of me. (If I did, I probably wouldn't have been playing the bagpipes since I was five.) Playing hockey, you have to learn to deal with your injuries and get back into the game as soon as you can. I felt the same way when I knew my arms and legs were gone. “Okay,” I thought, “I'll just get new ones.”

My old hockey coach says I'm the only person he knows who could deal with this so well. Still, getting better was tough. I hated being poked and prodded and having tubes pulled out and stuck into me all the time. Sometimes I'd have “phantom pain”: It felt as if my feet were still there and they
hurt
. But the worst part was definitely the “tank,” a steel bathtub where burn patients go to have their wounds washed out. The nurses would peel off the bandages from my legs, arms and back and clean my wounds to help them heal faster. They said I was the loudest yeller they had.

Later that month, I was transferred—again—to Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains so I could build my strength back up and learn to get around. It was frustrating; for three hours a day I had to do sit-ups and push-ups and practice moving in and out of my wheelchair. Once I was fitted with prosthetic arms and legs, I had to learn to balance and stand and bend over and pick things up.

Now I'm grateful for all the exercises because I'm back to being really athletic, but at the time, I hated it. Every part of me was screaming in pain. Learning to walk was the toughest. I could bend the knees of my prosthetic legs, but they're not as flexible as real knees. Without feet, I couldn't feel the floor. It felt like I was levitating. My new hands were battery-activated, but every once in a while they'd freeze up.

When I got frustrated, I'd just stay by myself for a while until the feeling passed. But what helped me most was hanging out again with my friends. My parents got permission for them to spend the night with me in the hospital. We'd get takeout and watch movies. I knew my friends were relieved that I was alive and still
me.
I never tried to hide my scars from them. When I started joking about what happened and they saw I was okay with it, so were they.

On March 29, 2000, I was finally able to come home. My parents had moved my bedroom downstairs and had ramps built over stairs so I could get around easier. My medical costs were outrageous, but friends of our family held benefits to raise money for my bills and a wheelchair-accessible van. My dad's a show-business publicist, and a lot of his clients, including Christian Slater and Scott Wolf, pitched in to help. That was cool, but I don't want to be seen as “Nick the Angel” because of what happened. I'm still the same guy I was before I lost my legs and arms. I work out at the gym twice a week, I listen to Limp Bizkit and Korn, and I think Jessica Alba is totally hot.

I want to get back to my regular life, but it's tough when people don't treat me like a regular person. When I went back to my high school this fall, some kids weren't sure how to act around me. If some guys were making plans to see a violent movie, they wouldn't ask me to go. Girls would say
“Awww!”
and baby me—not think of me as someone to date. (Luckily, that's changing.) I'm also more independent than people think. I can write, eat with a fork, open doors, type on my laptop and even punch my friends. If little kids stare and ask questions, I just say something goofy like, “I misplaced my hands.”

Joking around is how I deal with things. And yeah, I do have times when I get frustrated or discouraged. But I've always loved a challenge, and this is the ultimate one. I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me or think I'm helpless—I've just had to change some of my goals, that's all. The way I see it, nothing's impossible. I want to get into wheelchair racing and compete in the Paralympics. I'm learning how to drive, and this summer I want to travel abroad, maybe to New Zealand or Sweden. So I can't button a shirt yet—but hey, all in good time.

Nick Springer
As told to Stephanie Booth

The Long Journey Home

C
onflict builds character. Crisis defines it.

Steven V. Thulon

I was like any other twelve-year-old. Girls had cooties. Nintendo and bike riding ruled my life. I had homework that I didn't always do. I won a few ribbons at track and field. I tried to stay up past my bedtime almost every night. I played baseball. I had a continuous craving for pizza. There was one thing that was different, though. I was really tired. I would come home and go to sleep at 4:30, get up and eat, and then go back to sleep until the next morning. My mom started thinking something might be wrong so she took me to our family doctor. He sent us for some blood work. We waited a week or so for the results. When the doctor's office called back, they wanted to do more tests. To this day, I don't know what they actually told my mom, but I just went to the hospital and they did their tests. After some more blood work, they came back and said they needed to do some other tests. One of them was a bone-marrow test. They took a big needle and stuck it into my lower back. I was out cold for the entire thing.

I honestly don't remember how people were acting around me during this time. I don't remember my mom or dad being upset or anything. I just thought they were normal tests they did for tired kids. The same night as the bone-marrow tests, I was admitted to the hospital. The next morning, the oncologist spoke to my mom and dad and told them that I had acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

I don't remember much of that morning—maybe it's better that way. The doctor and my mom and dad all came into the room, and the doctor explained to me that I had cancer. I just sat there and listened. I listened very closely. I didn't understand much until the doctor explained to me that I was going to lose all my hair. She said she was going to send a team of people to my school to tell all my classmates and my teachers that there was a student who had cancer. They said they would tell everyone that I wouldn't be feeling well and what they could do to help. They would tell them to treat me normally, she said, as if I wasn't sick. I was glad to hear about that because I was really scared about going to school with no hair. I didn't know what people would say or think. Looking back, I'm glad they did that.