Miracle Kid: The Seventeen-Year-Old Newborn

by Zachary D. Gauvin

Overview

Zach Gauvin was a junior in high school who had it all—star of the football team, a beautiful girlfriend he adored, and a terrible drinking problem. Miracle Kid tells the story of his near fatal accident and how, at the age of seventeen, he had to learn how to live all over again.

A high school all-star athlete, Gauvin wakes one day to find that his world has been turned upside down. He has been involved in a serious car accident and has received a traumatic brain injury. He wakes after being in a coma for a month. Now, he must relearn how to do everyday things that most people take for granted. He must learn how to walk, talk, and use his left hand all over again.

He beats all odds and recovers, fights through many hardships, and accomplishes things people—including the doctors—never thought would be possible. Along the way, he becomes an advocate for people with brain injuries, seeking to pass along the things that he has learned to others in similar situations. Miracle Kid hopes to inspire everyone to fight hard when things get tough—against all odds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469786384
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/25/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	172
File size:	3 MB

Read an Excerpt

Miracle Kid

The Seventeen-Year-Old Newborn

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By ZACHARY D. GAUVIN

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Zachary D. Gauvin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4697-8637-7

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Chapter One

TBI

I wake up in a room that is strange to me. Everything in my mind is groggy, my eyes aren't focusing, and nothing makes sense. I search for my mother who I can hear crying profusely. I looked around the room trying to make sense of the noises and bodies around me. My friends, and family, all looked as sad as I'd ever seen them. This was just another day, right? Morning. I'd woken from a night of sleep into this awkward moment. But if it was just another day, why were they all here staring at me? I keep scanning the room trying to make sense of it all. I had tubes everywhere. There's one, there's another, there's one going into my stomach filled with some sort of brown liquid.

This is right around the time where I start to believe I have just woken at my friend's beach house in Maine. For whatever reason, there really is no rational explanation; I simply thought I had woken in Maine. And with this thought, more questions flood my mind. How did I get in Maine? Yesterday I was home in Leominster, Mass. Today I'm in Maine? Why is my mother in Maine, sitting by the window crying?

Then the peculiar hallucinations. I can feel the bed trying to suck me in, almost as if it was eating me alive. The harder I try to free myself from the evil hunger of the bed, the more it sucks me in. I am sick of being in this bed and I want out. Every time I try to get out, I can't. The whole left side of my body will not cooperate, as if the left side is not receiving signals from my brain to move.

I start to yell and scream. I'm yelling for help from everyone in the room, but for some reason they do not help. I yell and yell and yell. They don't seem to see me lying here, being devoured, screaming for their attention. No one answers my call. It is as almost like they cannot understand what I am saying. My mouth is hard to open; it feels like something is restricting it from opening wide or at all.

Then a friend came to my side and began removing all tubes penetrating my body. I yell his name, Gonzo! Gonzo! Gonzo! But he does not understand. What's worse, it seems he didn't even hear me. Then I realize this man looks nothing like my friend Gonzo. Wait, this isn't Gonzo, who is this man? I soon realize that he is a doctor.

My usual schedule is that I wake up every day and go to the gym at five, right before school. This way I can get the gym out of the way and not have to go in the evening. I would get out of practice at six in the evening with ample time to hang out with my girlfriend before too late at night. Time with her was valuable, every moment counted, because I had to work so hard to get her to go out with me (but that's another story for later). I was currently batting .466 on a high school baseball team. With my hard work, disciplined schedule, I believed my dream would come true. I was going to go to a division one school to play baseball. But these doctors and these tubes and the fact that I feel I'm in Maine creates a panic in me. This isn't my routine. This isn't a part of my path to success.

Fellow doctors run into the room and they tell me that they are going to prepare me for transportation. Transportation? Where? They picked me up and placed me on a bed with wheels. They picked me up almost the same way you would pick up a small child and throw him in the pool. One man grabbed my legs and another grabbed my armpits. Confused, but ecstatic for escaping the jaws of that evil bed, I lay and ponder the places they could be taking me.

