Blind, but Now I See

By Blake Adams

I was going blind while serving in the United States Air Force, first in one eye and then the other. Seven surgeries would be needed to restore my vision. After completion of the fifth surgery, my life started spiraling out of control. I was diagnosed with brain cancer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490866666

Blake Adams

The journey I was unwillingly placed on changed me and made me see things from a different perspective.  When the odds seemed to be against me and all hope was lost, I turned to God to guide me.  It has been thirteen years full of victories and heartbreak.

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Copyright © 2015 Blake Adams.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-6665-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-6667-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-6666-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900726

WestBow Press rev. date: 02/09/2015

CONTENTS

Chapter 1     The Beginning of Real Trouble

Chapter 2     The Shack

Chapter 3     Charlie

Chapter 4     Green House

Chapter 5     Out to Sea

Chapter 6     Name Change

Chapter 7     Apples

Chapter 8     The Tow Truck

Chapter 9     Bus Wreck

Chapter 10   Fire

Chapter 11   Turning Point

Chapter 12   The Furniture Factory

Chapter 13   Regrets

Chapter 14   Kripsy Kreme Donuts

Chapter 15   Joining the Air Force

Chapter 16   Good Deeds

Chapter 17   The Ex

Chapter 18   Moving On

Chapter 19   Eyes

Chapter 20   Meeting Ashley

Chapter 21   The Fog

Chapter 22   Custody Battles

Chapter 23   San Antonio

Chapter 24   The Post Office

Chapter 25   The Bad Dream

Chapter 26   Surgery

Chapter 27   Finding Our Place

Chapter 28   An Ominous Cloud on the Horizon

Chapter 29   Who’s My Dad?

Chapter 30   Ambulance

Chapter 31   Hunter

Chapter 32   Now I See

Chapter 33   My Thoughts

I dedicate this book to my wonderful wife.

ONE

The Beginning of Real Trouble

M Y WIFE AND I SAT in the doctor’s office awaiting his arrival. I’d just had my MRI one week earlier, and there we sat. Mere seconds seemed like minutes, and minutes seemed like hours. We sat in silence, staring at the walls. Our nerves were shot by the sheer bulk of uncertainty that lay before us. We really didn’t have much to say. We had talked and talked and talked about it all week long. We had discussed all the possibilities. In fact, I was getting sick of talking about it. There was really nothing either of us could do. We just had to wait and see the results of the MRI. Something was seriously wrong with me. I needed help, and I needed it bad. Something was going haywire in my brain. I knew I couldn’t fix it myself. I just hoped and prayed that whatever was going on could be easily fixed.

I heard the doorknob rattle, and then the door slowly cracked open. The doctor came in holding an envelope; the contents would most certainly change our lives. The big question was: in what way? Was it going to be life threatening or life changing? We had so many unanswered questions. The possibilities were endless; it was way too much to absorb.

The doctor told us I had a tumor. Over the next few minutes, he went on to say that the tumor was the size of a boiled egg. Furthermore, he was not sure whether it was malignant or benign. He explained that part of the tumor could be benign and another part could be high-grade malignant because of the large size of the tumor.

We had three choices, none of which seemed too appealing. The first was to do nothing and certainly die. Second, I could have a small hole drilled through my skull to get a small sample of the tumor to biopsy. My last choice was the scariest of all: have a big hole the size of a golf ball drilled into my skull, and try to get the whole thing. The doctor explained to us that getting it all would be the only way to determine what exactly was there, how serious it was, and, most importantly, how to treat it.

I looked over at my wife, and tears were pouring down her face. Her tears did not go unnoticed by my doctor. He was so caring and quickly offered my wife a tissue. His caring demeanor was why we had chosen him in the first place. I felt as comfortable with this doctor as a man could be in my situation. He had what they call in medicine a great bedside manner. He told us we didn’t have to make a decision right away. Thankfully, we had a few months to think about our options. Ashley had made it abundantly clear to me that she would accept whatever decision I made and would support me in that decision.

I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t just start chemotherapy and radiation to get rid of it. Why did they have to go into my head? The thought of it freaked me out. I told my wife I guessed this was it. I wasn’t going to let them do it. I was just going to let it kill me. At least then, I thought, I would die in one piece without a hole in my head.

However, weird things started happening to me. I experienced heavy sweats all over my body—so bad that they drenched my clothes—along with tingling down my left side. Most worrisome were my out-of-body experiences. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. The path that brought me to this point began with my earliest memories in a shack near the train tracks.

