I put this story up back in 2002 and plan to leave it on this site as it represents my initial, raw desire to share my story with others. I will be adding my short stories on the "Read Me" page, but the information on this page is non-fiction.

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This story is for all of the people who have felt alone or hopeless because of something that makes them different from other people.  It’s also for those who know someone who is dealing with problems that you just can’t understand, and that you don’t know what to say or do to help them get through these problems.  Whether it’s an illness or a physical trait or something very painful that we are dealing with that makes us feel different, most of us who have these problems feel alone at one point or another.  Some of us feel alone all the time.  We’re not supposed to talk about our problems in public, that’s a rule of society, and if we do, we are usually looked at as whiners or people who are just looking for attention.  That rule can be what makes us feel alone too.  I’m not one to follow rules though, unless I know why and unless they make sense to me.  So, I don’t keep my story hidden from anyone, not even my co-workers.  You know what?  In sharing my story with my co-workers I’ve found other people with some of the same problems that I have.  Some of them thought they were alone until I came along.  I share my story on sports message boards when people ask me why I’m so passionate about a player who isn’t a superstar (I’ll get into that later), and when I tell them, the majority of them tell me that I have opened their eyes and brought some perspective to their lives.  I want to be able to help more people, and the only way that I can accomplish that goal is to keep sharing my story.

 The Road to Illness

 Growing up

Have you ever noticed that most kids who are sick growing up are “good kids?”  I’m not sure why that is, but maybe it’s because we don’t have a lot of energy to waste on being bad when we’re sick.  Whatever the reason, I was also a good kid.  I never cut classes, never smoked or drank.  Never had a curfew because I never went out.  Of course I got into trouble sometimes, but it was never for anything serious.  I was one of the kids who accepted most people for who they were and didn’t get into the whole clique thing.  It didn’t matter how much money your family had or what you looked like, my group of friends was filled with people who just liked being around each other.  There were a couple of kids that we all thought were just a bit too strange, so we weren’t completely accepting of everyone, but for the most part we’d just hang out with whoever wanted to hang out with us.  My tolerance for people may come from the occupation that my mother had while I was growing up.  She worked with handicapped adults, and she didn’t keep my sister or myself away from the people she worked with.  We would hang out at her work sometimes, and when I was older she even had me teach some sign language to some of her students.  Being exposed to people who were very different at such a young age, as well as growing up and continuing to be around them was an important part of my development into who I am now.  I guess I never really thought about that until now, but it’s definitely true.

We moved a lot when I was a kid because my mom had to struggle to make ends meet.  My parents divorced when I was 4 I believe, and my mom didn’t get much in terms of child support and a whole dollar a month for alimony.  She didn’t let it keep her down, and she did the best she could for us.  She sacrificed a lot to make us happy, and she always found a way to keep going.  When I wanted to go down to Los Angeles (we lived in the Bay Area for the majority of my childhood) for a Monkees (the group, not the animal.  They were hot again in the late 1980’s) Convention because that’s what I was into, she found the money to get us down there.  When I wanted to go up to Spokane to visit a pen pal that I had, she had us hold a garage sale and used the money from that to buy me a train ticket.  Even though she could have used that money for other things, and even though she probably should have used that money for other things, she wanted me to be able to have new experiences and she wanted me to be able to grow as a person.  My pen pal was 9 years older than I was, she had a young daughter, and she had less than a perfect past, but my mom still let me go.  She was always looking out for us, and wanted to protect us, but she was also very willing to let us grow up and make our own decisions.  Maybe she already had a little practice for raising her own children since she was nearly 11 years older than her youngest sibling, and had a hand in raising the three younger kids because she was so much older.  Whatever it was that made her so wise, I’m really thankful for it. 

In sixth grade I moved from elementary school to junior high.  It was there that I met a young Korean girl who was in the US with the sponsorship of the Shriner’s Organization.  She came to this country to have her legs fixed, and she was constantly in casts or had braces on her legs to lengthen them.  Her name was Joo Young, but she later changed it to Kimberly.  You could look across the quad and see little Joo Young flying from one side to the other on her crutches.  She was really sweet, but also kind of shy.  I don’t remember how I met her, and I don’t think she was in my homeroom class.  What I do remember is that her name was written on the board in one of my classes (maybe math.  I don’t remember the class I just remember the room), and that the teacher said something about her, and then I became her friend.  She may remember this more clearly than I do, but my memory has been cloudy since I got sick.   

When you are a sixth grader at from Canyon Middle School, there’s a one-week camp that you go to in the hills near Santa Cruz. In preparation for this camp we were told write down the names of three people that we would like to bunk with, and we would be paired with one of those three people.  I wrote down Joo Young’s name, and another name that I wrote down was of a girl who I had known since elementary school who wasn’t really well accepted in junior high.  I don’t remember the third person that I chose.  I was nervous about going to this camp because of a problem that I had that I didn’t want anyone to know about.  I still wet the bed in sixth grade, and I even had surgery to try to help solve the problem at one point.  It was one of the things that I had to deal with, and my mom and I didn’t know what would happen if I went to the camp and wet my bed.  When my mom asked, we were assured that this was not unusual and that they made special arrangements for people in my situation.  They would come in and wash our sleeping bags every morning when all the kids were out and they’d be dry when we came back.  We were also in a cabin that had a bathroom and a shower in it, so we didn’t have to go too far if we had to go to the bathroom late at night, and we could clean ourselves up if we needed to in the morning.  I don’t know if any of the other girls in that cabin had the same problem, and I don’t need to know.  But it was a big relief to not have to be worried the whole time about someone finding out.

I was paired up with Joo Young as my cabin-mate, but I don’t remember who the other girl ended up being paired with.  At one point during camp, I was walking somewhere with Joo Young, and someone came up behind me, put her arms around me, and pulled me back from Joo Young about 15 feet.  I had no idea who it was or why this person was doing this, but when we stopped moving backwards I realized that it was one of the head counselors.  She told me that she heard what I had tried to do for the other girl, and how I was concerned that she wouldn’t have a friend to be her cabin-mate.  She then told me what a special person I was and that it made her proud to hear about what I had done.  I wish I could remember exactly what she said, but as I said before, my memory is pretty cloudy.  Of course it could just be that it happened 18 years ago, and I’m just getting old.  Anyway, it really made me feel good to hear that.  I wasn’t trying to do it to get praise, I was trying to do it because I wanted my friends to be happy and to not have to feel bad about themselves.  I’ve always been that way.  I want the people that I care about to be happy, and I want to do things that will make them happy.  When I see them smile it makes me feel good.

In sixth grade I got along with a lot of kids in school, but things changed as soon as seventh grade started.  I remember the look on the face of one girl when I saw her on the first day of class and said, “Hi,” to her.  She just stared blankly at me, as if to say, “how dare you even think of talking to me!”  I guess over the summer the cool girls got together and decided who they would and who they wouldn’t talk to.  No skin off my back, I had a group of friends who were enough for me, so I didn’t need to be accepted by them.  I just thought it was stupid to suddenly stop being someone’s friend, but we all know that’s how kids are.  In my school, most of the kids came from families with money.  Not really well to do, no one was being driven to school in limos or anything, but most of the kids lived in houses that their parents owned.  We didn’t have money, and we shopped at Kmart for clothes.  When one girl asked me where I got my clothes, I told her, and the rest of the girls laughed.  She would ask me every day, and I guess it was a funny joke every day.  I told my mom, and she told me that the next time the girl asked me that question I should tell her, “From your closet.”  So the next time she asked, I said that, and she stopped, got a strange look on her face, and stammered through a, “no you didn’t.” response.  Shut her up from then on anyway.  I was so prepared to use the, “yeah, you know I shop at Kmart.  Remember, I saw you and your mom there the other day,” but I don’t think I got to use it.

