By: SherryJo Crandall 

Word on the Street Issue 48, October 2024

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On May 19th, 2003, I entered another dark period of depression when I was admitted to the hospital with abdominal pain. I spent four days in the hospital dealing with the pain.  During this time, they found a mass in my liver. The thoughts racing through my head were; CANCER! CANCER! To find out what it was, I underwent a biopsy.

This is where my journey to healing myself began. You see the doctor did not believe me when I told him that anesthetics do not work right on me the way they were designed to. I just had to prove it to him. As soon as he took the sample I was in the fetal position and in so much pain that they couldn’t get me out of it without sedation.  I found later that my blood pressure had dropped so low, they were afraid my heart would stop.

I spent the next nine months in and out of the hospital. Once again feeling great change and fear and yet not knowing how to handle it.  The fear soon became all-consuming and yet I fought with every ounce of strength I could muster. 

During this time I was fighting one battle, another was developing. I was getting a migraine that would last two months and confine me to bed.  It was during a spinal tap that I learned that my back had been broken in two places.  I never knew how it had been broken. Was it broken in falls that I had or was it part of a disease process?  I was lucky to be alive because one set of vertebrae was in neck at the base of my skull. 

The reason that I share a bit of my medical history is this; my second and third attempts came about as the result of near toxic levels of drugs, specifically caffeine, found in my system.  Now I must clarify that there is a difference in taking pills and drinking caffeinated beverages.   With pills, the amount of caffeine in my system stayed at a constant level whereas if I has been drinking caffeinated beverages, the levels would of varied.   The doctors failed to tell me not to drink soda in addition to taking the pills. 

I was hallucinating and really struggling but through the fog both times I was able to go and get help. I can’t tell you what gave me the strength to do so but some higher power was watching over me through all of this. Teaching me that I have a job to do.

The feelings, even to this day, are so strong at times, I feel like I have lost all that makes me who I am. Each day I have to spend time, as Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey said in their SNL skit, pumping myself up.  Reminding myself that I do matter and I do impact the lives of the people around me.  It’s a fight to separate the person I want to be from the person I was.