TWO

The Shack

M Y MOM WAS IN CHARGE of the checkbook, but unfortunately, she was not paying the bills. Dad just assumed that his wife and mother of five was doing the responsible thing, what was best for the family, but sadly, that was not the case. By the time Dad figured out what was happening, a lot of damage had already been done. The landlord had no choice but to evict Mom and Dad. Dad never questioned Mom, but now she had a lot of explaining to do. He had no idea where all his money had been going.

Dad had to scramble around to find us a new home. It wasn’t much, but it was the best he could find under the circumstances. It was really small—way too small for the seven of us—but we were young and not hard to please. The house was really close to the railroad tracks. Day after day, trains rumbled by the back of the house.

I have both good and bad memories of living in the small house. It was the source of my first real memories. I stepped on my first bee while running around outside barefoot, and that would be the last time I went outside without shoes.

I loved hearing Dad sing when his friends came over to play guitar. It was a real treat for me. It cracked me up when Dad sang one particular song. It was called Big Bug in My Beer. I remember laughing uncontrollably every time he sang it.

My first Easter memory came from there; however, it was not a pleasant one.

On Easter morning, we kids woke up excited and ran to the front room to see what Peter Cottontail had left us. There was a basket waiting for each of us. We wasted no time in tearing into them to see what was inside. Mine had candy and a paddleball. We each got one, and we played with them most of the day, but that’s not what I remember most about that day.

The day would get progressively worse from that point forward. We all went outside to play, and what we saw was too hard for our little minds to comprehend. It was all too cruel, something I wish I’d never seen. Outside in plain sight in the middle of the yard was a dead bunny rabbit. It looked like it had been attacked by something. To this day, I wonder how it came to be that of all the places the rabbit could have died, it had died right there in our yard on Easter day. It was almost as if it had been intentionally placed there for us to see. It was way too much of a coincidence.

Another memory is of my brother Frank. One afternoon he decided he was going to remove a large beehive off the roofline of the house. It was packed full of bees. He took a few swats at it with a stick before he finally hit it. The hive fell from the roof and landed dead center on his arm. He was stung hundreds of times. I know it must have hurt badly, but he was okay. It was a good thing he was not allergic to bees.

Mom had forbidden us kids to go anywhere near the railroad tracks. She told us all kinds of stories to put fear in us. One such story was about hobos and convicts who rode the train, and we never knew where they might get off. Mom claimed that some of these convicts were on the run from the police and that they might try to hurt or kidnap us. She would say anything to keep us off the tracks.

Our neighbor’s dog had a bad habit of sleeping on the tracks, and one night the dog was hit and killed by a train. I have to admit that I became very nervous about those tracks and was reluctant to go near them. I was even scared of being outside by myself. I was scared that a hobo or a convict was going to break into our home and kill us all.

One of the more pleasant memories I have took place in the front yard. A cherry tree grew there. We all loved to eat the cherries. Out of the blue one day, my older brothers foolishly decided to climb the tree. They must have known that those limbs could not support their weight. I was standing there when I heard a large crack come from the tree. Then suddenly a large limb came crashing to the ground with my brothers on it. It barely missed me. We were no longer allowed to go anywhere near the tree—or what was left of it.

It was cool when Dad took us kids down to Sherman’s gas station for ice cream and candy. It’s amazing how vivid my memory is of those days so long ago. I liked to get a Brown Bear popsicle. It was vanilla ice cream on a stick, dipped in chocolate. Sherman’s was a kid’s wonderland. It had every different kind of candy—more than anyone could ever imagine. From front to back, the walls were covered with cool stuff: bubble gum and candy bars of all kinds. They even had toys. I could have spent the entire day there.

Mom worked at one of our town’s industries, Roman Mills. She had a great job. I know this because for Christmas that year, we all got these cool, handheld radios, courtesy of the plant. Roman not only treated their employees extremely well, but they also wanted to make sure all the children of all the employees were taken care of at Christmas-time. Roman was a highly sought-out place to work. Most of the townspeople had submitted applications to get jobs there, but the company was extremely picky about who was hired.

Mom’s great job didn’t last long. A cigarette vending machine in the break room of the plant had broken. It was dispensing cigarettes without money being put into the machine. Mom could not resist the urge to steal as many packs as she could hide. I guess she didn’t hide them very well. She was caught red-handed before she made it to the exit and was fired on the spot. At the time, Dad was trying to give up smoking, and Mom knew it. She sat there in the living room and smoked one cigarette after another just to make him mad. She was good at pushing his buttons.