The bedwetting was obviously a big problem and stayed with me for a lot of years.  I don’t remember when I stopped, but I think it was sometime around Christmas one year.  I do remember trying to convince myself that if I went for a certain period of time without wetting the bed then I’d get to go to Disneyland or something like that, even though it wasn’t true.  It didn’t have to be true, because that’s eventually what worked.  I’ve also had glasses since I was in pre-school and had to wear patches and have eye drops because I had a lazy eye.  I don’t really have much vision out of that eye now, and I don’t really have depth perception, but my eye doesn’t wander anymore.  Other than those things, I wasn’t always sick as a kid.  Things came and went and my bigger problems didn’t really start until I was 13 years old.  Before that, I had already had a couple of operations and ultrasounds, which told us that I only had one kidney.  Years later we would find out that I also had two uteri (instead of one uterus).  With this early knowledge, we found that I was like some of my other relatives in terms of having improper numbers of organs. 

My second cousin Laura was built the same way I was.  She had one kidney and two uteri.  She also had horrible endometriosis and developed a brain tumor that caused a seizure disorder.  I’m not sure if the brain tumor was caused by the endometriosis, but there is a chance it was.  As frightening and bizarre as that may sound to those who don’t know much about endometriosis, it is possible.  The tissue does not stay in the abdomen all the time.  Some women bleed from their arms or noses when they are menstruating.  It may sound gross to people who are reading this for the first time, but imagine if you were the one dealing with it.

My mother and one of my aunts were both born with 2 ½ kidneys.  This doesn’t mean that they are better off because they have extra, they actually have problems because it.  All of us have smatterings of other problems with our reproductive, digestive, or urinary tracts as well as the ones mentioned above, and my sister has digestive tract problems as well.  Plenty of doctors have said in the past that this is not hereditary, but I think it’s a bit too coincidental to not be.  None of us were conceived, developed in-utero, or born in the same places, so environmental issues aren’t to blame.  I hope someday we can find out why this all happened, so that the women of my family will no longer have to worry about not wanting to have children to pass this onto, or won’t have to feel guilty if the children we do have end up in the same boat.

When I was 13, I had an appendectomy, and 2 months later I began menstruating for the first time.  The cramps were bad from that first time on, and I was diagnosed with endometriosis.  I would scream and cry and vomit throughout my periods, and ended up taking up to three baths a night to try to ease the cramps.  I would take one pain killer for anywhere between 2 months and three years, and then it wouldn’t work anymore so I’d have to find something else.  One treatment option that doctors use for endometriosis is birth control pills, but even the weakest of those nauseated me to the point of incapacitation.  So, I just took pain killers, popping them like candy at times, to get me through each cycle, and I kept a heating pad close by.  I rarely took pain killers for other things because I knew that each time I took one I was getting closer and closer to the time when I’d have to find a new brand to take.  During the times that I wasn’t close to an electrical outlet, I found a product that would heat when exposed to the air, so I used those to be able to function.

When I was 15, I was walking to the locker rooms after gym class, and my left hip locked up on me.  We had been playing tennis, but I didn’t think I had done anything to strain it.  We went to see the doctor, but there was nothing on the x-rays that they could see to explain what happened.  I spent three days on crutches and then I was okay.  I guess it was around that age too when I started getting a rash on my hands.  It only appeared on my palms and sometimes the backs of my fingers.  The doctor I saw for that asked me to leave the room, and then he asked my mom if I had gonorrhea.  I didn’t have gonorrhea, and I didn’t have an answer for this rash either.  So, as a teenager, I had miserable cramps, unexplained joint pain, and a painful, itchy rash that would come and go.  Not exactly a life that others would envy, but now I look back on those days as the “good times.” 

        I went to one high school with my friends from junior high for my freshman year, then went to another for the first semester of my sophomore year because we lived in a different city.  When I was at that second high school I had a teacher that I just couldn’t stand to be around.  I don’t know what it was about him, all I know is that I couldn’t deal with him.  Maybe it’s because of some experience that I had with him in a past life.  I don’t know.  All I know is that I would convince myself that I was sick quite often that semester because I didn’t want to be in his class.  He never picked on me or had a bad encounter with me, it’s just something that I couldn’t really explain.  I went to see a counselor and asked if I could change to a different class, and when she asked me why I couldn’t explain it to her either.  He didn’t understand it, and he pulled me aside to ask why I was leaving, but I just said I had to.  It was at that time when I told my mom that I didn’t want to go to high school anymore.  She didn’t get crazy or yell at me or brush me off.  Instead, she got some information about the California High School Proficiency Examination (CHSPE), which is like the GED, but it’s only valid in California.  After that first semester of my sophomore year, I moved up to live with my grandparents in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Yosemite.  My sister lived with our father, and my mother moved in with one of my aunts for a while. After that school year my mom and sister moved up to the mountains as well.

It was at my third high school that I actually took the CHSPE, and I passed it at the end of my sophomore year.  I thought it was kind of strange that a person who had only completed two years of high school could pass an equivalency exam, but I did.  Even though I wanted out of high school, my mom and I decided that I should try to get into an exchange program and go to Japan.  I was conceived and born in Japan as my father was stationed over there and my mom went to live with him while he was there.  We lived there for the first 7 months of my life before we moved back to California, so I don’t remember any of that, but this time it’s not from a cloudy memory.  So, it worked out that I would go to Japan for the summer after my junior year in high school for a nine-week period.  I only went to high school for that third year so I could go to Japan, or maybe I still wasn’t completely ready to move on to college and it was my mom’s way of keeping me from moving too fast.  The first semester I went full time to high school, but the second semester I only went part time, and I took a couple of night classes at the junior college.  There isn’t much in Columbia, the town where we lived other than spread out homes, just a state park, a couple of stores, an elementary school (that goes through 8^th grade) and the junior college (The high school is in the next town, Sonora).  The basketball team at Columbia Junior College has been pretty good from what I hear, though I never went to any of the games while I was there.  The head coach who was there for a couple years when my sister was a student at CJC actually ended up at UCLA as an assistant coach.

I think it’s quite apparent that I didn’t live a “normal” life, as a child or a teenager.  It’s not only the physical problems that I had that made me different, but also my mentality.  I liked talking to my teachers (other than that one), and I was very fortunate to have a lot of great teachers in my life.  They were never just people who made me do work, they were people who could teach me something other than just what we read in our books or heard in the classroom.  My pre-school teacher in Northern California (I started pre-school in Southern California, but after my parent were divorced my mom moved us back up to live with her family) was a friend of the family for a while, and when she ended up working at my junior high school I was able to be around her again.  I think I apologized for the way I was when I was little.  I guess I made them change the words to the songs that they sang because they weren’t the words that I had learned in LA.  Yes, I’ve been stubborn since I was that young.  She was just the first teacher that I liked, there were plenty more. 

