You Know What’s Crazy? I’ll Tell You What’s Crazy.™
With so many seniors waiting for college entrance forms; I remembered writing this.
It’s a daunting task to write the perfect essay that gets you noticed at your dream school.
How do you do it? What do you write about?
“I don’t know what to say, dad.” he said to me sadly.
I wanted to put myself in that position, so I wrote this from my son’s point of view.
We didn’t use this essay. He wrote his own. Something entirely different. But if I was my son, which I’m not. This is what I would have written to get into college:
LIFE’S CRAZY COLLEGE ENTRANCE ESSAY
I’m standing on the observation platform of the Eifel Tower. It is summer time and the evening breeze is cool and refreshing. Below me I can hear the honking of cars barreling down narrow streets. The lights of the city are brilliant, like a kaleidoscope plugged into a car battery.
It’s no wonder they call Paris the City of Lights.
Just then a pretty girl smiles at me. My French is limited so I smile back.
I lean back onto the railing and exhale, wondering how things got so good after a year that made me cry more than once.
The pain in my head started in the summer time, between my sophomore and junior year at Battle Ground Academy.
At first the pain was manageable.
I was working as a life guard at the community pool.
I was spending eight hours a day outside in the sun. I thought I had a head ache caused by too much sun infused with the constant aroma of chlorine.
But as the summer crept by, the pain increased.
Was it the flu? Was it a migraine?
Whatever it was, it was growing worse, by the day.
I sat at the pool and could barely blow my whistle.
The sound of kids shrieking was piercing, like a harpoon ripping into my thoughts.
I wore dark glasses to hide my tears.
What was happening to me?
My parents took me to the family doctor. He took blood and urine and didn’t like the enigmatic results.
He recommended I go to a headache specialist.
The doctor says I have a static migraine which means a headache that doesn’t stop.
“great,” I think to myself. “most people get a migraine that subsides after a few hours or even few days. I get the static migraine that only one in a million get.”
It’s hard to pin point, but It all seems to start unraveling at this point. It’s like I’m in movie and this is a slow motion car crash where metal crumples and glass shatters.
The pain has become so intense, it’s as if a jack hammer is inside my head, ripping apart every neuron in my skull.
I look in the mirror and see a shadow boy. My eyes are cloudy and my cheeks puffy. I am pale and the world I knew seems to be receding into a fog.
I can’t sleep at night and I find that I am subconsciously forcing my hand into a fist crushing the invisible, but very real pain that is slow debilitating me.
What starts out as a nuisance and an adversion to light has degenerated into a horror film.
I am like a zombie roaming the halls of my own house. It is dark and I cannot sleep.
When I do put my head on the pillow, and I close my eyes, all I see are electrical bolts of pain that surge across my frontal lobe like a rolling thunder head.
Sitting still hurts. Talking hurts. Thinking hurts.
So at night, I walk, aimlessly, in the dark.
My cats Simba and Bengal follow me. They are up anyway, and they think this is the greatest thing in the world.
“Hey a new friend,” they must think.
But it is the worst thing in the world.
I can’t stand the pain and I often cry wondering why this is happening.
The doctor was sure the drugs he put me on would break the headache.
They don’t.
But he’s cocky and soon I am at Vanderbilt’s Children’s Hospital.
The colors of the hospital project a positive atmosphere.
Wall paper border of smiling animals and cheerful scenes are everywhere.
But these decorations cannot filter out the reality that is taking place all around me.
From my hospital bed, looking up from my sickened state, all I see are dots in the ceiling tile. My arm is numb and bandaged. Somewhere a large needle is in one o my veins. I trace the plastic tube leading from my arm to a plastic bottle. I am constantly groggy and angry.
I want them to fix me.
Why won’t someone fix me?
The door of the room opens and the sounds of the hallway pour in.
A nurse wearing pastel colors comes in.
She has a stethoscope and a tray full of needles and other medical equipment.
I barely acknowledge her existence.
These hospital workers are like insects coming and going.
Sometimes it is a familiar face, some times it is a new nurse.
It doesn’t matter. They all eventually hurt me, stabbing me with something cold or hot.
