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7
ON COURAGE
One of the most courageous things you can do is identify yourself, know who you are, what you believe in and where you want to go.
Shiela Murray Bethel
The Birth of an Adult
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The doctors started to rush into the room. The delivery was going smoothly, but to me it felt like hysteria. The walls were a chalky gray like the wall of a jail cell. It wasn’t the best setting for Jamie’s labor, but it would have to do. Jamie was only a seventeen-year-old junior in high school. And now she was giving birth. She lay back in pain. Her only movements consisted of shaking her head from side to side, in an effort to escape the pain.
I took Jamie’s hand, comforting her and trying to soothe her agony. Her eyes opened, and she looked at me. Our eyes met, and suddenly I felt every emotion I have ever known. I always knew Jamie would challenge me to better myself; however, I didn’t think it would entail being her sidekick during her pregnancy.
All this began on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1997. I sat in Jamie’s basement awaiting the urgent news she had to tell me. She collapsed onto the couch and told me how she had broken up with her boyfriend, Eric, who had left the country to study abroad. This came as something of a relief, although I did my best not to show it. I didn’t think Eric, or any other guy she had dated, was good enough for her. Okay, I’ll admit it, I was—how should I put it—a little jealous. But I’d convinced myself we were better off as friends, anyway. And now she needed one.
Then the real news came: She was six weeks pregnant. Tears rolled down her face as she told me. I sat in shock and disbelief. The words were not registering in my head. She reached out and gave me a hug, which must have lasted only a few seconds but seemed like hours. My arms were still at my sides. We talked for a little while, and then I left her house and drove around in my car. I was in shock. I was upset about her lack of birth control because this whole ordeal could have been prevented. I was too young to deal with her pregnancy. Being a seventeen-year-old and a junior in high school was confusing enough without dealing with my own real-life afterschool special.
That evening I arrived at a party to drink my worries away. The air was filled with smoke and the partygoers reeked of alcohol. I could not take the atmosphere for long, so I left. I went to Jamie’s house and stood on her front porch staring at the front door. What should I do? I asked myself. My foot started to turn from the door, but my hand reached out and pushed the doorbell. I wanted to run and go back to the party. I wanted to have fun this New Year’s Eve. Suddenly, the door opened and Jamie stood in the doorway with her head down. “You can’t spend New Year’s Eve by yourself,” I blurted out. She smiled, and we hugged in the doorway. This symbolized the beginning of the new journey that lay ahead for us. That night, we sat and laughed like usual while watching Dick Clark ring in the New Year. After that night, my life would change. I wouldn’t be a crazy teenager anymore. I would become a young adult.
Weeks passed, and Jamie told her parents about the pregnancy. She and her parents made the decision to go through with the pregnancy, but to give the baby up for adoption. My parents talked with her parents and offered their support, almost like they were discussing our marriage; Jamie and I were growing and maturing together.
During her first trimester, I found myself at Jamie’s house every day after school giving her a foot massage while she relaxed and watched her soap opera. She wasn’t able to walk very much. I made snacks for her and enough food runs to Taco Bell to last us both a lifetime. My friends were not considerate about what I was going through. While I was busy helping a friend, they were busy making fun of me. They would call Jamie’s house wondering what I was doing. They already knew, but they just wanted to poke fun. At school, the jokes surfaced like, “Gonna be a good daddy?” and “What are you doing this weekend . . . Lamaze class?” I shrugged them off and ignored them. I went on with my daily chores and focused on Jamie. I tried to make her life as easy as possible.
Later, one Saturday afternoon as I was catching up on sleep, Jamie called.
“Did you want to do something today?” she asked.
“What did you have in mind?” I replied.
“I want you to help me choose the baby’s family,” she said.
My ears turned hot, and I felt uneasy. But I told her I would pick her up. As I drove to her house, I thought about how much I had changed. I was more responsible, but I still considered myself a child. I felt I had no business choosing a path for an unborn baby. I groaned and doubted myself. I arrived at her house and helped her into the car. As we were driving to the adoption agency, Jamie pointed out to me, “You’re not speeding.”
It occurred to me that I was no longer a crazy driver, thinking about how quickly I could get from one place to the other. I was now responsible for making sure we got there safely.
“I’m driving for three people now,” I told her.
We arrived at the agency and were seated in a conference room. Fifty manila folders lay on the table, each containing a couple. One of these folders would be the lucky one. One of these couples would be the parents of Jamie’s baby. The counselor and Jamie and I went through each folder discussing their spiritual, psychological, financial, genealogical and emotional backgrounds. I began browsing through one folder, which read “Jennifer and Ben.” The folder was more like a booklet chronicling their life with pictures of where they’d been, who they are and who they wanted to become. Their explanation of why they wanted a baby caught my attention. This couple intrigued me. We kept narrowing down the couples, until we were down to two couples: Jennifer and Ben and Jamie’s pick. We discussed both couples, finally agreeing on Jennifer and Ben.
As we were getting ready to leave, I took a picture of Jennifer and Ben out of the folder and slipped it into my jacket pocket without Jamie noticing. I wanted to have a record of them before their life was to be changed forever. I put on my jacket, and we left the agency.