My teacher in first grade was also my teacher in 2^nd and 3^rd grades, and I must say that I was disappointed on the first day of 4^th grade when I looked at the list of kids who were in her class and saw that I wasn’t on it.  She had a cool raft that was suspended over a corner of the room, and when we did well in her class, or when we did certain things we got to go up on the raft and get a little prize out of the big barrel.  It’s not like the prizes were anything extravagant, they were just little things that you could probably buy for a penny, but it was still cool to be able to climb up there and get a prize.  It was in her class that I got into a race with a boy to see who could finish the math book the quickest.  I remember that some of the girls gathered around me and the boys gathered around him as we worked on the last few pages and tore them out to turn them in to the teacher.  I won the race.

In fourth grade my teacher was also the coach of the basketball team, and I liked her as well.  I was a guard I liked to steal the ball and wave my hands in front of the other players to distract them.  I only played in 4^th and 5^th grade, and I couldn’t shoot real well, but I had fun.  I also did a couple of events in track and field and played the violin for a few years, and I liked the people who worked with me on those things.  In 5^th grade a friend of mine and I asked our teacher for extra worksheets for fun.  They were more mind challenging things than just extra work.  I’ve always liked doing jigsaw puzzles and playing word games, and when I found out that she had things that I could work on that would help me learn and that could be fun, I jumped at the chance.  Maybe we were nerds, but who cares.  I was happy and I liked what I was doing.  My friend and I even plotted to ask to go to the bathroom at the same time and take pencils in there so we could erase some of the stuff that kids had written on the walls.  The principle was a really nice guy and when we told him what we had done, he pretended that we were going to be punished and said that we would have to go back with our pencils and erase more of the stuff off the walls.

I really had a great experience in elementary school.  There were only a couple of bad things that happened.  One was that when we would have assemblies all of the kids would have recess at the same time, and I didn’t like that when I was in 5^th grade and my sister was in 3^rd, because she’d run up to me and hug me.  Oh, how awful it was to have your little sister hang around you when you were two years older than her.  Another thing was that they didn’t put in the really cool playground equipment until after the year I left.  How unfair was that?  But, on a more serious note, we did have a tragedy in the family while I was in elementary school.  My father’s second wife had a son who was three years older than I was, but I only saw him a couple of times.  He was in Juvenile Hall, as he had been a troublemaker since the time he was pretty young.  At one point he and some of his friends came up with a plan on how to escape, and the plan was that they were all going to pretend to kill themselves and get transferred to a hospital.  Once they were in the hospital they would escape.  I don’t know how many of them were in on the plan, but I do believe that they each chose different ways of pretending to try to commit suicide.  Troy (my step-brother) decided he would try to hang himself, but they didn’t find him in time and he died.  I guess because I was so young and didn’t really know him it didn’t have a devastating affect on me, but I did figure something out then and there.  I decided that no matter what happened in my life I would never try to kill myself.  I thought that it was a selfish thing to do and that it only ended up hurting the people who cared about you.   It’s probably a good thing that I learned that lesson way back then and made that decision then, because it might be part of the reason why I’m still here today and why I’m so set on fighting through the tough times.

Getting back to teachers, I had quite a few good ones in junior high too.  My homeroom teacher in 6^th grade was a wonderful person, and she’s the one who first started teaching me sign language.  I can’t really point to anything in particular about her that made me think she was so wonderful, she just was.  Another teacher that stands out is Mr. Landers, the 7^th grade Biology teacher.  I know that name automatically brings smiles to the faces of many members of my family because so many had him when they were in 7^th grade.  My mom, her 2 brothers and two sisters, and my Great Uncle Morgan’s four kids all had him, and after a 10-year respite from having to deal with the Lambert clan, I came along.  My mom told me to ask him if he remembered the Lambert family, and he said, “I’ve been trying to forget.”  Of course he was just playing around, but I let him know that he’d have to deal with not only me but my sister as well in a couple of years.  I’m the oldest of all the Grandkids, and none of the others who were nearing their teen years lived in the same town, so they didn’t have the opportunity to have him teach them. 

I think most of the teachers in my junior high were good, but there are two others that stand out to me.  One teacher actually pulled me aside and told me that she had some clothes that her daughter had grown out of and she wanted to give them to me.  I don’t know exactly how she knew that we didn’t have a lot of money, but I didn’t question it.  I remember wearing one of the dresses that she gave me to a violin recital and I made sure to catch her eye so she could see that I was wearing it.  Another teacher that I really liked was my 8^th grade science teacher.  He was a very good teacher and very exciting.  He would do things like stick hot dogs in dry ice and then slam them against the counter, making them shatter.  One time he was walking around the class and did something to make a small explosion occur, and one kid fell out of his seat because it scared him so badly.  He really knew how to make science interesting, and when he started teaching us about Geology he got me hooked.  I knew then that I was going to major in Geology in college.  I was fascinated with the way the earth worked, especially being someone who lives in California and deals with earthquakes.  Of course, that was 1986, and that was the year that California was supposed to fall off into the ocean, according to Nostradamus.  My friends and I talked about that sometimes, but when we started studying Earth Science I realized that there was no way that this was ever going to happen.

At my first high school most of my teachers were cool, and my math teacher was actually the man who had taught me how to swim when I was really young.  Swimming was always a part of life for my family, and we were at the pool all the time.  My mom had been on the synchronized swim team when she was a teenager, and she made sure I was in the pool when I was a baby.  I was on a couple of different swim teams growing up, but when the local pool advertised that they’d start a synchronized swim team, I switched to that.  I told the coach that my mom had been on a team when she was younger, and I volunteered her to be an assistant coach, but on the first day of practice she ended up being the only coach we had.  It was a lot of fun, and we did it for two years, until I moved up to live with my grandparents.  We ran a snack bar at the pool that allowed us to raise money for our costumes, and I was called “Mermaid Lady” by the kids who were there every day.  Our team was called the LAC Mermaids, and I had a visor with that printed on it.  We weren’t able to perform the stunts properly because the pool was only 5 feet deep at it’s maximum point, but we weren’t in it for competition, we’d just do a show for our families and friends at the end of the summer.  When I told my duet partner that I was moving away, she said she was disappointed because she wanted us to go to the Olympics together and compete.  I had the same thoughts, though we both knew that wasn’t going to happen.  But, hey, why not dream big?  Most kids have dreams like that when they’re young, I believe, and it’s good to have them.

In my second high school I also had some pretty good teachers, save for the one I already spoke of that I couldn’t deal with.  One of the teachers would start each day by having one of the kids go up to the front of the class and have the rest of the kids give that student a standing ovation.  It wasn’t for anything  that we did, it was just an exercise to help make us feel good about ourselves.  Even if just for a moment, it put a smile on everyone’s face.  One day I asked if I could be the one to go up there because I was going through a hard time, and she agreed right away.  It was a nice feeling to be up there, but it was nice to be one of the ones clapping for the other students as well.  Another teacher who was pretty cool was my drafting and drivers ed. teacher.  I had started doing drafting as a freshman and continued it at this school, and then had home design for one semester at my third high school.  I enjoyed it a lot and if my printing was better I might have stuck with that a bit more.  As it is I still like taking graph paper and playing around with designs for houses.

