My new life started on 6 june 1977. I was layed off from work at the papermill, and really enjoying {or so i thought} the time off from work. I had the worst headache that i've ever had all day, and was eating tylenol, aspirin and Ibuprofin like it was candy. It was getting close to the time to pick up my son at daycare and i figured i might feel better if i hopped in the shower real quick. The next thing i know i was waking up with those infamous words "just cough when i pull the tube out of your mouth".

Thank goodness i had not picked up my 2 year old son yet. My 11 year old daughter found me unconcious on the floor wedged between the wall and the toilet. She had to get our neighbor to call 911 from his house because our phone kept giving her a busy signal to 911. In the ER they were just getting ready to call time of death on me when my wife came in and screamed my name. It brought me back to the living! Thank god she was'nt delayed in traffic!!!!!!

I was out for 11 days in a coma. The doctors hardly gave me a chance to live much less recover. They told me later that i was a 1 in 300,000 man. that i should not have survived I had an anuerism in the hypothalamus region of the brain. Explained to me the hypothalamus is like the control center of a spaceship, that all info is relayed there and reactions sent from there.

I woke up paralyzed on my left side, thank the lord it did'nt last long and i have recovered 99.999 of normal use on the left side. The worse thing from it is i cant sit in traffic using a clutch in a manual transmission car. At least i can drive a car. I stayed in the first hospitol Mercy Fitzgerald for a total of about 2 1/2 weeks before getting accepted to Magee Rehabilitation hospitol in Center City Philadelphia. What a godsend that institution was. They gave me back my life as i know it now. I think of them daily, the caring staff, THE GREAT DOCTORS. My one regret for moving to charlotte North Carolina is not being able to visit with my old caregivers. They will allways hold a big chunk of my heart.

I even went back to work in November of 97 at the papermill. What a joke that was, i did'nt even realize how bad i was performing until i no longer worked there. I was a rotating shift mechanic. Just means that my hours rotated every six days or so to another shift, but the mill depended on me to keep it running or to repair anything that broke down. Ha ha ha, i shut the mill down every time i had a minor problem, having to call for help each time was humiliating. I went from a top notch mechanic to not being able to find my butt with my hands. I had to have someone assist me on the easiest repairs, I could'nt do it-things that i had done thousands of times over the years were beyond my grasp. But again i was lucky. Before they gave up on me and fired me the plant closed down, shut there doors forever.

They did for me what i could not admit. Without any saleable skills and many resumes sent out, i did'nt even get a bite for a job interview. So i refiled with Social Security and got my disability a year and two months after losing my job. The opportunity arose for me to realize an ambition that i had had for over twenty years, to move back to the south. My wife got a transfer within her bank and we purchased a home in charlotte, only 4 hours from my dads house in atlanta.

My ending is a happy one up to this point. I am alive, i still have my loving wife and family, and i found this caring group of tbi-ers that have been my lifeline for so long now. Sure i get grumpy thinking about how things used to be, but i get a lot of joy thinking of everything i have. I love you guys joeeeeeeeee

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