They inject me with medicine that burns going into my vein. If I’m lucky it makes me fall asleep. If I’m unlucky, it makes me vomit.
The pain is diminishing, but the end result is a comatose patient, barely able to see through his own eyes.
I sense my mother and father in the room with me.
My mom has been by my side almost non stop.
My dad comes and goes. I’m not sure what time it is anymore.
It’s either day time or night time.
The television is always on, and it seems like it never displays anything but the Discovery channel.
Episodes about crab fishing in Alaska fill my delusional mind.
The doctor is less convincing with each passing day that his new treatment does not succeed.
He continues to tell my parents that if we can break the migraine, it should go away for good.
He tries drugs, both established, and some that are experimental.
Nothing works.
He orders a spinal tap to measure my cranial fluid.
Normally this is done without general anesthesia.
My doctor orders me put to sleep, thinking that this will break the migraine.
I’m scared.
I don’t want a needle pushed into my back.
My parents assure me that it will be ok.
I’m not sure what to believe anymore.
I’m no longer in control of my own life.
I am a human pin cushion for the nurses and a human guinea pig for a headache doctor that is trying to prove all the doctors at Vanderbilt that his diagnosis was the right one.
I remember waking up in the recovery room.
I am dizzy, and my parents tell me that I say many funny things.
Sadly, It’s one of the few positive moments they can recall.
The results, indicate elevated pressure.
My parents think this could be the answer.
Sadly the headache expert says this proves nothing.
After a week of jabbing and poking and promising us results, the headache expert sends us home.
My mother exploded like an emotional time bomb. With tears racing down her cheeks, she shook her fist at the doctor and gave him a tongue lashing that no one in the hospital dared to do.
She told him how he gave us hope and promised to fix him and now he was giving up on me.
He tried to tell her she was wrong, but I mostly remember him standing there, his head slightly down, listening to her rant.
He politely dismissed us, giving us medicine and hypodermic needles and instructions on how my mom needed to inject me.
It was awful. Awful for me. Awful for her.
The shots made me sick to my stomach and I still was in so much pain I could barely speak.
My thoughts formed slowly, oozing out of my mouth in a slow, gravely mumble.
After a while it was too hard to think; way too hard to talk.
I went home and sunk into a deeper state of despair. My head was filled with pain augmented by hopelessness.
What started as a headache in May had blossomed into a full blown debilitating illness.
Life was slowly passing me by.
I was a spectator in a drowsy, pain filled train.
I would look out the window from the shadows of my darkened room.
The light hurt my eyes which hurt my head.
I was sleeping less and less.
The circles under my eyes were so pronounced, I looked like I was wearing theatrical make up.
I swallowed medicine like jelly beans.
So many milligrams of this. So many milligrams of that.
I swallowed so many pills that my gag reflex just quit. It didn’t care anymore either.
I had long ago quit my life guarding job.
I had long ago stopped hanging out with my buddies.
I looked at the calendar as day after day of what was the longest summer of my life began to unravel.
Like a slithering serpent, the calendar coiled around my neck, beginning to choke the life out of me.
What had started in early May had now dragged on for 2 straight months.
The world’s longest, never ending migraine was going to force me to miss the start of football camp.
Normally I would be bitching about running wind sprints in the heat of a Tennessee summer.
Well, I would give anything right now to be pain free and sweating with my teammates in the nauseating heat.
That was not going to happen.
The serpent like calendar kept turning, circling my wind pipe, closing out normal existence.
Forget football camp, I was now in danger of missing the start of my Junior Year.
My Junior Year!!
How could this be happening?
I cried. The pain and the anxiety and the hopelessness.
I slept late into the day when I could sleep.
At night, when it was dark and the house quiet, I roamed the halls.
I moved slowly waiting for my shadow to meet me in the moonlight.
One evening, I couldn’t take it anymore.
The pain was nail being punched through my eye.
“AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH,” I screamed.
Before I knew it, my right arm was firing forward.
My fist was clenched. My teeth gnashing against each other.
I’ll show this pain who is boss.
“WHACK”
There was a crack that filled the still night air.
My cats scrambled, their claws digging into the hardwood floor.
Ratta-tat-tat
I slowly pulled my fist back.