It was a miserably cold spring day. After helping Jamie into the car, I walked around the car and a warm breeze struck me. I stood by the trunk of my car feeling the summer draft. I couldn’t understand it. It was a cold day, but the wind was warmer than an August breeze. It felt like a sign, an anonymous thank you. We drove away and I thought about the decision we made. I thought about the families we didn’t pick. How much longer would it take for them to receive the gift of a child?
A few weeks later we met Jennifer and Ben for the first time. They impressed me. They were a close couple, and I knew they would apply the love they had for each other to their child. Jamie told them that I urged her to pick them, which made this meeting even more overwhelming for me. I tried not to show it, though, as we bonded almost immediately. They urged Jamie to take a childbirth class so she would be ready for all of the upcoming events. She needed a partner for the class, so I agreed. She signed up for a class, and every Tuesday night Jamie and I attended together.
The first class was awkward. I had never felt so out of place in my entire life. Jamie and I sat down together, trying to ignore the seven married couples staring at us. We were too young and too ignorant to be going through a pregnancy and a birthing class. Nevertheless, Jamie had to do it, and I would not let her be alone. After time, we all began to bond and develop a tremendous amount of respect for each other. Everyone realized what a struggle it was for us to get this far.
During the “Mom Time,” the dads and I sat outside talking about the babies’ futures. The dads talked about peewee football, mutual funds and insurance. I talked about Shakespeare and Geometry. I was out of place, for sure, but I realized there is more to giving birth than nine months and a doctor. So much freedom was sacrificed, replaced with a huge amount of responsibility. The
dads respected me and praised me for my humanity towards a friend, not to mention my maturity. I still just couldn’t believe I was sitting around talking about babies. I wanted to be innocent again. I wanted to drive my car fast and go to parties, but more important responsibilities called me. I was maturing.
I was getting ready for school one morning when Jamie called me from the hospital. “Um, do you want to get over here?” she asked.
“It’s only another sonogram. Besides, I can’t miss class,” I said.
“Well, I think you might want to get over here, ’cause I’m having the baby!” she shouted.
I ran out of the house and darted to the hospital. At the hospital, the nurse handed me scrubs and I entered her room. She lay there as I sat next to her.
“Well this is it,” she said. “Nine months, and it’s finally here.” She grimaced with pain and moved her head back and forth. Doctors were in and out of her room every two seconds with medication. She was about to give birth. After a few hours of getting Jamie settled, she was fully dilated.
“Okay, here we go. When I say ‘push,’ you push,” the doctor said.
She acknowledged him while grabbing my hands and nodding her head quickly several times. Jamie gave three pushes of strength and, with one final push, she breathed life into a new baby. The doctors cut the umbilical cord and cleaned the baby off. I sat in awe. Every possible human emotion struck me like a freight train.
“It’s a boy,” they exclaimed.
I smiled, and tears of joy ran down my cheek. No more fear, no more chores, just pure happiness. The baby was handed to Jamie, and she spent the first moments of the baby’s life holding him in her arms. She looked up at me, and I looked at her.
“You did it, kiddo,” I whispered in her ear.
The doctors left with the baby to run tests and weigh him. Jennifer and Ben came in with the birth certificate. “What’s his name?” Ben asked. Jamie motioned for him to come closer, and she whispered in his ear. Ben smiled and went into a different room. I walked outside to get a drink. I came back in a few minutes and saw the completed birth certificate. It read Blake Jonathan.
I smiled and cried. The doctors brought Blake back in. They passed Blake to me, and I held new life in my hands. I thought about the dads in birth class. Then I thought about Blake’s future. His first steps, peewee football games, the first day of school and his first broken heart. All the dads’ talk finally caught up with me. Jennifer and Ben looked at me and smiled. Tears rolled down their cheeks. I gave Blake to Ben and received a gracious hug from Jennifer. They were his parents now. They were his keepers. Jamie still lay there, crying but filled with delight. I went over to her and gave her a big hug.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Fine. Absolutely fine,” I whispered, and kissed her softly on her forehead. I would never be the same.
Jonathan Krasnoff
Unstoppable
When I was fourteen, my life was pretty normal. I chilled with friends, worked to keep my grades up and played hockey. Everyone thought I was a shoo-in to be the goalie on the junior-varsity team when I started school in the fall. In fact, I’d attended goalie camp in Canada right before leaving for summer camp in late July.
It was my third summer at Camp Becket. We were about halfway through the session, and “Dad’s Weekend” was about to start. I was psyched. My dad works a lot in Manhattan, and at home I was always on the ice—my dream was to play in the NHL one day—or hanging with my friends, so this weekend was one thing we always looked forward to.