At my third high school, there were a couple of teachers who really stood out to me.  One was my Earth Science and Human Biology teacher, and the other was my sign language teacher.  Both of these teachers were very open and I spent a lot of time talking to both of them.  One time I was talking to the sign language teacher in the cafeteria and when my sister saw me she pulled me away, embarrassed by the fact that her older sister would be speaking to a teacher in front of everyone.  I had some fun and interesting teachers at my junior college as well, and at UCLA.  As a Geology student, you spend a lot of time with the people in the department.  Most of the professors have little quirks, and you get to know all of them before it’s over.  There are too many to go into individually, but if you ask anyone to point out the main characteristics of certain professors, or even grad students, you’ll hear the same things from everyone.  You get to know each other really well, and sometimes too well.  But, when you’re in the desert or on top of mountains with these people on the weekends, or during summer field for several weeks, you have no choice but to get to know each other.  There was only one field trip that I went on where we stayed in cabins that had showers, and it’s a good thing we had them on that trip.  Some of us went into the hot springs near Bishop, Ca, and if you know anything about hot springs you know that there is a very pungent sulfur smell that stays on you after you go into hot springs.  We could deal with the smell of sweat that we all built up on these trips, as well as some of the other smells we had to deal with, but no way could we have dealt with that smell for the rest of the trip.  Though I do feel sorry for whoever had that UCLA van after we did.

            With all of the wonderful teachers that I had, it might be hard to understand why I wanted to leave high school early.  It wasn’t because of that one bad experience with the teacher that I had, but it was because of the kids.  It’s not that I was ever too concerned with what other kids thought, and I always had at least a small group of friends that I hung out with, but I just didn’t like the attitude.  There are a couple of things that really stand out to me that made me so ready to move on from high school.  In PE at my third high school I had a bunch of jerks that I ended up getting teamed with when we were playing Volleyball.  They were always rude and insulting to me because wasn’t very good and didn’t try hard.  I didn’t like playing volleyball and I didn’t want to try to win because they were jerks.  Why should I care if we lost every game if I didn’t respect them and they didn’t respect me?  So, one day we had to play against a team that was short two people, so my team offered my over to the side in order to help their chances.  Or so they thought.  I never got the ball over the net when I served on their team, so when it was my turn to serve for the other team they all just started laughing.  The kids on the team that I was playing for on that day were encouraging me though, and even though I didn’t need their encouragement it was even more motivation to play well against the other team.  So, I served the ball, and it landed between all of them in the middle of the court.  Ace.  Then I served again and aced it again.  You would have thought that they might catch on after that, but I served a total of five aces before they finally ended my serve.  A couple of them came up to me afterwards and were furious when they asked me why I didn’t play like that when I was on their side.  I just told them that the other team was respectful and encouraging to me and they weren’t, and I walked into the locker room to change.  Of course, I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day.

The other thing that stands out is about the classroom attitude.  I just wanted to be in school to learn and to get ready for college.  It seemed like there were only a handful of kids who really wanted to be there.  The rest just didn’t care.  In my history class we were given an assignment on propaganda, and one of the boys in the class asked how he was supposed to do the assignment if he didn’t know what propaganda was.  I can’t remember what the teacher said to the student, but I was thinking that not only should he know what it was since he was a junior in high school, but also because we had been studying it for the six weeks prior to that assignment.  I didn’t really try all that hard in high school in subjects other than science and math because I didn’t like them that much, and I didn’t need to work hard to get good grades.  I didn’t like that trait in myself either.  High school just wasn’t challenging enough to me and I didn’t want to be in a place where people were there because they were forced to be there, not because they wanted to be there.  I wanted to be in a place where the students were more serious, and where I would have to work hard.  Honestly I didn’t have to work that hard at my junior college either, but it was good for me to go there first before moving on to UCLA.  I think I would have struggled greatly if I had started at a university when I was just barely 17 instead of at 19. 

After my junior year in high school I went back to the land of my birth.  It was different, but it was a wonderful experience.  I went to school for about a month while I was there, but I didn’t do anything for grades.  It was more for the experience, and because I had to as part of the exchange program.  It was interesting being in school there because it was so much different than schools in the U.S.  I had two host sisters, but none of the three of us went to the same high school, and it seems like most kids go to schools outside of their towns.  I took a train and then walked through the town and finally up a huge staircase to get to the school.  I believe there were well over 100 steps to climb on that staircase.  It was nice exercise anyway.  The first thing I noticed at the school was that the slippers were really small.  When you get to school you take your shoes off and put on slippers, and even though my feet aren’t huge, they still fit snugly into the largest sized slippers that they had.

I was given a little schedule for what classes I would be in.  The schedule changes daily, and there are only a couple classes that the students have every day.  Students don’t change classes like we do here, instead the students are broken down into groups and the teachers change classes after every period.  There were a couple of classes that we had to go to other rooms for, but for the most part we stayed in one room.  It was interesting to see that, and it also shocked me to see kids occasionally fall asleep in class.  I had no idea that they did that in Japan, for some reason I just thought that schools were so strict that you wouldn’t dare allow yourself to fall asleep.  But, I guess we’re all human.

It was definitely interesting being in school there and interacting with the other kids.  I was asked to teach my class to sing, “My Bonnie,” and I was supposed to sing one verse, then let them repeat it before going on to the next.  After I sang the first verse, I could barely hear the entire class repeat it back.  I don’t know if it’s just because they weren’t really sure of their English skills or if they were just shy, but they kept singing rather quietly throughout the whole song.  But they weren’t so shy after that when some of the girls would ask me to sing, “Yesterday” every day at lunchtime.

One day in the English class the teacher was going to play a tape that gave instructions on how to make a paper airplane.  He had played it in his previous class, so he had to rewind the tape when he came into my class.  The volume was really loud, and one time when he was checking where the tape was, he let one word play and I just lost it.  I don’t know, it may have been childish, but I couldn’t help laughing.  It just caught me off guard when the word that boomed through the room was, “STRIP!”  It was even funnier because none of them understood why I was laughing so hard, and I couldn’t exactly explain it to them. 

When their “summer” came along, I stopped going to school, but they didn’t.  I know my friends were bummed that I wasn’t there anymore, but I was able to do something a little different.  I was living on the island of Shikoku, which is south of the main island, Honshu.  After I finished going to school, I was given a chance to go to a camp for 5 days, so I traveled to Tokyo and then on to the camp a bit north of there in Akagi.  There were a large number of Japanese students there, but there were also other exchange students from Australia, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, New Zealand, India, Denmark, Canada, and Thailand.  There were 29 exchange students there, and the vast majority of them were from Australia.  It was really interesting to be able to meet so many people from so many different places, and there were a large number of activities that we took part in that made sure we mingled and got to know as many people as possible.  One activity wasn’t planned though, but it led to another interesting experience.

