Playing with adversity
In the summer of 2008 I was prepared to step onto the field Friday night and play alongside my brothers that I had got to know over several years. It was my 11th year of football and throughout that entire time I had dealt with being diagnosed with diabetes. Managing my blood sugar; making sure it didn’t go too low while at the same time trying to prevent it from going to high. Playing so many years with diabetes I had mastered the art of controlling my blood sugar while competing in a high intensity sport.
Having so many hours devoted to the sport caused it to be a major part of my life. Little did I know that the very first play of my 2nd game as a senior, my life would be flipped upside down. On the opening kickoff a guy on my team pushed one of the opponents into my left knee. As I was helped off the field my initial reaction was to go back on the field as soon as possible. That’s exactly what i did. I didn’t fully realize that it would take me 5 weeks to get back onto that field.
I had gone to the doctor and discussed with my parents and decided that I would want to go back playing football with my torn ACL. In those 5 weeks I spent countless amount of time trying to make my knee as strong as possible with intense regiments of rehab before playing on it torn. Once I returned, my first few games I was in I was at about 50%. The very first game happened to be against skyline which was in the top 10 in the nation. I personally had to go against a D-1 prospect who is now attending Colorado. My knee gave out at least 11 times, resulting in me being driven into the ground in front of a crowd of about 5 thousand.
As the year continued, I had a few occasions of blood sugar being low in practice. Our team had entered the playoffs and my knee continued to gain more strength while still missing that crucial ligament. My knee was almost restored to normality by the time our team entered the state championship. It was against skyline, our rivals that happened to be only a short 9 minute drive away from our school. It was in the Tacoma dome, in front of about 9 thousand people and much more watching on TV. Even though we lost, our team had outplayed the other by having over 150 more combined yards than they had. I personally did very good as well and was satisfied with the ending of my high school football. The day after there was an article in the Seattle times sports front page talking about my playing with….diabetes and a torn ACL.
An interesting month..
In the 2009 summer I had my life all planned out. Since I tore my ACL during the prime part of football I came away the season with no scholarship offers of any kind. Even though I desperately wanted to be able to play again I was content with going to Northwest. It seemed to be a backup plan. I was ready to follow in the footsteps of my both my sisters and walk away with an experience from Northwest University.
Set with Northwest as my college for my freshman year, I was anticipating an exciting year. However, in 24 hours my world was flipped upside down. I first received a phone call from my sister Brittany, telling me that my grandpa was in the hospital and would probably not make it through the night. My grandpa is my Dad’s fathers who lives in Arizona but came up to Seattle with my grandma to visit us for 2 weeks. Throughout those 2 weeks he was very healthy which made it very surprising to see him so close to death.
Twenty minutes later I was getting ready to leave to the hospital with my sister and the phone rings and it was my other sister on the line. She told me that my Dad had lost his job. Now my dad owns his own business as a medical distributor which means him and his sales team buy medical equipment and supplies from corporations and then in return go out and sell it to hospitals in the northwest United States. Phillips, the corporations that let my dad’s business go was the same company that was responsible for about 85% of his company’s sales.
Watching my dad watch his father almost die and his business go to shambles all in the same day caused me more pain than the situation itself. My grandpa began to recover and my dad also began to recover his job. Turning to different corporations to replace Phillips my dad’s business had started to rebound. As my grandpa was recovering from being ill my only uncle came to visit. I didn’t get to see him very often but he came up for 2 weeks to see and comfort his father as he was beginning his road to a long recovery. We said good bye to him after 2 weeks of staying with us, he was headed back to his home in California.
3 days after he returned my dad gave me a phone call while I was working. I’ve always looked at my dad as a figure head in my life. He was a man of strength and leadership throughout our family. As I received that call I heard a man that was holding back pain. But then I heard him begin to cry, slowly breaking down on the other side of the phone. Now at this point in my life I had only seen my dad cry twice before. He told me that they had found my uncle, his brother, dead on his kitchen floor. It turns out that he had a destroyed kidney and suddenly dropped dead in his house. This was a sudden blow to our family but especially my dad. My poor dad who had lost his brother, almost lost his father and lost his business all within 3 weeks. Since then however, things have drastically improved. My dad has recovered his business and is doing very well and my grandpa is back in Arizona and is making drastic steps to a full recover. Those 3 weeks humbled me to appreciate not only the things I have in my life but more importantly the people I had in my life.
A child’s imagination
Growing up I was always the little ambitious and active 5 year old who would always have a curious mind that would typically get me into trouble. I would climb trees, play tag, hide-go-seek, and always I’d always being looking for something to do. At the same time I was also able to entertain myself for hours. Taking a typical toy car and turning it into a car that was also a spaceship, which also had bazooka’s attached to the sides that would destroy the bad guys that would invade my base, also known as my room. Growing up with an older brother that I admired I would watch him play video games or watch movies that typically involved some kind of violence. That is perhaps how and why I came up with my creation of art that would entertain me for the next 9 years of my life.
It started when I was drawing on a blank piece of white printer paper and began to create dinosaurs. I thought to myself, well if there are dinosaurs they have to be mean and viscous and people trying to stop them. I drew my first complete page at the age of 5 which was comprised of 2 dinosaurs and about 20 stick figure soldiers with guns trying to shoot at it. There were a few dead soldiers and a few reinforcements that were coming in but I wasn’t sure where the reinforcements were coming from. That spurred my next creative idea of just continuing the battle to the next page. So I took a new page and just taped it onto the next and drew more dinosaurs with more guys fighting them. It began with just one page but little did I know it would end with over 200 pages.
There were some parts of my life that I focused on this project more than other parts of my life. During the time when I was about 10 years old I lacked friends and didn’t know what to do with my time. Instead of going out trying to find new friends I would sit on my desk adding onto this long strand of paper. I would add in new types of guys with new weapons and new vehicles that would try to stop these evil dinosaurs. I continued at an inconsistent rate of adding more and more pages onto this strand of paper. Except at this point it was too long to call a strand of paper, instead I had to roll it up into a bundle. It continued to entertain me for hours throughout my childhood.
Now it is stored away at my parent’s house for safe keeping. Totally over 200 pieces of paper it is longer than a football field when fully rolled out. The piece of papers is something I am going to want to continue to keep to show my kids and have them see their fathers creativity when he was their age.
