by Keith Smitherman

Created on: July 26, 2007

I have a true story to tell about grasping a second chance in life. It is my own personal experience. It starts after a work accident where I was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I was given a second chance by GOD, but I had to take, or grasp if you will, my second chance from my family of all people.

After I came home from rehabilitation I had to live with my grandparents until I could get a place of my own. In rehab I had been taught everything that I needed to know about how to take care of myself once I left the hospital. My grandparents, and my whole family, had other ideas about how I would live the rest of my life.

Now, I love my family. They are very supportive of me even to this day. This will not be a blistering report of all the terrible things they forced upon me. All the actions they took were done out of pure love, aggravating, overbearing, love. They would not let me have one minutes privacy.

We will start with my grandmother, GOD bless her soul. While in the hospital I had lost about twenty pounds. This was a good thing because I was going to have to use my arms and shoulders to transfer myself in to bed, the tub, and the car. The less my body weighed, the less stress on my arms and shoulders. In the past I had eaten at my grandparents house on occasion, to excess. She would always cook massive amounts of food and we would always fill ourselves on collard greens, sweet corn, pork chops, black-eyed peas, cornbread, and steamed cabbage. We lived in the country, so all this food came directly from the garden, fresh. When I moved in with them, I, along with the doctors, tried to explain to them that I did not need to gain a lot of weight due to my situation. My grandparents would not hear a word we said and fed me three meals a day. I would always eat as little as possible each meal, but when one eats that kind of food it does not take long for the pounds to come back.

My grandfather was always the most helpful. He was there when I woke up in the morning to help me get dressed, a task I was supposed to be completing on my own. He was there when I had to go to the bathroom, another task that I needed to do for myself. After I had transfered over on to this special bench I used for the occasion, he would sit there while I did my business, it was during this time that I missed my privacy the most. He was deathly afraid that I would fall off of the bench and he wanted to be there to try and catch me.

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