I had problems with ingrown toenails before I went to Japan, and while I was there I still suffered from the same problems.  My socks would be bloody every day after walking around, and at one point some of the counselors decided to take a couple of us who had ingrown toenails to have them removed.  I can’t recall how this came about, or why, but they took three of us to a local hospital.  I’ve had plenty of experiences with hospitals in the U.S., but this was definitely new.  We didn’t each wait and go in one at a time, we went in together.  There were four beds on each side of the room, and while other people were being treated on the other beds, we were each given a table.  One person was right next to me so that the doctor could go from one to the next without having to stop.  It was really bizarre to me to have a communal treatment room, but I guess if they have communal baths what’s the big deal about having communal treatment rooms, right?  I’m sure for bigger things you get your own room, or at least I think so.  The most disturbing thing to me was that people smoked in the waiting rooms of the hospitals that I went to (I went to another one when I got back to my host family’s house so they could check on my toe).  People smoked on the trains even though there were non-smoking signs, and people smoked in restaurants and wherever else you went, but I just couldn’t believe that they would smoke inside a medical building.  I guess it really bothers me because I also have asthma and when I get sick it’s usually because I’ve inhaled someone else’s smoke.  I’m just really sensitive to that I guess.

I had a great time in Japan, and I would like to go back someday.  Some of my classmates would ask me which country I liked better, and I would tell them that it wasn’t right for me to choose.  I had grown up in America and I was only visiting Japan, so of course I would be biased towards America.  One thing that I do enjoy about the US is the freedom that we have to travel.  Not everyone here travels, but a lot of Americans do.  In Japan, they don’t travel that much.  Or at least they didn’t when I was there 12 years ago.  Sometimes the men in the family work far away from their homes, and they only come home on the weekends, and most kids take trains to their high schools, but there isn’t much recreational travel for many of the citizens of Japan.  It just isn’t, or wasn’t, a part of their lives.  Another thing that I like more about the U.S. is the food.  There are some things that I miss that I used to eat over there, but Big Macs are just not the same in Japan.  I never ate at KFC while I was there, which is another larger chain in Japan.  In places like Tokyo you find some more American restaurants, like Dunkin’ Donuts and Red Lobster, but for the most part the only American restaurants that you’ll find are the big name fast food chains.  One thing that I did acquire a taste for over there was rice.  I hated rice before I went there, but when I started eating rice that was made in rice cookers I started to like it.  A lot of people thought I was crazy to be going to Japan when I didn’t like rice and I was allergic to fish, but I survived and overcame one of those things at least. 

When I got back from Japan there was no rest for the weary.  No time to adjust to the time difference, but I didn’t really need it anyways since I was still young and could acclimate to the time differences quickly.  The day I got back was actually the day that classes started at the junior college, so my mom had to go and petition to get me into one class while I was flying home.  I never got my driver’s license (I still don’t have one, I don’t like driving since I don’t have very strong depth perception), and the public transportation in Tuolumne County is not very extensive, so I usually either walked or rode a bike between home and the college.  Sometimes I took the bus to the college, but I had to walk back home on those days because the bus only went through Columbia once, passing by the state park first, then going to the college, and then back to Sonora.  Since I lived near the park, I had to rely on myself to get home.  I didn’t mind though.  I liked walking, even if it took me about 45 minutes to get up to the college.  Other than the dogs in some of the yards on the way there, it was really a nice walk.  There was a back trail that I took sometimes, but I was usually nervous about walking that way because I didn’t want to run into any animals.  I guess that fear started after we found out that a mountain lion had set up camp outside the dorm area one night.  Even the deer can be scary if you happen to end up between a mother and her babies.  It’s probably good that it made me nervous to walk that trail, because it forced me to get more exercise. 

I had grants to help pay for school, but I got a job as a tutor at the college to help out with expenses at home.  The summer after my first year there, I was chosen to be the lone tutor for the school during that summer session.  My main job was to assist with a low-level math class, but there were also some classes that were held during the summer that I had knowledge of and could tutor for.  I had to be enrolled for the summer in order to work and tutor there, so I took a tennis class with one of my friends.  I had always enjoyed playing tennis, so this was more for fun than it was something that I had to do.  Actually, most of the classes that I took at Columbia were more fun than work.  I didn’t take an easy load or anything, but with the two years that I spent at Columbia I didn’t get much in terms of class credit when I transferred to UCLA.  The units transferred over, but all the science and math classes that I took weren’t high level enough to fulfill my class requirements once I got to UCLA.  Honestly though, if I hadn’t had fun with the classes at Columbia it may have deterred from my interest in some of the classes that I had to take at UCLA.  I probably should have taken more non-science classes so that I could have fulfilled some of my GE’s before I moved on, but I didn’t.  I liked the science classes and I didn’t really check into setting up a plan for transferring like I should have.  Didn’t matter though, because when I applied to transfer I got into UCLA and USC for Geology.  When I looked at the financial aid package from SC it was a joke.  They expected my mother to spend more on my schooling than she made in a year, as they only offered to cover $10,000 of the $25,000 costs for the year.  I was initially upset about it, but man, am I thankful to whoever came up with that ridiculous aid package for me.  If they had given me something more realistic I would have ended up there instead of at UCLA and I would have been miserable.  I mean, I don’t know what I would have done if my team had been on the short side of the streaks that UCLA football and basketball had over the SC teams during the 1990’s.  Plus, I would have had to have listened to those awful fight songs every game and watch football in the horrible Coliseum more than once every two years.  That is just a horrible place to watch a football game, and it’s still amazing to me that the Raiders ever agreed to play there.  It’s hard enough to believe that UCLA used to play there before they moved to the Rosebowl, but an NFL team?  Of course, they didn’t last long in LA.

   When I came down to LA for my orientation in the summer of 1992, I knew I belonged as soon as I stepped on Bruin Walk.  I don’t know what it was that made me feel that way, I just knew I belonged there.  When I moved down to campus I wasn’t really thinking about joining any organizations.  I just wanted to concentrate on studying and go from there.  One of my roommates joined the UCLA Rally Committee, and she was gone for the whole day whenever there was a football game.  I wasn’t into college football when I came to UCLA, but when that roommate asked me if I wanted to go on the trip up to Berkeley for the game against Cal I agreed.  This roommate and I were close friends for a while, but it took me too long to realize how manipulative and untrustworthy she really was.  There was one good thing that came out of the whole relationship though, and that is Rally Committee.  Luckily the people in Rally Comm didn’t believe her lies and I ended up staying while she moved on to other things.  I do have to thank her for getting me involved in this organization though.  It’s led to so many wonderful things that the bad things pale in comparison.  Even the 13 hour days (at least) that we put in for every game, and all the work that we do in the office before each game (the work load was much heavier when I started, but technology has taken away some of the work that we had to do) is well worth what we get out of it.  At least it’s worth it for us die-hards who continue to be involved well after we graduate. 

            The UCLA Rally Committee does the card shows at the football games, and that is our primary function.  We are also in charge of several spirit emblems for the football team, the airhorns, the helmet cart, and the victory bell.  The Chairman of Rally Committee gets to travel with the team to each game and brings one of the airhorns along to sound when we score.  We use both of our airhorns at home games, as well as ringing the victory bell when we have it.  For my first seven years in Rally Committee we had the bell, as we were on an 8 game winning streak that started the year before I started at UCLA.  The Victory bell was UCLA’s originally, but some Trojans stole her and hid her in the early 1940’s.  Someone decided to publish a picture of some Trojans with the bell, and the two universities agreed that USC would pay for half the cost of the bell and then it would become a perpetual trophy, going to whoever won the football game each year.  When we have her she’s painted blue, and when the Trojans have her she has to wear red.  This isn’t a small cowbell or anything.  She’s a heavy girl, and the frame that she sits on that allows us to move her is almost as heavy as the bell itself.  I’ve pulled her around a lot in my day, but I don’t believe I ever tried to pull her up the ramps to get her out of the Rosebowl.  The helmet cart was donated to UCLA years back from a pro team, and it’s more for show and picture taking than anything else.  If you ever watch a UCLA home game you will see the helmet sitting next to the end zone near the cheerleaders.

