At the age of 11, I was playing baseball with friends and my best friend at the time. We would play in the parking lot of a church on asphalt. We would take turns finding the baseballs when they were hit over the tall fence that went around the parking lot. I was going to find a baseball that had been hit farther than any of us had previously. I borrowed a friend’s bike. I stood up on the pedals and was trying to get as much force as possible, to peel out. I had never had a problem when doing that. Instantly, the chain of the bike broke apart and I flipped off of the bike and landed on my left elbow. I heard a horrible crunching noise when that happened. I immediately told my friends that I had to go home as I had hurt my arm. You would never expect your best friend to do such a thing, but my best friend told everyone that I was exaggerating. He grabbed my wrist and bent my arm up and down and you could again hear crunching. With my good arm, I grabbed a baseball bat and I told everyone that if they touched me again, I would beat them down with the baseball bat. Now my best friend realized that I was not faking, as I was not a violent kid. I arrived at our apartment and my Mother opened the door. To this day, I don’t know why I let go of that arm, but as soon as I did, my arm bent backwards and my Mom’s face turned pale white. Somehow, I was able to put it back in place myself and the pain was terrible. Again, Mom just about fainted. Mom and her boyfriend ( later he was my stepfather ) took me to the hospital. My bicep and my forearm swelled up so bad that they said I looked like Popeye. They took a needle that was a few inches long and stabbed my arm. This was to let some blood out. The pillow was immediately soaked with blood. The doctor asked me if I wanted some mustard with that and I almost vomited. The doctor and my stepfather could not believe that I never cried the whole time. I did scream in pain, but I never cried a tear. My stepfather didn’t know until then that I was such a tough kid.
My arm was too bad to put in a cast, so they put it in a sling. It was broken in 3 places, not just one.
I was referred to a bone specialist as I needed to exercise my arm in order for me to regain use of the arm. The bone specialist said that a good outcome would be 60 percent usage of my left arm once it had healed. The doctor said that I probably would not be able to play baseball or basketball once it had healed. Months went by and the bone specialist leveled with my Mother. He said that I had not been healing fast enough and that they would most likely have to rebrake my arm in order to have better flexibility in my arm. I returned to the bone specialist and he was fully prepared to rebrake my arm, however when he was testing how many degrees I could bend my arm, he was astonished. He asked me what I had been doing that would allow me to have healed so well. I told him that I had just been doing the exercises that he had told me to do and Mom and I had been praying. The bone specialist was beside himself. He said over and over that it was impossible. Without braking my arm again, it was simply impossible that I could have healed that well. When I saw him again, as he wanted to see how I was doing, I explained how my broken arm had become stronger than my good arm. I could lift heavier things with my left arm. He just could not believe it and all he could do is shake his head.
At the age of 5, I was play boxing with my biological father. We were using what were called “Soccer Boppers”, which were huge inflatable boxing gloves. I had come up with a way to make it appear that my Dad had dealt a strong blow, by doing a backward somersault when I was punched. I had done this many times, but one day I had done this and I instantly had a horrible feeling in my neck. I could not turn my head in either direction and one shoulder became higher that the other shoulder. My parents took me straight to the hospital. The doctors had xrays done. The primary doctor came to my hospital room with xray pictures to show my Mother. The doctor took his time breaking the bad news to my Mother. The doctor told my Mother to be sure that I would not move my head at all. He explained that if I did move my head, I could suffer temporary to permanent paralysis. My Mother stayed with me, but had to leave after visiting hours. I was only in the hospital for a couple of days when my Mother came to visit me first thing in the morning. When she was walking down the hallway toward my room, what she saw nearly made her faint. I was running down the hallway pulling my room mate ( a black boy that was my age ) in a Red Flyer toy wagon. Mom yelled at me and told me to stop running that moment. The nursing staff panicked as well. The nurses called the doctor to have him check me over. They did another series of xrays. The doctors were stunned. The doctors now showed my Mother the new xrays. These xrays were perfect, there were no issues whatsoever. Mom kept trying to get an answer as to how my condition could change that fast and the doctors were just as shocked as her. We would never again play with the Soccer Boppers.
