I am forty years old and have many interests in a lot of different topics. Reading and writing are my favorite ways to spend my spare time as well as running our site's message boards. I have written a novel about what living as an amputee is like and have plans to write many more novels along the theme of living with disability in some fashion. I believe people would enjoy learning about disability through a well written, realistic fictional adaptation of the journies my stories will take readers on. Since I have lived with my disability for twenty-one years, I believe I am able to bring to life the plights and challenges facing the disabled.
I’m sure you can see from my web pages so far that I do like to write and I hope you find my poetry enjoyable. Writing poetry has brought me a lot of satisfaction over the years and sharing it with you is my pleasure. I hope you take the time to give my samples of my fiction a try too. I am currently working on a story about my friend Pamela Wanstreet and our bonds of friendship. I believe anyone who reads it will be as touched by her strength as I was upon meeting her so many years ago in the hospital. I hope to get these stories published professionally when the opportunity presents itself, but for now putting up a sample of what I have of this story so far makes me feel very good.
Writing is a wonderful way to share ideas and I welcome any feedback you are inclined to offer. Part of the joy of writing comes from hearing how what you’ve written affected the people who’ve read your work. I have been inspired over the years by many authors. J.R.R.Tolkien was the first author to take me to wonderful places and taught me how to really use my imagination while I was still in grade school. Anne Rice, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul all showed me the horror that could exist in the world and tested the limits of my imagination.
I met Anne at a book signing for one of her Vampire novels and was the only one there in a wheelchair. I had the pleasure of making direct eye contact with her from a sitting position as she was in, when I told her how much I enjoyed her stories, confessing that I was also a writer. She smiled and was very encouraging to me during that brief encounter. It meant so much to me to meet her in person and I must say if you ever have a chance to meet your favorite author, you should jump on it. You never know what might happen.
I remember getting online back in 1996. Right after my son was born and I must say that once I discovered Westwood Chat and began to meet some interesting people there I really started enjoying the net. He plays a lot of games Nick Jr's website and sometimes on Nick.com. He is a wonderful little boy and you can check out pages here devoted to him on this website here.
After exploring the net a little bit I was exhilarated to find some great websites with information on parenting and other issues close to my heart. I have listed most of them on my links page and hope you give some of them a try. If you are interested in making your own web page I highly recommend giving it a try. It isn’t all that complex that you need a college degree, but it is a little time consuming. There are plenty of resources online to guide you through the process and this site has taken me just about three weeks to get up and running. I am proud of myself for making the commitment to making this page a reality and if you are ready to do the same for yourself, I say go for it!!
I was born here in Florida, in a town called Dunedin, and went to school here all my life, until 1987, during my senior year I was involved in a serious motorcycle accident. I was new to riding and wasn’t able to react fast enough as my bike went out of control and collided with a fence. My left leg was impaled on the foot peg of the bike and it took over seven emergency technicians to carefully lift me onto a back board.
That’s when Bayflight came in a took me off to Bayfront Medical Center and I was on my way to the hardest fight of my life. I spent only six days in ICU, before being moved to await surgery on my right leg to set the bones with ‘pins’ & ‘plates.’ I will someday write about my experiences, but for now writing it from a fictional standpoint suited me just fine. I put a lot of my personal experiences into the novel "Walk of Fire", having my protagonist face them, because I felt that it would add a certain realism to the storyline. I laughed and cried during the writing of "Walk of Fire," and it is my greatest hope to get it published and to hear that it made others feel as I did while writing it.
After my accident, I would get all kinds of questions from total strangers coming up to me, while I was out in public. I credit a lot of that to the publicity given to my situation in the local newspapers and while I was still in the hospital I must have received over two hundreds cards and letters to encourage me to get well quickly. That year my high school football team made it to the state finals and even though they lost I was so happy for the school. My school days weren’t always so good though. I was teased a lot and after I lost my leg I was overwhelmed with cards from fellow classmates who wanted to wish me well.
I still have them all, tucked away and take them out every now and then to remind myself of how far I have come over the years. It shouldn’t take an accident to make people see you for the person you are. With all the violence in schools today I fear for my five year old son and what he will face in the years to come. I hope that maybe I can help others to really understand the importance of kindness, because being kind is free, but the effects are priceless. Because of the kindness of others I have been able to get out of my chair and walk for almost three years.
Ultimately it is a personal choice for the amputee, as to whether or not they are willing to try to leave their chair behind. It takes a while to make a prosthesis and even longer to get good at using it, but the feeling you have when you stand at your refrigerator to get a drink, looking into it from a different perspective, is incredible. Even doing little things takes on a whole new meaning when you are doing it from a standing position after being used to being in a chair for some months or even years.
A lot depends on how much you have left to work with and from the picture I have here of my prosthesis, you can see I lost my left almost to the hip, so I had to work very hard just to get to the point where I was able to use it on a daily basis. It was worth it, but since the birth of our son, Jackie, I have chosen to go back to using the chair for many reasons. First and foremost is the way my body changed after he was born. My foot spread and a bone was out of place, due to the exertion of walking while pregnant. Second that ‘leg’ you can see in the photograph, wore out and the next one I had made was so different I wasn’t able to use it like I had been the previous one.
But please, don’t feel bad for me, I am totally happy in my wheelchair and could probably fly past you at the mall, wearing a huge grin and holding Jackie, his bag and any other packages we happen to have at that moment. To tell the truth, I feel less disabled using my chair then I did when using the ‘leg.’ That’s because it was so much harder on me to walk as well as so much slower to get where I wanted to go, that I just decided to postpone walking for the moment until I am in better shape physically and could take the time to go through the process all over again. Which I will make happen as I made the dream of having my own web pages a reality
Thank you for visiting my site!
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