What was that sound?, I thought to myself.
Was it bone shattering or wood cracking?
I didn’t really care.
I felt the pain swell into my fist like a tidal surge.
For the first time in a long time, my headache did not preoccupy my every thought.
I held my hand and smiled. I hadn’t smiled in a while.
For at least a few minutes, my head was clear, now filled with the stinging realization that I couldn’t bend my hand.
The next day I told my mom what had happened.
She was very displeased.
My hand was swollen like a rubber glove stuffed with pudding.
Of course she dragged me off to the doctor.
The Xray confirmed that I had a hair line fracture in my wrist.
The doctor was mad at me. My mom and dad were made at me.
I was sort of mad at me as well.
You see my headache had returned like a piston boring though a cylinder block. And now my hand was wrapped by a thick cast that made it hard to do anything. And it hurt like hell too!
The calendar serpent sunk its fangs into my jugular in late July.
That’s the day that school started and it was clear that I would not be starting Junior Year with the kids I had grown up with.
My parents called BGA and told them that I would have to miss the beginning of school.
BGA hierarchy was very concerned.
On the first day; all my friends texted me.
“where you been?”
“when are you coming to class?”
A day turned into a week.
A week turned into a month.
The texting grew less regular.
I was suddenly just the sick kid at home that nobody remembered.
Football games went on without me.
School dances somehow took place in my absence.
I stared at my Green cast.
My younger brother and sister had signed it.
My best friend Jared signed it in letters ten times normal.
He did that so it would fill up the cast and make it look like I had more friends.
Man that is sad.
Suddenly my arm was a symbol for everything that was wrong.
One lonely oversized signature.
Though I was losing hope, My parents never quit.
My mother found another nuero-expert and we began seeing her.
Unlike the migraine expert, she thought the cranial pressure results were revealing.
She put me on some crazy sounding medicine that high altitude climbers take for high altitude to reduce cranial pressure.
I took the pills that looked like all the other pills.
I wouldn’t work. I was sure of that.
Nothing would work.
Then a funny thing happened.
A few weeks went by and the serpent began to relinquish its hold on me.
I felt the cobwebs clearing and a slow diminishing of pain.
Suddenly I could go into the light without my skin burning like a vampire.
I felt a smile periodically cross my lips.
After a few months, the pain was gone.
It was like a revelation.
The doctor can’t be sure, but she now believes I had encypholitis.
I got stronger every day.
My friends began to visit more and the text messages began to flow again.
“Glad you feel better”
“Can’t wait to see you.”
From a denizen of the dark to 16 year old kid.
The transformation was completing.
I probably could have gone back to BGA in December for the 2nd semester, but I was so far behind, my parents and the doctors felt the stress might cause a relapse.
I wanted to go back. I was ready.
It didn’t work out that way.
My parents decided to wait till next year and do the 11th grade then.
I was without pain, but I was depressed.
I wanted to go to school. I wanted to be with my friends.
Then my best friend’s mother suggested we go to Europe for 17 days in June.
The trip was expensive and my dad told me that if I could raise some of the money, then he’d send me.
I had just turned 17. I should have been in high school. Instead, I was out looking for a job.
I filled out a hundred applications on line and in person. I went to coffee shops and retail stores and supermarkets.
For 3 weeks I hit the streets, just as the economy was spiraling out of control. My applications were being considered with those of candidates twice my age.
They say when it rains it pours….
Suddenly I had a job at Burgers and Cream and at the local movie theater.
I was working 2 jobs making minimum wage hours, but it was beginning to add up.
By june I had made 3,000 dollars and I was with a bunch of students from Williamson County jetting to Europe.
In just a year I went from zombie pin cushion to an American Teenager returning a French Girl’s smile on the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Wow.
Life is unpredictable and awesome.
I think that I have had a life experience that few applicants have.
I know that my ordeal has made me a stronger person and a better student.
I appreciate life, now, for its opportunities and its second chances.
Accept me into your university, and I promise you this, you will be getting a student who cherishes life and knows what it means to sieze an opportunity and be grateful the time we have.
My son is now a junior at the University of Alabama, studying geology with an emphasis in oil exploration.
Life’s Crazy™