And now, after ten years of normal life, my parents found themselves back in the same place with a different child. After two and a half years of chemotherapy treatments, spinal taps, and bone marrow biopsies, my little sister finally walked out of the hospital happy, healthy, and cancer free. Ten years earlier, they had entered the same building on the ground floor after my sister was diagnosed with leukemia at age three. My parents were no strangers to this hospital. After yet another seizure-my third of the day-I was put into a medically induced coma and placed on a ventilator. My broken bones needed to be fixed, but I was in no condition to undergo surgery. By this time, the swelling in my brain had become so severe that I was having repeated post-traumatic seizures. When my mom and I landed on the roof of the hospital, a team of nearly twenty doctors and nurses sprinted onto the helipad and wheeled me into the trauma unit. After passing my siblings off to family and friends, he drove to Cincinnati to meet my mother. He choked back tears as he explained to my sister that he would miss her eighth-grade graduation ceremony that night. While my mother rode with me in the helicopter, my father went home to check on my brother and sister and break the news to them. I remained unconscious and unable to breathe on my own as she held my hand during the flight. My mother, who had arrived at the hospital a few moments before, climbed into the helicopter beside me. The stretcher rattled on a bumpy sidewalk as one nurse pushed me along while another pumped each breath into me by hand. I was rolled out of the emergency room doors and toward the helipad across the street. As the doctors hurried to supply me with oxygen, they also decided the local hospital was unequipped to handle the situation and ordered a helicopter to fly me to a larger hospital in Cincinnati. I struggled with basic functions like swallowing and breathing. Shortly after arriving, my body began shutting down. Minutes later, I was carried out of school and taken to the local hospital. My body was unable to handle the rapid swelling in my brain and I lost consciousness before the ambulance arrived. “Patti,” I said casually, ignoring the fact that it had taken me ten seconds to remember my own mother’s name. “Who is the president of the United States?” When we arrived at the nurse’s office, she asked me a series of questions. Nobody realized that every minute mattered. Random hands touched my sides, holding me upright. My teacher looped his arm around my shoulder and we began the long walk to the nurse’s office: across the field, down the hill, and back into school. Shocked and confused, I was unaware of how seriously I had been injured. I used it to plug the stream of blood rushing from my broken nose. One of my classmates took the shirt off his back and handed it to me. I looked down and noticed spots of red on my clothes. When I opened my eyes, I saw people staring at me and running over to help. In a fraction of a second, I had a broken nose, multiple skull fractures, and two shattered eye sockets. Immediately, a wave of swelling surged throughout my head. The collision sent the soft tissue of my brain slamming into the inside of my skull. The bat smashed into my face with such force that it crushed my nose into a distorted U-shape. I have no memory of the moment of impact. As my classmate took a full swing, the bat slipped out of his hands and came flying toward me before striking me directly between the eyes. ON THE FINAL day of my sophomore year of high school, I was hit in the face with a baseball bat.
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