My Nightmare...And How I Woke From It
By Joseph Reidy
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About this ebook
This book is about a journey that I went on into the catacombs of being in a hospital with a brain injury. This book is based on true events that happened to me. Doing a journey like this has certainly changed me for the better at the end of the day, I believe. There is just something about having a traumatic event happen to you, it changes you ultimately for the better. it can be a struggle though, but the trick of it is not to get discouraged. I hope this book helps you through whatever traumatic events have happened to you.
Joseph Reidy
I am a guy from a very small island off of the coast of Maine. I'm fairly funny, I wrote this book to help out people going through a brain injury. I've worked hard to recover from this brain injury, which is just what anyone doing this, going through a brain injury, needs to do. If I had known many of the things in this book beforehand, I feel as though it might have been somewhat of an easier time going through this. I have a lot of ideas of things that I would like to do, own a food truck, get into comedy, own a restaurant, seriously a lot of different ideas. If I've made it through this, I know I can do just about anything.
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My Nightmare...And How I Woke From It - Joseph Reidy
My Nightmare...
and How I Woke from It
Joseph Reidy
My Nightmare...and How I Woke from It
©2014 Joseph Reidy
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review.
Formatted by IRONHORSE Formatting
Published in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to my family.
Without you I don’t know if I could have done this. I also would like to thank Carol Moran-Brown, who helped so much with college after my accident.
Table of Contents
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE - The First Weeks After the Accident
CHAPTER TWO - I Thought I Was in a Dream
CHAPTER THREE - It’s Hard Just Being Human
CHAPTER FOUR - Learning Everything All Over Again
CHAPTER FIVE - People are the Most Valuable Thing
PREFACE
When I was eighteen years old, I was involved in a very serious accident—one that forever changed the course of my life.
My Nightmare ... and How I Woke from It is my personal account of that accident, and the thoughts and feelings I had about my life in the weeks and months that followed. I believe that, during that time, I changed from a boy into a man. And My Nightmare ... and How I Woke from It reveals how that happened.
The accident occurred on September 9, 2011, when I was a newbie freshman at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Looking back on that time, I really didn’t have a clue about most things. Yes, I had been to many countries and regions, including Germany, England, France (twice), Switzerland, Austria, Italy, the Caribbean, and different parts of the U.S. So I was worldly
in that way and I loved traveling. But I was pretty naïve and inexperienced otherwise, and I had lived a pretty sheltered life, growing up, as I did, on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine.
So what happened came as a huge jolt.
It was on a Friday, and I had been feeling really good that day, emotionally and every other way. I was adjusting well to college, and things just felt nice. I had finally gotten to a place where I belonged. But I was out doing something I shouldn’t have. I was getting beers and other types of alcohol for a bunch of people in my dormitory, worrying how I’d carry it all back to them. Soon I had much more serious worries.
As I was making my way back to my dorm, I was crossing the street when I was struck on my left side by a Volkswagen Jetta going 30 to 35 mph. The next moments were a total blur, but— bottom line—I soon was in the hospital. And that’s where I began writing this book—not only about the experience of recovery from my life-threatening accident, but, more important, to reveal how that experience changed me as a person.
CHAPTER ONE
The First Weeks After the Accident
The first week after the accident I was in a coma in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit of Fletcher Allen Health Care in Vermont, and they weren’t sure if I was going to live or die. They had to give me a lot of medications to control the inter-cranial pressures (ICP’s) in my head. (I was told this later, but I remember none of it.) I also was later told I had to have a thing called an Arctic Sun put on me. An Arctic Sun is a machine that runs cold water through pads placed on the body, to lower your temperature. In my case, my high temperature was caused by brain swelling; it’s a typical response to brain injury. Then I had a tracheotomy to help me breathe. I was then finally stable enough to have an external fixator put on my left leg, to hold the broken bones in place. I also had an external ventricular drain (EVD) put in my head to help relieve my high ICP’s, since the medications weren’t working to keep them down.
Twelve days after my accident, I opened my eyes for the first time. At first just my left eye opened, and then the next day both of them opened. At that point, they put my feeding tube (gastrostomy tube or G-tube) in. I had to have the G-tube to make sure I was getting enough nutrients.