I fell asleep shortly after and woke up in an ambulance on my way to Spaulding Rehab in Boston. My mother sat next to me in the ambulance. She began to tell me a story as foreign to me as the scene I'd just woken up in. She said, "You were involved in a serious car accident. You have been in a coma for a month." The message meant almost nothing to me. I was still relaxed from morphine running through my veins. None of the words she spoke seemed real. "We are on our way to Boston, where you will have rehab." Rehab, ya right I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm captain of the football team, going to be captain of the baseball team. She continued, "The doctors said you must relearn how to do everything all over again." Though I still couldn't realize it at that exact moment, everything I had ever worked for had come crashing down. All the physical attributes, the baseball skills, the hours in the gym over the years were all now irrelevant.

Mom told me I had sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury and that I had injured the right side of my brain so badly that I had what is called left side neglect. This meant that my entire left side, though intact and normal appearing, was uncontrollable. I could not move or connect with it. I remember lying in my bed, looking at my hands and trying to make them move, and nothing would happen with my left hand or arm. I could move my right one just fine. But I would try to move them simultaneously, and my left hand remained flat.

She told me that I had broken my jaw and had to have my jaw wired shut. It all began to make sense. That's why no one could understand me when I tried to talk. I had rubber bands that ran up and down my mouth, vertically, to restrict my mouth from opening too far. She told me to induce me in the coma the doctors had given an overdose of morphine. For a month I laid in bed with an overdose of morphine running through my veins to keep me comatose.

My mother started to list off all the injuries I received when my 2002 Chevy Blazer veered off the highway and rolled over several times. I only remember the night it happened from stories friends told me. I went 0-4 in a baseball game that morning. Though I was still batting a hot .466 for the season, going hitless haunted me all day. I needed to get the game off my mind. I went to a barbeque with the person who meant the most to me at that time, Natasha, my girlfriend. There was drinking at this barbeque, but I didn't drink much as I had to go to a college baseball game later in the day. I wanted to watch two teams that I could possibly play for next year in college, Holy Cross and the University of Rhode Island.

My friend T.J. and I went to the game for only a little while. URI was killing Holy cross. We left and headed home. I had plans with Natasha, but she instead decided to make plans with her girl-friends. So T.J. and I decided to attend a party. We pre-gamed (played drinking games) at a friend's house before the real party began.

We arrive at the party, Natasha's ex-boyfriend was there. This I believe made me drink more. I couldn't let Natasha's ex show me up, right? So I ended up drinking too much. He started feeding me shots one by one and, I being the "champ" I was would not back down from the challenge. No surprise, and to the point, I was absolutely trashed. I blacked out completely. From that moment on, even without the accident, I wouldn't remember the next several hours. My friends said I was completely blitzed.

I took the keys and ran from my friend who held them. I was going to meet T.J back at his house and stay for the night. We took the highway like always, me leading T.J. who followed. My car veered to the side of the road and according to the police report dropped off the shoulder, struck the end of the guardrail. After Impact, the car began to rotate clockwise for approximately seventy-six feet. Next, the left rear door struck one of the support posts for an advertising sign. It rolled numerous times smashing my head around the car.

My parents say that miraculously I was able to get out of the car and walk to the other side. I proceeded to the other side of the car and fell into a pile of leaves where I was found. We like to believe that Dante (my grandfather who had passed several years ago) came down from heaven and assisted me; I always believed he was my guardian angel. But Trooper Dwyer who found me said I didn't walk at all. I was thrown from my car as it rolled. The doors were completely ripped off the car. I doubt I will ever know the truth about my accident.

When a cop called my mother at 2 in the morning, she could hear the swooping sound of the blades from the helicopter as it landed on the highway to take me to the I.C.U at UMass memorial in Worcester, Massachusetts. Doctors said if it had been too windy to fly the copter I would have died because an ambulance would have taken too long to get me to the hospital. I needed care and urgently. That was what happened to me April 19th 2006.

Riding in the ambulance after my month-long coma, Mom, begins to describe my injuries from the bottom up: I shattered my foot, collapsed a lung, broke my jaw, and I smashed my head into the window on the left side as blood pooled on the right killing nerves on that right side of the brain. This is what left me with left side neglect. "You had a five percent chance of living," Mom said, tears filling her eyes. "And on a coma scale where fifteen is the best, you were a three. This meant there was little hope for you. If you did survive you were supposed to be a vegetable."

The truth is, one night the doctors didn't think I would make it through to the morning. They told my father to stay as he readied to return home as he had to wake at four in the morning for work. They told him there was a good chance I wouldn't make it through the night. So my dad along with my mother and in shock stayed.