Things started getting bad. Dad was tired of watching us kids while Mom was out doing who-knew-what with who-knew-whom. I honestly believe that she hadn’t been ready to get married, and she certainly had no business trying to take on a family. She hadn’t gotten all her partying out of her. That was how we’d ended up in the shack to begin with.

Dad was fed up with Mom going out night after night, and he formulated a plan to find out what she was up to. He suspected that she was cheating on him, but he had to see it with his own eyes to believe it. He was driving himself crazy, wondering what she was up to when she left the house at night. He hoped his suspicions were wrong. He hoped she was just out with her sisters having fun, which was something he could forgive her for.

His plan was to let her go out on one particular night, just like every other night, and wait thirty minutes before going out. He drove up and down the streets looking for her car. Then he drove to all the hotels in the area; there were only three at the time. He eventually saw her car parked in front of the Fountain Motel just outside of town. Charlie’s car was parked right next to hers.

Dad was not stupid. He wasn’t going to start knocking on doors. He already knew whom she was with. It was a small town, and people talked. Dad came back home and waited, and the longer he waited, the madder he got. Dad was never known to be a patient man. I’m sure he was furious by the time she got home.

Sometime around midnight, Mom arrived back home. Dad was waiting by the door, and he had a few beers in him. Later that night, I heard something I wish I’d never heard. I had almost fallen asleep, when turmoil broke loose. Screams poured out of the small bedroom where they slept. There would be no sleep for us kids on that night.

Mom and Dad argued all night long. At the peak of the argument, Mom was screaming, Help! Help! Help! We kids were scared and didn’t know what to do. No one was coming to her rescue. We lived a ways away from any other home. Julie and Frank were the oldest siblings, but neither of them were big enough or brave enough to take on Dad, especially if he was drinking. The arguing was nothing new to us; it occurred night after night. But this was different. Mom had never screamed for help before. I can’t speak for anyone else, but that night still gives me the chills. As for me, between the arguing and the train noise, I guess I had taught myself to block it all out. At least that was what the doctor said when Mom took me to him.

Within the next few days, after Dad had left for work, Mom rounded up all of us kids, gathered some belongings, and led us across the yard to the car. She drove for about ten minutes, eventually stopping at a trailer park. She moved herself and us into a trailer there.

A man lived right next door to us in a trailer of his own. Mom seemed to know him, and I could tell that she had known him for a while. We didn’t need to be rocket scientists to figure out that this was Mom’s boyfriend. Although it was never formally announced to us, we all knew that this was our new home. At some point, we learned that the man’s name was Charlie.

THREE

Charlie

O VER TIME, WE ALL GOT to know Charlie. We kind of knew that he was the new father figure in our lives. We all just went with the flow. Even though he lived next door, we rarely got to go over there, but when we did, it was a treat. He kept his place very nice, much nicer than ours.

I wondered why Charlie had his own trailer. My theory is that maybe Mom or Charlie hadn’t finalized their divorces from their previous marriages. Another theory I have is that there was just not enough space for all of us in one trailer. Or maybe his trailer was his man cave, a place of his own to escape the chaos of five kids. My last theory is that Mom and Charlie were taking it slow, maybe to let us bond naturally with Charlie. Mom was still trying to wrap up things with Dad in her own way. Mom’s way was to benefit herself and to leave Dad in the worst possible way.

Mom sold the house by the railroad right out from under Dad. He came home from work one day, and a Sold sign was displayed in the yard. When Dad questioned Mom about it, she simply said, I needed the money. My Dad was rendered homeless. Thankfully, Dad had a friend he could move in with long enough to find another place. Dad eventually settled into a single-wide trailer. It didn’t look like much from the outside.

Meanwhile, we were adjusting to our new home in a different trailer park. The trailer park was surrounded by trees, which gave us kids a place to play. And play we did. We explored and played games with our newly made friends.

One day I wandered off into the woods alone. I had been in the woods many times with my older brothers and my new friends, so I didn’t think it was a big deal. I walked and walked, curious to see what treasures and secret spots I could discover. I was looking for something cool; I wasn’t sure what that was, but I was sure I would recognize it if I saw it. I didn’t have a care in the world as I crossed fields and reentered the tree line.

Eventually, I’d had enough and decided to head back, but there was a problem. Everything started looking the same to me, and I had no idea how to get back to the trailer. I thought I was walking in the right direction, and I felt that soon I’d pop out of the trees and see the trailer park, but that was not to be. I was clearly lost.

I just kept moving. Hours had passed, and