            Another one of our main responsibilities is putting on the Beat SC Bonfire and Rally every year.  We build up the bonfire under the supervision of the Fire Marshall, and we build the base up with pallets and have a Trojan effigy at the top.  There’s usually an exhibition basketball game on campus the night of the bonfire, and once that game ends everyone leaves Pauley Pavilion and heads over to the rally.  We have different speakers get up on stage and talk to the crowd to motivate them.  We have football players get up there and speak, and you never know what’s going to happen when they grab the microphone.  Some start out shy and get a little more bold as they keep talking and making the crowd scream, others are total hams from the get go, and some have even tried to get dates while they were on the stage.  Of course, every once in a while you have a player who forgets that he should NEVER WEAR RED (at least not during Beat SC Week and especially not to the rally) and he gets up on stage wearing that nasty color.  That of course sets the crowd into the chorus of “Take off that red (fill in the blank)!” until the player covers it or takes it off.  We also have members of the coaching staff get up there, as well as members of other sports teams on campus, alumni who know how to get the crowd going, and just about anyone else that we can think of.  Once the crowd is totally riled up and the band is playing up a storm, we turn to the bonfire and torch the Trojan.  Some years it’s rained or there have been other reasons that deemed it inappropriate to have a fire, so we’ve found other ways to take care of Tommy in those years.

            Every year during Beat SC week, different organizations from the two schools face off in flag football games.  The bands play, teams from the school newspapers square off, as well as others, including the Rally Committee and Trojan Pride showdown called the Spirit Bowl.  The Spirit Bowl is co-ed, and I ended up playing center the three years that I played on the team.  That first year we tied, and I ended up chipping off a piece of bone in my ring finger when I caught one pass (yes, centers are eligible receivers under these rules).  During the actual UCLA/USC football game I was arm in arm with another Rally Committee member who had smashed his hand when the Beat SC Bonfire was being set up.  We were screaming that we had given our bodies in support of our team and we needed the team to pull out the victory.  The two things that I remember most from that game were seeing JJ Stokes rise above everyone else and catch a touchdown pass on the opposite end of the field, and that the last 40 seconds of the game took about 15 minutes to complete.  That game was very dramatic and came down to the end, but we won.  I believe we stopped a two-point conversion try by the Trojans at the end that would have won it for them.

            Once football season is over, Rally Committee’s attention turns to basketball.  During basketball season we are responsible for handing out Priority Numbers at each game. These little pieces of paper keep kids from having to wait in line for days to get seats for the games.   There are some fans that sleep out the nights before games, and they’re the ones that get to sit on the arena level. That first season I wasn’t all that interested in the basketball team so much as being around my friends and having a good time at the games.  It would be a couple more years before I would become the diehard basketball fan that I am today.   I became a Bruin fan from the time I attended that first football game, but since I grew up with no interest in watching basketball it took me a while to really get into it that sport.

             That first year at UCLA determined what the rest of my years would be like.  I worked on campus, went to class and on field trips, and spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends from the suites or with Rally Committee. I had four different groups of people that I had the opportunity to hang out with, and I was able to have fun and enjoy my time with each group without.   Many times the people that I hung out with would drink, but if they got too obnoxious I’d just leave.  Alcohol actually causes me pain.  I’m not sure what it does exactly, but it makes my body hurt even with just a few sips of a wine cooler.  Even if my body didn’t react that way to alcohol I still don’t think I ever would have gotten into drinking.  I had always found ways to enjoy myself without needing to use anything that would hinder my ability to think clearly.  I just never understood the need that some people had to get so drunk that they either didn’t remember what they had done while they were drunk, or they got sick and threw up everywhere.  I just don’t see how that’s fun or worth it.  I have never found it fun to be around people who’ve been drinking that heavily either.  Some people think it’s fun to watch others get drunk, but I’ve never found it to be fun, and I never will.  I can tolerate it when people are drinking a little bit at a gathering, but when the point is to get smashed, that’s when I look for something else to do. 

My second year at UCLA I began taking some of the core classes for my major, and I decided to work in the student union instead of in the dining hall.  One of the best weeks of my time at UCLA came during Beat SC weeks that year.  That year we were in the running for a berth in the Rosebowl on January 1^st, and in order to get into the Rosebowl we had to beat USC.  If we tied with them (in those days there was no overtime in college football) or if they won, we would go, but we had to win the game outright. The Friday before the game a local radio station was broadcasting from both schools in the morning, and we brought the bell out so we could remind all of the USC fans out there that we had her.  A local TV station also sent a crew out, and had Rally Committee and Trojan Pride do a tug of war on the news, with a rose as the prize.  We won the tug of war, and later that afternoon we went over to SC and won the Spirit Bowl as well.  Then on Saturday we were all holding out breath in the last few seconds of the game as we were leading, but SC was in position to win as the clock was winding down.  Then their quarterback threw a pass right into the hands of one of the Bruin players in the end zone, sealing the victory for us.  The Bruin streak over the Trojans was at three wins, and we were going to be able to keep the bell for yet another year.  We had Sunday off from all the excitement, and then on Monday a handful of us were off to East LA to do a card show in a movie.  All most of us knew was that it was called Forrest Gump and Tom Hanks was in it.  We set up the bleachers for the card show and then the extras came in to do the show and to be the background for the football segments.  Many of the extras were Trojan fans, and they were not exactly happy to be taking instructions from a bunch of Bruins.  One of them even slapped one of our members in the face with the pom-poms she was holding.  I guess they were still bitter about the loss from two days earlier.  The band that was there was comprised of some members of the Trojan marching band, so we kept our distance from them.  Though we weren’t shy about cheering when Forrest ran them over as he scored his touchdown and kept running out the tunnel.  Once the movie was released I realized just how amazing it was to have been able to have a part in making Forrest Gump.  I found it interesting that they wanted to use people for the card show instead of all the technology that was used in many parts of the movie, but from what I’ve seen of attempts to do card shows with technology, they suck.  It’s easy to tell the difference between the real thing and a computer generated card show, or at least it is for those of us who have put on numerous shows in our lives.   

It was a great choice to go with the real thing, and the handful of us who participated that day were able to benefit because of that choice.  The benefits that we received, however, weren’t limited to just being able to show our families what we did one Monday in November.  When Tom Hanks won the Spencer Tracy award, those of us that had been involved in the filming were invited to the ceremony and Q & A session that was held in the Ackerman Grand Ballroom at UCLA, and then we were invited to attend the small reception that was held afterwards.  Very cool stuff. 

