Scotty Cranmer
I recently found a YouTuber, Scotty Cranmer, who has been vlogging his life. He is a professional BMX rider that crashed on his bike. It was a pretty serious accident.
“He was shooting a film session with his Monster Energy teammates in Las Vegas on the evening of October 12th and caught his front wheel in a hole that catapulted him into a face plant without time to get his hands in front of him, causing him to suffer several facial fractures, cerebral hemorrhage and damage to his C4 and C5 vertebrae “
Wikipedia
The accident changed his life forever! Scotty has been blogging his recovery and documenting his life and the road to recovery. He has not given up on life, which is very inspiring to me and probably many others. Scotty could have easily just have given up and spent his life in a wheelchair.
Experience
The last video hit me pretty hard and I could totally relate to some of his experiences. I wanted to write about why I can relate.
A little story
On November 28th 1993, I woke up with the flu and my body was hurting and my joints were aching. The flu got worse and it wasn’t going away, so my mother took me to the doctor on the 29th. The doctor told me I was dehydrated and to get fluids and to come back if the symptoms got worse. Tuesday, November 30th 1993, I was in bad shape. I couldn’t walk and I was a bit incoherent. She rushed me back to the doctor. They called the ambulance and rushed me to the hospital where I was given a spinal tap and they found out that I had Spinal Meningitis. I can’t remember at what point, before or after the spinal tap, but I aspirated, which caused me to stop breathing and life saving techniques were used to bring me back to life.
My memory is a little foggy of that time, but I wrote a journal about it after and through my recovery. I have since converted this to electronic format. It is interesting to read and it was part of my recovery. The next 5 days, were spent on life support, which included hallucinations and lots of anger. I was given very little chance to survive my ordeal. The diagnosis kept changing from never surviving, to being quadriplegic, to being limited use on my left side to a full recovery. Using a walker, I walked out of the hospital on December 24th, 1993. Great Christmas gift, right? The emotions of that day were crazy as I got back to my own bed and my next chapter of life was about to begin.
Never give up
My drive was similar to Scotty’s, where I didn’t want to give up. Learning how to walk again and use my body again was rough, but giving up was never an option for me. A visit with the Dr. early in my recovery, I remember asking “You aren’t going to tell me, I can’t be a programmer when I get older, are you?” The concern of not being able to be a developer was my biggest fear. This dream was never going to slip through my grasp.
I could go on for much, much longer, and go into great detail. My recovery was a very crazy experience. I’m glad I went through it, and it gave me an understanding of some of the struggles he’s going through. I went through this over 25 years ago, so my story won’t help many. It’s good to see his journey and I hope it inspires many people to keep fighting and know they can do anything they set their minds to. I can’t wait to see the video of Scotty running some day!