The tubes connected to my body each had a different function. There were of course the IV's so that my body would receive the correct amount of fluids. I had a brain tube, which helped pump fluid out of my brain. I had a chest tube, which pumped fluid out of my collapsed lung. I had these annoying leads or censors to measure my heart rate if it should fall below the correct amount of beats; because I was in great physical condition they would go off constantly because I had such a low heart rate. The tube that entered my stomach, filled with brown liquid, was filled with liquid nutrition. This is how I ate for more than a month because I still had my jaw wired shut.

Tasks that people don't think about in everyday life I had to learn all over again. I was a seventeen year old new-born. I had to learn how to speak, when to take the correct breaths as I spoke, I had to learn how to do basic math again, I had to learn how to walk, use my left hand, practice memory techniques, and correct my double vision.

The best way I can describe what a TBI (traumatic brain injury) is I had obtained a brain injury, by impact. Which is different from an acquired brain injury. An acquired brain injury is obtained by the body having a stroke, tumor, or degenerative diseases. They are not necessarily caused by an external source. A traumatic brain injury is caused by an outside source.

Waking up from a coma feels like any other day, like opening your eyes after a sleep. I had no recollection of what happened to me that night. A month later I wake up in a hospital bed. As I woke, I opened my eyes thinking it was just another typical day. My brain instantly calculated getting out of bed, making breakfast, and doing it all as quick as possible so I could hit the gym before school. As I tried to lift myself, out of bed, I found myself impaired. I mean, I've woken in a trunk before after a drunken stupor of a night but this was totally different.

I remember things, though, when I was in my coma. Because it was a medically induced coma, when I was slowly taken off the morphine or "waking up," I saw people crying. I would see their faces without understanding, and I'd drift in and out of sleep waking on occasion to see faces of tears and I'd return to sleep. I remember my Legion baseball coach, Sid, coming to visit me. And my football coach Jon Dubzinski and many, many of my friends. My parents wanted everyone to see what can happen to someone when they are reckless. Which I'm actually glad they did because hopefully it help guide people's decisions in the future. But what's funny about the whole thing is that it just feels like a dream. After seeing pictures and hearing stories about my coma, I have now developed more memories. When I see pictures, I think Oh yeah, I remember that. I believe that these pictures have actually brought back images that had been stored in my memory. That after seeing these pictures and refreshing my memory I do actually remember these things. I know Natasha would hold my hand, I would squeeze it. I don't remember if I heard her, if I smelled her or was even aware of her. But I know I squeezed her hand.

When I started waking I began to recognize all my friends and loved ones. Many were crying, but some were laughing. I thought This is kind of an odd situation to be laughing in. Everyone else is crying. As it turns out, my dad was cracking jokes to lighten the mood. Hun-dreds of my friends flooded the waiting room.

Many brought posters with pictures of me to reminisce the good times they had with "Zachy Chan" (my nickname in high school). My parents left the doors open so all my friends could see what could happen when someone acts carelessly. One minute you are on the top of the world and the next you are lying on a pile of leaves with blood oozing out of your head.

They couldn't believe this could happen to the nice kid who everyone loved. The happiest, most carefree kid one could meet now lies in a hospital bed with a five percent chance of living, connected to more tubes than one could believe barely keeping him alive.

As I was transferred to the rehab center by ambulance, most of my friends enjoyed life by the pool on a hot summer day. Not me. My summer would be filled with speech therapy and practicing how to walk. I lay in the ambulance as it took me from the I.C.U. at UMass Memorial in Worcestor to Spaulding rehab in Boston.

Chapter Two

Rehabilitation

Now I was off to Boston. Soon I would be awakened to how cruel the world could be. Soon I would be taken by the hand, as if I was an infant, and have to learn to do everything over again. When I say everything that is exactly what I mean. I had to learn how to walk again, talk the correct way (when to take breaths at the correct time between words and phrases), how to use my left hand (which I still have a tough time directing), practice memory techniques/ strategies, learn math again and my balance and coordination were all screwed up due to the damage I had inflicted to my cerebellum.