The weekends that I wasn’t attending sporting events were usually spent on Geology field trips.  On these trips we would hike through deserts, around mountains, and in and out of dormant volcanoes.  We had one extended trip that took us to New Mexico, but the rest of the trips that I went on were to locations in California.  I noticed that the little injuries that I got during some of these trips never really healed completely.  To this day my wrist still hurts from a time that I sprained it 9 years ago, and after I banged my knee against a rock it was never the same either.  The worst injury I had was when I tried to put my hand on a large rock to steady myself as I tried to get down a slippery slope (I’m a wimp, so I never had the guts to just run down those slopes).  This was a really big rock, so I thought it would hold my weight, but it didn’t.  The rock moved and my hand slipped to the ground, in the path of where that rock was going to roll.  It ended up crushing the tip of my right pinky finger and pulled the fingernail out of the bed.  The nail was only being held on at the end of my finger and it hurt like hell.  I cried like a baby until a couple of my classmates came to help me.  It took us about an hour to get down to the van from where I was, partly because of where we were and partly because I was really nervous about going down the slopes after that.  Once we got down to the van, we splinted my finger with a colored pencil (what else would Geologists use?), and my professor had to decide which direction we would go in.  We were about an hour and a half from any hospitals, and we had to choose between going to Barstow and Needles to get my finger treated.  We went to Needles and once I was finally able to see a doctor, my fingernail was cut off the rest of the way and then sewn back in place.  A new fingernail eventually grew in and took the place of the old one.  There was ligament damage to the finger , but it’s not anything that causes me any problems. 

In 1995 the UCLA Men’s Basketball team won the National Championship.  In 1996, the team lost in the first round of the tournament, and just before the 1996-1997 season started the coach was fired.  Because of the success of the team in 1995, the top assistants were lured away to other schools to become head coaches, so the interim head coaching job was given to an unknown, young assistant coach who had been with the Bruins for 5 years.  It was clear as a fan watching the team that season that Steve Lavin was more of a brother figure to the guys on the team than a father figure, as you would expect from a relationship between a coach and his team.  The majority of these guys had won a championship as freshman or sophomores, and the year after that they had played like a bunch of guys who just wanted to show off their athletic ability and get on the highlight reels.  As much as I love those guys, I really didn’t like watching them play that year because they weren’t a team that I could be proud of.  So, as these guys entered the new season with a new, unproven coach, they were again inclined to do what they wanted instead of listening to the coach.  Until the “Maples Massacre.”

The “Maples Massacre” is the label put onto a game that the Bruins played at Stanford, where they lost 109-61.  That was the worst loss in school history, and you’d think that the young, interim coach would try to sneak off the court with his tail between his legs, wouldn’t you?  He didn’t.  He was actually caught on camera, joking around with some of the players as they walked off the court.  Some people may think that he should have been fuming and laid into the players for playing so poorly, but he didn’t think that would do anything to help the situation.  Instead, he joked and shrugged it off.  Stanford had played at a magic level and no one could have stopped them on that day.  It was just one game during the season, and the important thing was that the team bounced back and didn’t let this one game destroy the rest of the season.  His approach worked, as the players finally decided that it was time to listen to their new coach and buy into his system.  After that, they beat Arizona in Tucson (which only a handful of teams have done even now), they beat Duke, and blew Stanford out in the rematch a month later.  The team eventually made it into the NCAA tournament and made a deep run before losing in the Elite Eight (fourth round).

In the Blink of an Eye 

I graduated from UCLA in March of 1996, and eventually ended up working in the mailroom of a law firm.  It wasn’t a great job, or anything that I intended to do for an extended period of time, but I had some good friends there and was making enough money to be comfortable.  When the basketball season ended a year later, I was really happy.  Not because they lost in the Elite Eight, but because of what the team had been through.  They were beaten and embarrassed at Stanford, but they bounced back.  They fought through the adversity of losing their coach and they bounced back.  They didn’t win the championship, but they accomplished a lot.  That’s more true to life, I thought.  We all go through rough times and we need to bounce back.  Having resiliency does not mean we are going to get everything that we want, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and strive to get what we want.

As I said, I was just really happy then.  Maybe it wasn’t happiness so much as being content and at peace.  I remember talking to my Grandmother on the phone and telling her that I was happier than I had ever been.  I just felt good.  I learned a lot from the struggles of the basketball team, and I was really proud of them.  I didn’t have much pressure on me for anything.  The girls from work would go out dancing or roller skating sometimes, and we just had fun.  We were planning on going out for my birthday in April, but a few days before that I started feeling bad.

The basketball season ended on March 22^nd for the Bruins and my birthday was April 18^th, so it was less than a month between when I was as happy as I’d ever been to when my world began to shatter.  At first I thought I was just ovulating when I was having really bad cramps, but after three days the cramps didn’t go away and they were getting worse.  I went to the doctor and was given some pain killers.  Within a couple days I was so nauseated that I couldn’t stand up straight, and one of my co-workers called my doctor to make them get me an emergency appointment.  She didn’t like the green color that my skin had turned.  I saw another doctor, and she didn’t seem to be listening to the things that I was saying.  It was almost like she was anticipating how I would answer her questions, and basing her follow up questions on what she thought I would say, not on what I did say.  She sent me home with another prescription for pain medication.  On a Friday my doctor told me that I should have an ultrasound, but I’d have to wait until Monday since I had no chance of being pregnant, meaning that it wasn’t an emergency.  I told her that I couldn’t see clearly, my skin was alternating between green and gray, and I couldn’t stand up.  How could that not be an emergency?  It sure wasn’t normal.  I couldn’t work, and I had to crawl to get to the bathroom.  She called me back 15 minutes later and had an appointment for me that night.  Luckily a friend of mine came over to get some camping equipment from me that night, and I asked her to take me in for the ultrasound as I didn’t have a car and wouldn’t have trusted myself with driving even if I did have one. 

The ultrasound showed a mass on my right ovary, and my mom drove down to LA to take me to see another doctor the next week.  This doctor just wanted to give me treatments for endometriosis, assuming that it was just a flare up and would go away.  He gave me a new prescription for a new pain killer and sent me home.  Every time we called and said it wasn’t working and I wasn’t improving, all I’d get was another prescription.  He just kept giving me a different pain killer every day until my mom said enough was enough.  All of those vials of heavy-duty pain killers weren’t doing anything but taking money out of my pocket, so something else needed to be done.  I finally had a laparoscopy on May 1^st.  My right ovary was removed, as it was a big ball of endometrial tissue, and it was during this procedure that it was determined that I had two uteri.  The one on the right was not connected properly, so instead of the blood draining out of my body normally, the only place it had to go was into my abdomen.  But, the doctor did not want to take that uterus out because he didn’t like removing tissue unless it was necessary.  I already didn’t like him, but this seemed dumb to me.  If it was causing me problems, why didn’t he just remove it?  Then, they wanted to release me that night after my surgery, but my mom went home and refused to come back to get me.  My blood pressure dropped to 80 over 40 during the night, so it’s a good thing I didn’t go home. The doctor also made me try taking birth control pills again.  So as I was trying to recover from having surgery I had to try to find a way to get comfortable on the bathroom floor because I had to throw up from the pills.  I can’t remember if I threw the pills away or if my mom did, but there was no way I was ever going to take those things again.