On August 5, the day before my dad was supposed to drive up, I started feeling really weird. At dinner I didn’t have much of an appetite, and I was totally freezing. I dug through the lost-and-found for a sweatshirt, then lay down on the Ping-Pong table until the rest of my cabin was done eating. I felt really achy and tired, as if I had a bad case of the flu. My legs felt like they were made of ice, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
When I checked myself into the infirmary, the camp doctor told me I had a 102-degree fever. I puked my guts up all night. The next morning, I was so weak I could barely get out of bed. When I did finally make it to the bathroom, I passed out for a few seconds and hit my head on the sink. When I came to, I couldn’t stop throwing up. As I was getting back into bed, the counselor on duty noticed two huge purple splotches on my stomach. She radioed the doctor, and two minutes later they’d started an I.V. of antibiotics and called 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, there were splotches all over my body and my skin was turning blue.
The trip to the hospital is a blur. All I could focus on was how cold I was. I had no idea that I was close to dying, or that halfway through the thirty-minute trip to the hospital, the ambulance had to pull over and wait for another ambulance that had life-support equipment.
I’d contracted meningococcemia, a type of rare bacterial infection called meningococcal meningitis that’s usually fatal in the first thirty-six hours after you catch it. Even if it doesn’t kill you, you’ve still got a huge chance of going deaf, having your organs shut down or being permanently brain damaged.
Meningococcemia can be spread through saliva, so I might have contracted it from sharing a water bottle on a hike two days before. People can be a carrier of the disease without getting sick. It’s so rare that not every hospital has the equipment to treat it—including the one I was first taken to. The doctors in the ER put me in a drug-induced coma to help fight the infection and because my pain was so intense. Then they arranged for me to be airlifted to another hospital. By the time we got to the pediatric intensive care unit at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, I had no pulse.
Since my organs had stopped working, I was hooked up to all kinds of machines, including a ventilator that breathed for me. As a doctor explained to me later, the infection was burning me from the inside out. My parents, Gary and Nancy, my little sister, Olivia, and all my friends were constantly by my side, but I didn’t know it.
I also didn’t know that after two weeks in Springfield I was taken by ambulance to the burn unit at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. The infection had caused my blood to clot too much, and my veins were collapsing. Although my inner organs were getting better, gangrene was turning my hands and feet black. The doctors told my parents that unless my arms and legs were amputated, I would die.
During twelve operations over the next two months, while I was still unconscious, doctors removed layers of dead skin. By the time they’d gotten rid of all the gangrene, my knees, lower legs, lower arms and hands were gone. Skin was removed from my back and surgically grafted over where my arms and legs now ended.
In October, my condition was stable enough that the doctors decided to bring me out of my coma. I saw that my forearms and lower legs were gone before my parents told me. I was just so drugged up that I didn’t care. Gradually, as I came out of sedation, my parents explained what had happened and showed me pictures of what the gangrene looked like. It was pretty intense—the skin on my legs was literally turning to ash. I felt lucky that I was still alive.
People who don’t know me might think it’s weird that I didn’t fall into a huge depression or get pissed off about what happened. But sitting around thinking “Why me?” is just not my style. For one thing, I’m not into worrying about what other people think of me. (If I did, I probably wouldn’t have been playing the bagpipes since I was five.) Playing hockey, you have to learn to deal with your injuries and get back into the game as soon as you can. I felt the same way when I knew my arms and legs were gone. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll just get new ones.”
My old hockey coach says I’m the only person he knows who could deal with this so well. Still, getting better was tough. I hated being poked and prodded and having tubes pulled out and stuck into me all the time. Sometimes I’d have “phantom pain”: It felt as if my feet were still there and they hurt. But the worst part was definitely the “tank,” a steel bathtub where burn patients go to have thei
r wounds washed out. The nurses would peel off the bandages from my legs, arms and back and clean my wounds to help them heal faster. They said I was the loudest yeller they had.
Later that month, I was transferred—again—to Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains so I could build my strength back up and learn to get around. It was frustrating; for three hours a day I had to do sit-ups and push-ups and practice moving in and out of my wheelchair. Once I was fitted with prosthetic arms and legs, I had to learn to balance and stand and bend over and pick things up.
Now I’m grateful for all the exercises because I’m back to being really athletic, but at the time, I hated it. Every part of me was screaming in pain. Learning to walk was the toughest. I could bend the knees of my prosthetic legs, but they’re not as flexible as real knees. Without feet, I couldn’t feel the floor. It felt like I was levitating. My new hands were battery-activated, but every once in a while they’d freeze up.
When I got frustrated, I’d just stay by myself for a while until the feeling passed. But what helped me most was hanging out again with my friends. My parents got permission for them to spend the night with me in the hospital. We’d get takeout and watch movies. I knew my friends were relieved that I was alive and still me. I never tried to hide my scars from them. When I started joking about what happened and they saw I was okay with it, so were they.
On March 29, 2000, I was finally able to come home. My parents had moved my bedroom downstairs and had ramps built over stairs so I could get around easier. My medical costs were outrageous, but friends of our family held benefits to raise money for my bills and a wheelchair-accessible van. My dad’s a show-business publicist, and a lot of his clients, including Christian Slater and Scott Wolf, pitched in to help. That was cool, but I don’t want to be seen as “Nick the Angel” because of what happened. I’m still the same guy I was before I lost my legs and arms. I work out at the gym twice a week, I listen to Limp Bizkit and Korn, and I think Jessica Alba is totally hot.