When I was a teenager, I was in the back of a Ford Escort GT car. My best friend at the time was driving and another friend was riding shotgun in the front seat. We were coming back from Chicago on highway 80/94 East. We saw police cars in a line with their lights flashing up ahead of us. They were on the right shoulder of the highway. They didn’t have anyone pulled over, so we knew that something wasn’t right.
We suddenly hit a large sheet of black ice. The car immediately started to spin. We had spun 2 complete times. The headlights of the semi behind us flashed across the front windshield twice. Just before the third rotation, we all yelled “Goodbye” as we knew the next rotation would have the semi driving right through us. However, it was as if some huge hand grabbed the car, moved it completely sideways and stopped it in place on the left shoulder. We ended up right next to the concrete divider facing the correct direction.
It took us several minutes to “unfreeze”. We had no idea how we could have been alive. It took several minutes before we were able to communicate. I was still bear hugging the seat in front of me.
After all of this, we decided to grab something to eat somewhere in order to calm down.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a soda/pop warehouse. I loaded 24 pack cases of soda/pop onto pallets that were then loaded onto semi trucks. At the beginning of one day, we were told that we had a bigger order than normal and that we needed to step up our game to make it happen. I was assigned to load several pallets of product in a very short time period. I was working my butt off. Once guy had come around and told me that I needed to pick up the pace. I was already at a very fast pace. All that I remember was being in the middle of moving a 24 pack case to the other pallet. The next thing I knew was that I was on my back when I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. I looked around to see if someone had tripped me, but nobody was near me. I then realized that something was really wrong. Then I saw half of my team running toward me. One guy gave me smelling salts as he obviously knew that I had passed out. They picked me up and took me outside where I immediately began to hyperventilate. Now I was scared to death. I had not control at all of my breathing. The ambulance took about 30 minutes to get to me. They of course put me on oxygen and they rushed me to the hospital. When at the hospital, nurses were frantic in finding a doctor to assist. When the nurses brought the doctor to see me, he still asked where the patient was. They explained that it was me. The doctor said that it was impossible to be me as I was conscious. The doctor immediately told the nurses that they were to do anything to keep me conscious, even if it meant slapping me in the face. He said that if I were to go to sleep, I would not wake up. The doctor told me that he has no explanation of how I was conscious, but he repeated that I cannot go to sleep. He told me that even after waiting for 30 minutes for the ambulance, the ambulance then taking 30 minutes to get me to the hospital, that I still had that much carbon monoxide in my system, he said that it was nothing short of a miracle that I was alive let alone conscious. The doctor told me that I might be put in a doctor’s journal as my experience there was something that was not supposed to be possible. He said that at minimum I should have been in a coma. Osha then inspected the warehouse. It turned out that the ventilation systems had been shut off on purpose, which is why I was deathly sick from the carbon monoxide poisoning. All of the management at that facility were fired and I’m sure that there were fines as well.
At the age of 5 or 6, my biological Father was supposed to be picking my Mother up at night school. When she was not outside waiting for us, my Father had very paranoid thoughts. He was driving us home when these thoughts caused him to slam on the brakes. The car was a big Oldsmobile that was made of solid metal. The car behind us hit us so hard that we took out about 15 feet of metal guard rail. The trunk was crushed so bad that it was crushed all the way to the bottom of the rear windshield. The car was completely totaled. A policeman was immediately on the scene. The policeman came to see how we were doing and noticed that I did not have my seatbelt on. My Father had his seatbelt on and he still had to be rushed to the hospital with whiplash. The policeman looked at me like he was looking at a ghost. This was because normally in that type of accident, I should have either hit the dashboard or been thrown through the windshield. I did not budge in my seat and I was perfectly fine. So Dad went to the hospital and the policeman took me to pick Mom up at night school. Her class just ran long that night. While the policeman discussed the accident and that I didn’t have a seatbelt on, my Mother could not believe it. She said that around the time of the accident, she had been praying for my protection. Mom would later tell me that I needed to give my guardian angel a break as I kept him busy.
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