The ambulance took me to Spaulding rehab in Boston. They wheeled me into the rehab center on a stretcher. Here I would do a stint of inpatient rehab. I assumed inpatient rehab meant I had to stay overnight. I had an optimistic outlook. I thought I would be in and out, get a few treatments as the night went on, and be perfectly normal. When I heard the doctors had me booked to stay for the entire summer, I buried my head into my sleeve as it lay on the table; while I sat in my wheelchair.

When I arrived they took down my weight. They weighed me on my bed because I could not get up; I couldn't even sit up on my own. The scale read a measly 121. I weighed around 150 before my accident. The nurses were afraid to give me too much food (liquid nutrition) in my coma, so I did not put on weight. Most of the weight I'd lost was in muscle I'd worked so hard over the years to develop. When I first came into the ICU the nurses felt my abs and they thought I had an abdominal injury because my abs were so hard. But now I no longer had hard abs, instead I had almost a pot belly. I actually thought that I was fat at my insignificant 121 pounds.

After a couple of days, I had regained sufficient strength to start my rehab. I started in a wheelchair. I hope to never sit in one of those again after being confined to one for a couple of weeks. They taught me how to transfer myself from the wheelchair to the bed, how to propel myself forward, and to make sure that my left hand, still weakened and almost useless, did not fall down into the spokes of the wheel. Becoming mobile again was great, but I wanted to be able to run, not wheel myself around in a wheelchair. For the most part my mom pushed me long distances. She stayed with me every night and every day and helped nursed me back to health.

After being a couple weeks it was time to get my jaw unwired. The speech pathologist had me opening my jaw as wide as I could while it was still wired to strengthen. Now instead of building muscle to hit home runs, I had to strengthen my jaw to chew food. I wondered what it would be like to again feel food in my mouth, to chew and swallow. I fantasized about all the flavors; chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. I would finally be able to taste food again! The nurses would tease me because they knew, even though I lay in a bed unable to move, I wouldn't let it hold me back from having a couple laughs. They often asked me what flavor liquid nutrition I wanted in my feeding tube on this day. I'd think really? I can't taste it, it's going directly into my stomach so I don't think it matters much.

When I went to get my jaw unwired, things went a little differently than I had anticipated. I thought there would be a long medical procedure to unwire them, maybe anesthesia, who knew. I anticipated the release of my mouth, but dreaded the steps to get me there. Nope! My mom wheeled me down a few floors to the room where it would take place. The doctor locked my wheels so I couldn't roll away and he busted out a hand tool similar to a screwdriver. He began twisting away on the inside of my mouth. I could feel the repetitive tug on my mouth. One by one he released metal pieces in my mouth into a metal tray. A few minutes into it he clapped his hands together and said, "You're all set." "Well that was an experience," I thought. After the ordeal, I continually rubbed my jaw and opened it as wide as I could, but the first thing I did was go down a couple floors to the food court and get something to eat. I still had limitations to what I could eat. I couldn't have the steak that I wanted, so I got chocolate pudding. It was the best tasting pudding I have ever had.

When I attempted to walk with a walker or on a treadmill, my knee would always bend backwards and would hurt, a lot. It was more of a quick snap than a bend. A man came in to make a half cast molded to my foot all the way up to my knee. It gave my left knee support and would stop my knee from hyper-extending when I stood. The man asked if I wanted a picture or a decal on the back. I could actually communicate with words now instead of nodding or pointing at things. I told him that I wanted a Red Sox decal, but they did not have any Red Sox decals. The only decals they had for sports teams were the Patriots; I decided to suck it up and go with the Patriots decal. Don't get me wrong I love the Pats, but I'm a baseball guy.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Miracle Kid by ZACHARY D. GAUVIN Copyright © 2012 by Zachary D. Gauvin. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................ix
Preface....................xi
Chapter 1 TBI....................1
Chapter 2 Rehabilitation....................7
Chapter 3 Adaptation....................16
Chapter 4 All on my own....................30
Chapter 5 Depression....................36
Chapter 6 A New Beginning....................43
Chapter 7 Optimism....................51
Chapter 8 Transformation....................62
Chapter 9 Working Hard....................72
Chapter 10 Realization....................80
Chapter 11 Straightening out my life....................89
Chapter 12 Confusion....................103
Chapter 13 Maturing/ Growing up....................111
Chapter 14 New Attitude....................118
Chapter 15 Recovered....................130
Reflection....................139