A few days later I was getting ready for bed around 1:30 a.m. Like I always did before going to bed, I smoked a water bong, which would usually put me to sleep right away. However, this time was different. After finishing the bong a strange feeling came over me. The next thing I knew I was I was in my dad’s room shaking his shoulder to wake him up. I said to him, “Let’s go to Israel.” I remember seeing fear in his face so I took my hands off him and left his room. Still dressed only in my underwear, I left our apartment and walked down the hallway, down the staircase and outside the building into the cold winter’s night. I walked across the street to the school yard and kept walking – straight into the school’s brick wall head first. I staggered backwards a couple of feet and then walked again into the wall, head first. A third time, I bowed my head and rammed into the wall. This time all I could do was fall onto the ground, unable to move. I remember lying there on the ground for a couple of minutes looking up into the black sky and thinking to myself, “Am I dead?” and yelling, “Oh God – no, no!” Everything went dark after that as I fell into a coma.
I don’t know how much longer I lay on the ground alone. Shortly after I had left my father’s room, my dad had gone looking for me around our building. He couldn’t find me so he went upstairs to wake my mom and call the police. The police checked around the building for about 45 minutes. They went up to the roof to check there and then headed back sown the stairs when they found I wasn’t up there. On the way down, my dad looked out a window of the stairwell and saw a light shining on the ground across the street, lighting up the top half of my body. Where that light came from was a mystery since there was no streetlight in the area and that part of the schoolyard is usually totally dark at night. The source of that light continues to
be a mystery to me and my family to this day.
I was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where they found I had a broken neck, which left me quadriplegic (paralyzed in all four limbs). I came out of my coma three days later, which happened to be my 27th birthday. I couldn’t move a muscle. One of my lungs had collapsed and my other lung was on the verge of collapsing. A team of doctors ordered everyone out of the room. They thought I was going to die and called in a priest to give me my last rights. They hooked me up to a ventilator to keep me breathing. The doctors told my mom I would never again be able to move a muscle below my neck. So I lay in bed motionless with tubes down my throat for a month. One day I started getting twitches in my arms. I kept getting more and more movement until one day I was actually able to touch my nose to scratch it. That was like a dream come true!
They then took the breathing tubes out and gave me a forty-eight hour trial to see if I could keep breathing on my own. They put a hole in my throat – called a tracheotomy – which gives them access to my airways to suction out fluids to prevent me from getting pneumonia again. I passed the breathing test and was able to speak for the first time. When I was able to speak, a psychiatrist came into my room. He asked me what had happened to me. The only answer I could come up with was to say that God had done this to me as punishment for my sins. When he shook his head in disbelief, I felt angry and closed my eyes until he left the room. The psychiatrist diagnosed me as having a bipolar disorder and called my incident an “unexplained psychotic event.”
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