Fragments From My Life

I'm discovering that Spring is the perfect time for reflection. Being limited with my mobility helps.

Sometimes life has a funny, cryptic way of connecting the dots in our lives. If I were to try to connect the dots on my own, I would never in a million years have been able to connect them in such a perfect way to ensure my continued survival after such a horrifically random accident. Simply put, when life breaks your leg, it opens up doors to help ease the incredible burden that experience creates. This blog will be an attempt to make sense of those connected dots up to this point and beyond.

Leading up to my accident, I felt like everything was going right for me. Only a year prior, I had decided to quit a job that I loved working at for the past ten years in order to try to accomplish a dream of mine, getting a bachelor’s degree. I had saved up, and with the go ahead from my wife, made the transition to a full-time student studying English and Computer Science at the local community college. Returning to school after 13 years was difficult, but I was excited to see how the skills I had gained in my work would transfer into helping me pass exams and classes. I went from being a college dropout to receiving my associate’s degree and transferring to the state college, the University of Utah, where I found myself on the Dean’s list.

My personal life felt equally unstoppable. I married the love of my life and girlfriend of 5 years, and we had taken an incredibly lucky honeymoon to Italy and Greece during a lull in the COVID pandemic. Since I wasn’t working, I decided to revisit another area of my life that I had missed since getting a full-time job: helping my dad build a huge addition to their house for a family friend. Being able to work with my hands while climbing scaffolding and rafters was one of my favorite hobbies, and I was living the good life.

Though everything felt like it was going well, there were certainly moments of great strife. During the fall of 2020, I contracted COVID. I thankfully avoided having to be hospitalized, but the virus did wipe out every bit of energy I had for nearly two months, along with the ability to smell or taste food, symptoms that still plague me even today. Though it was hell to live through, the experience would be instrumental in how I processed my accident years later. 

Later in the summer of 2021, my wife and I would experience our first moment of heartbreak since becoming newlyweds. After trying for some time to have a baby, we were finally successful. This success, however, would only last for about 6 weeks, when my wife called me crying. I was an hour and a half away driving my dad to the construction site to get ready for a concrete pour. I could hear the heartbreak in her voice before she told me that she had miscarried. I was devastated. I pulled off the side of the road and asked my brother-in-law to drive and took 5 minutes at the rear of the car, crying my heart out.

Even though the heartbreak was still fresh, and my wife’s body was still adjusting, we remained positive and hopeful. Finding out that miscarriages are a lot more common than people realize was helpful, as was having the support of family and friends. Thankfully, we were able to get pregnant a few months later, where our lives began to focus on preparing for our new addition. This leads into 2022, the year that had two defining exclamation points that have redefined nearly everything that I thought I knew.

I was full of anticipation for the new journey of fatherhood that I was going to be embarking on. This anticipation quickly turned into a shocking realization that reading about babies is very different from the real thing. And just when my wife and I had gotten comfortable in our new rhythm of parenting, I went and got in a horrible accident that reset everything in my life, including all of our successes with our son. My accident happened in a flash, and left me with tough questions: Why now? Why me? How do I put my best foot forward now? You will wince at the irony of how I’ve answered this.

My son was born in May, on a beautifully cloudy early morning that took both my wife and I’s breath away, and gave breath, life, to a brand-new little human. This was one of the happiest moments of my life up to that point and capped off a pregnancy that was filled with new and challenging moments—the most difficult of them being not knowing whether we were preparing for a little boy or a little girl. The patience I developed in not knowing the gender until birth helped me during the next phase of my life. 

Luckily, I wasn’t alone then or now. I was able to gain valuable insight from my parents and from my younger sister who had two little ones at the time, as well as the many resources my wife helped me find throughout the pregnancy. The path forward felt like a sleep-deprived heaven that I am able to now look fondly back on, even as exhausted as my wife and I were at the time. Other parents can certainly relate.

Three months, 12 days, and almost exactly 12 hours following my son’s birth, on a scorching summer day in August, I almost lost my life, on a day that also took my wife and I’s breath away, but for very different reasons. An accident happened that brutally broke my leg and took away my ability to do anything on my feet. How could I put my best foot forward, when that foot was only attached by muscle and tendon, and not bone? How could I be the father I desperately wanted to be, or the husband, the son, the son in law, the brother, the brother-in-law, the uncle? Not to mention my passion for being a student again. I felt all of these titles stripped from my person, and all that was left were dark leftovers of what once was, leaving me to have to rediscover who I was. I experienced what I’ve started to call reset trauma, where this accident has shaken me to my very core, forcing me to have to relearn everything from standing and walking, to thinking about each and every step I can now take with my hurt leg and processing how I can contribute in creative ways despite my new limitations.

My wife’s pregnancy and our decision to start a family, and the strange, almost prophetic happenstance of the day that would eventually lead to me lying on the side of the road, begging for someone, anyone, to save my life is where I’ll start. Much of my writing here in the beginning will be devoted to exploring the accident: what happened, what I was thinking, how I was saved, and how these split-second moments in my life have had such a lasting and powerful impact on my very being.

I am still processing my trauma, primarily because processing trauma is incredibly difficult! Grieving what I lost, what was taken from me has been a tough mental mountain I have had to climb every day since. From losing the ability to do any of my active hobbies, to working with my dad and carrying my son around to soothe him, to pushing my graduation goal, each part of my life was affected by this accident. Yet, I don’t just want to dwell on the negative, or cry “woe is me” to the skies looking for relief, because there have been so many moments since that day that have made me appreciate everything I still have. I am still vulnerable and nervous and anxious about opening up. I’m scared about what talking about what happened to me and what I’ve been through will lead to or what it will open up for me.  Even though I know it’s going to be tough, I feel I’m ready to talk through my experience in order to allow for more healing to happen as I continue to get stronger, both physically and mentally.

But I am also so, so excited to share my entire story with you all, to be able to brag about the best, most incredibly fantastic wife in the whole wide world, and to brag about having the strongest, most patient and loving little son in the whole wide world. Because without them, and without family and friends and the little bit of connection to the world that social media has offered me during my isolation, my journey would have been much, much longer.

And with a new appreciation for social media and the connection I’ve seen it foster, I'll be posting on here as well as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and potentially TikTok. This will cover many other aspects of my life, like who I was before the accident, and who I am now after almost 9 months of healing. I'll cover everything from dealing with PTSD to what it felt like to stand for the first time after nearly losing my leg, to what it's been like being the primary caretaker in today's society when neither I nor my baby can walk. I hope you'll check in, leave a comment if my writing sparked something inside you, share a feeling or just let it sit with you. One incredible insight I’ve noticed sitting inside my house without being able to walk, surrounded by the same four walls, for the past eight and a half months is that I am so happy for the world that I live in with all of you. Even as scary and terrifying and awful and unfair as it might be at times. Life is worth the hassle. Life is worth the fight.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be posting more soon.