To make a very long story quite short, I was a passenger in a single car crash on 29 January 1983. I was 24 years old at the time of the accident. I have been recovering ever since. I somehow managed to finish college with a much lesser degree than I had originally intended to get. Only my previous military experiences helped me to get the jobs that I was able to get since the crash. But in 1998, I became disabled and have not yet been able to go back to work.

I am considering publishing a novel concerning my travails after surviving a very severe automobile accident in 1983. It has only been recently that I am even able to come forth with the substantial memories and the adequate information concerning my experiences that developed and continue to persist due to that automobile accident. My memory and my communicative skills have been disrupted since the accident and are only now becoming thoroughly usable again.

After 2 or 3 weeks into my third semester at a regional campus of Kent State University, I went to a local bar where a college friend was performing for a Rock-and-Roll band. I did not drive. My friend from work at K-Mart picked me up at my girlfriend’s home that Friday night after work. Upon leaving the bar at a very late hour, my friend had heard of a Geodesic style home having been built in the outskirts of Dover, Ohio. We went to see that home.

Sometime during that trip, he missed a turn and we went head-on into an embankment. I struck the windshield with the upper left side of my forehead, thereby paralyzing my right side. I am right handed. The car rolled with my side on the outside of the roll and I was thrown into a fence post and struck the back of my skull.

I have no memory of any of this. I was in a coma for six weeks, two weeks in a full coma and four weeks in a partial coma. I have had to recover many of my memories from relatives and from friends, or from other documentation from my past. I could remember who I was and some things about myself, but not very much at that time. I couldn't even remember my girlfriend, although we had only dated for about 8 months before then. But that is still a relatively long time. She is now married to someone else and has a family with him. I am glad for her, although when she first broke off our relationship, I was devastated!

Life for me has been a struggle ever since that date, 29 January 1983. I was in a wheel chair for several months and my speech was impaired for quite a period of time from my brain injury. I had to relearn to walk, to talk, to maintain a cohesive conversation, and to do many of the things that we all consider normal and second nature when we generally do them. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to perform basic mathematic functions. I had previously had Calculus in high school, now I couldn’t even do long division! Writing was extremely difficult because of my right side partial paralysis.

Within a year after the accident, I tried to return to college. I was 25 years old by that time, and I had just entered my third semester at a regional campus of Kent State University. But now, I was retaking many of the same courses over again to try to replant those memories in my mind. I was essentially starting over with less of a knowledge base than I had before I ever went to college, or even less than I had before I had finished high school. I am fortunate that the Tuscarawas campus of Kent State would work with me and allow me to do that, even though I may have had to pay for some of those classes again.

Until that time, I had done very well, securing Dean’s list accreditations during my first two semesters. That was due to my previous four-year enlistment in the USAF. I had done very well at my technical training courses in avionics, a branch of electronics that I had taken there, too. Naturally, after the accident and my brain injury, I had a very, very difficult time doing anything. That applies to both physical and intellectual events. But I persisted and I did get a degree of sorts.

I have been working with hospitals and rehabilitation centers in Cleveland, Ohio, Zanesville, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and even with a specialist in San Antonio, Texas.

Over time, so many things have occurred in my life that it would be impossible to list them in this brief analysis that I am sending to you. I will not try. What I will say is that many memories have come back, although I’m not sure if these are my true memories, or memories that have been created for me and by me. I have regained a portion of my physical abilities through hard work and diligence. It has not been easy for me. It has been very hard!

For many years following the accident, and even now, I have had physical difficulties concerning my balance, my agility and coordination, and many similar aspects of simply being alive. Most recently, beginning in November of 1990, I have been suffering from a disease that resembles Blepharospasms. Blepharospasms are a sort of involuntary eyelid closure that normally occurs in more elderly people. Although it has started to occur in people in their 40’s more recently. I was 32 years old when those spasms began top affect me in late 1990, again altering my lifestyles and my search to become more normal again.

Since then, I have worked with several hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. Those are some of the best hospitals in the world. But they could not help me very much. It wasn’t until 1992 that I started to get some relief from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center where Dr. Peter Jannetta did a specialized brain surgery to remove a blood vessel from a cranial nerve. The surgery was partially successful in that it did reduce the amount of facial spasms that I suffered from to a more livable amount. But, my eyelid spasms, or Blepharospasms continued unabated.

I continued to receive Botulinum Toxin injections to help to control the eyelid spasms. Botulinum Toxin uses very small amounts of a botulism poison-inducing chemical to inhibit the transmission of the nerves that are being used to cause the spasms in the eyelids. The botulism interferes with the normal transmission of the nerve impulses from my brain to my muscles responsible for causing the spasms in my eyelids. That drug did not ever prove to be very effective for me, especially over a longer period of time. If I did get relief, it was for a very short period of time of a week or so, but more usually only days. And that level of relief varied considerably, too.