I am curious what kind of obstacles people on here have overcome in their lives and what they credit for helping them get through it.
If anyone has seen my posts in the past, I talk a lot about my anxiety. It has been severe ever since I was a child. I would walk into school in the mornings and immediately go to the nurses station and request to go home sick because of it. It eventually escalated to severe panic attacks where I thought I was going to die. The best way I can describe a panic attack for those who haven't had one is the feeling you get when someone jumps out from behind a corner at you but the feeling isn't just half a second, it lasts for a while.
I began associating that feeling with everything. From being in wide open spaces to being too far from home. In a sense, I became agoraphobic and could relate any situation to my fear which caused it to grow. Back in March I had a severe panic attack that nearly pushed me to moving back home, but through perseverance and meditation, I am doing as well with my anxiety as I have ever done and plan to continue to work on this issue so that I can write a book about facing fear and overcoming it.
I know we have a ton of tough people on here because cyclone fans have had to endure a lot of nut kicks in our lives, but I am curious what people have faced and overcome outside of the elite 8, Hampton, Niang's broken foot, and Florida State.
Let's hear it!
I was in a car accident the summer after I graduated high school and already enrolled at Iowa State. My friend wanted to go to a movie that I didn't really want to see because I was not a big fan of horror movies. It was called the Abominable Dr. Phibes with Vincent Price. We were going about 65, when a carload of teenagers shot out of a crossroad, blowing a stop sign, and we T-boned them.
My head went through the passenger side windshield and glass scraped across my eye. The result was, I spent about a week in the hospital, and was on the critical list for about three days, lost most of the vision in my left eye, although the doctors at the Mayo Clinic were amazed I had any vision left whatsoever, and wound up with 160-some stitches in my forehead and 6 more in my left eye.
There was nothing they could do to improve the vision in the eye except make it just good enough so that it would bother my vision in the other eye, because they weren't exactly looking at the same thing after the accident. They would have had to refocus the bad eye and they weren't sure how they were going to do that. It would have required more surgery, likely, and the results weren't guaranteed. And the best they could do with a contact lens AND the most powerful lens they make is about 20-40 vision and I would have looked like a supervillain with glasses where one lens was a fish-eye magnifying my bad eye and the other was plain glass.
It was an adjustment getting used to life with just one eye. You don't realize how much you depend on two eyes for depth perception until you lose the use of one. Things like driving a car, especially backing up and especially in trying to park, judging the distance between you and the two cars you're trying to park in between, shooting a basketball, playing catch with a baseball (it was easy if the ball was thrown off to my side a little bit, but if it came straight for my head, I was in trouble.) Oh, and I can't watch a 3-D movie, because you need two good eyes for that. I was picking glass out of my head and my forehead was tender to the touch for months afterward.
There were certain careers that were dead to me, like being an airplane pilot, or a truck driver, and the military would have considered me 4F, not that I ever considered any of those occupations, but they weren't an option for me even if I had.
We sued and got screwed. You hear about all these multimillion dollar settlements for stupid things like coffee being too hot, but this was a legitimate claim and we wound up settling for I think $50K and the lawyer got a third. My parents got some of it to cover hospital bills that weren't covered by insurance and I wound up with about $20K.
A month after we settled, I saw a case where a guy was hammering a nail, mishit it and the nail flew up and stabbed him in the eye. He settled for $2.5 million. I always thought that was unfair considering he did it to himself and I was an innocent victim. But the difference was, he did it while working for a deep-pockets company and my injury was caused by people with only liability insurance that was capped at $25K, which my lawyer tried to explain to me was as much as we could hope to get. If that was the case, how did we wind up with $50K? To this day, I think I had the crappiest lawyer money could buy. And they later made him a judge in Algona.
This was in 1971, when I hadn't turned 18 yet.