My mom stayed with me for about a week, but before she left I told her I still didn’t feel right.  I thought there was still something wrong, but we figured that it was just part of trying to recover and having my body adjust to losing one ovary.  I think I went back to work, but I really can’t remember.  What I do remember is that 6 weeks after that surgery on May 1^st, I was laying on my floor, my entire body tingling from the worst case of pins and needles that you could imagine, thinking I was going to die right there.  My doctor told me to come in to his office, so I left a message for my friend and got in the bathtub while I waited for her.  I knew that I was going to have surgery again, so I wore my bathrobe to the doctor’s office.  The nurse asked what they should do with me and I said, “Knock me out!”  I think I took about 6 Tylenol with Codeine tablets that morning, so when we got to the hospital they couldn’t give me anything for the pain at first, and the people who worked in pre-op were shocked to see me again.  For some reason they remembered me from the last operation I had, even though it had been six weeks.  They paged the anesthesiologist and asked him to give me something because I couldn’t stop crying it hurt so badly.  This time the doctor took out the right uterus, and he told my friend that my abdomen had been full of blood.  He told my friend that blood only caused some people pain and that he didn’t understand why I would always cry when he examined me.  I cried because I was in a lot of pain, but apparently he couldn’t grasp the concept that he was hurting me. 

The doctor informed my boss that I could return to work in a couple of days as I only had a pelvic mass removed.  Never mind the fact that I had been really sick and unable to get around for two months, but I think a uterus is more than just a pelvic mass.  My mom came down to take care of me again, and she explained to my boss why I couldn’t come in to work three days later as my doctor had told them I could.  Luckily my boss and I were close, so she didn’t believe the doctor.  My mom got on the phone and tried to work with my HMO to get me a new doctor, but HMO’s are not easy to deal with at all.  I had to go back to that office one more time before I could change doctors and I started crying about an hour before we had to leave.  My mom practically had to drag me to the car because I just didn’t want to go back there.  When we did get there I saw a different doctor, but I just kept my arm over my eyes while my mom did most of the talking.  Yes, I was acting like a child, but I was so traumatized I didn’t want to deal with anything, especially being in that office again.  I am still traumatized about the whole ordeal, and each time I see a new doctor I cry while I’m explaining what happened to me.  For two years I cried whenever I walked into the waiting room of a doctor’s office, so I guess I’ve made some improvement.  Maybe someday I will be able to meet a new doctor without crying, but as soon as I see a new face in a white coat walk through the door, I get all upset. My mom put together a small binder for me that outlines what has happened to me as well as some of the medical problems that other family members have so the doctors can look through that while I try to compose myself.  Since I’ve been using that they tend to understand why I get so upset.  I’m fine after that first visit, I just can’t keep it together when I meet new doctors.  At UCLA doctors change over every couple of years as it is a teaching hospital, so I have to go through this more often than I would if I saw a doctor in some other office, but I trust UCLA. It’s not just my alma mater, it’s the place where I feel most at home.

After that last appointment in that office, I got a new doctor.  Since I had an HMO, I didn’t get the best care in helping me to recover.  I probably should have gone into physical therapy to strengthen my muscles, but that didn’t happen.  My back hurt constantly and I was basically bed-ridden for the next couple months.  Having my mom there was a big help, both emotionally and physically.  I guess the only good thing about so many of us in the same family having these medical problems is that we can all understand each other.  No one on the outside can really appreciate what you’re going through, so I’ve been lucky to have people who know what I’m going through be there for me.  But, all of this brought about questions that I had to start dealing with, and that’s where the loneliness sets in.  Can I have kids?  Should I have kids?  I’ve only ever wanted to fall in love and have a family, but could I live with myself if I had a child who got sick like me?  Isn’t it selfish to want a child when you know you could make it suffer so much just by passing on your genes?  All of these questions weighed heavily on my mind, but they were pushed to the background as I struggled to get back on my feet and get back to work.

The Road to Wellness

Taking Steps Forward and Backward

So, I was trying to recover from two emergency operations, trying to recover from being traumatized by some horrible doctors, trying to deal with the likelihood that I will never have kids, and trying to deal with the pain that I was in all the time.  Then, a month after I went back to work full-time, the company had to start laying people off and I was one of the victims.  Not too long after that, my roommate decided that she was moving, so I had to find a new place to live.  With no job, no money, poor health, and finally no place to live, things were getting pretty desperate.  But I didn’t give in.  During that summer I watched the tapes I had made of some of the basketball games that the Bruins had played during the season before all of this happened.  Every time something bad happened I watched those tapes again.  Those tapes were reminders of the good times that I had before I got sick.  They were reminders of how people can get knocked down and still find a way to get back up.  Resiliency is the key.  It’s not important what happens to put you down, it’s how you respond to it and deal with it that defines your character.  I wouldn’t let all that stuff get me down.  My family was able to help me out with a little bit of money here and there, and I was able to talk my way into a new apartment, even though I had no job, no prospects for a job, and no savings to fall back on.   

Six months after I had been laid off, I went for a job interview with Kaplan Test Prep in Westwood.  The first thing I noticed when I went for my interview was that my name was just outside the door.  On the street where our building is, there are placards for the movies that have won Best Picture throughout the years.  They go down the street and up and down the stairs to the second floor where our offices are located.  The one that sits a few feet from the door that lead to the office where I was to have my interview was for the movie “Rebecca.”  When I was going on interviews during this time period, I told myself one thing, that I will be an asset to whatever company has the smarts to hire me.  If they couldn’t see what I would bring, well, that’s their loss.  I was going to find a job that was right for me, and wherever I worked, those that hired me would not be disappointed.  When I saw my name outside of the Kaplan office, I knew it was meant to be.  I met with the person who was to be my direct supervisor, but his boss was not available to meet with me that day, so I had to come back the next day and meet with someone else.  I was hired the next day and started work on April 1^st, 1998.  My mother and stepfather were getting ready to move across the country, and they thought that they were going to have to try and convince me to move with them since I didn’t have any money or a job, but I didn’t want to go.  So I called them after I got back from that second interview, and when my stepfather asked how I was I answered, “Employed!” Things looked like they were getting better, slowly. 

I had started a treatment for the endometriosis in November of 1997, where I would get a shot every three months.  It kept me from menstruating, but I had other problems.  My back still hurt all the time, and I was having more and more pain in other places.  Eventually I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, which finally put a name on what I had, but didn’t exactly give me any solutions for dealing with it.  For four years I didn’t take any pain medication at all, not even for the migraines I got occasionally.  My body didn’t respond to the pain killers because I had been overmedicated during the time that I was being treated when I first got really sick.  The only thing that they could do for me for the Fibro was to try to give me medication to help me sleep, but nothing seemed to work.  Or if it worked, it lasted for two or three weeks and I’d just have to up the dosage.  I didn’t want to keep upping the dosages because that’s not a solution.  The other thing they say to do is to exercise, but that’s easier said than done for most people with Fibromyalgia.  Being able to sleep well and exercising are things that can help alleviate some of the problems, but they don’t make it go away.  Nobody has a sure fire way to help everyone with Fibro, and there is no cure for this disease.  Eventually I had to stop getting the shot too, so I’m now without treatment for the Endo as well as the Fibro.  The shot did keep me from menstruating, but it made me gain weight like crazy.  In the last year and a half that I got the shots, I noticed that I would gain between 10 and 15 pounds after each one.  It wasn’t like the weight came on gradually either.  About three weeks after I would get a shot, I could weigh myself and write that weight down. Less than a week later I would weigh 10-15 pounds more than I had before.  All this extra weight only added to the depression that I felt as well as making it more and more difficult for me to get around.  Since I stopped getting the shot, I stopped gaining weight, but I haven’t been able to lose the weight either. 

On top of all this, I really don’t have many friends anymore.  Sure my friends were sympathetic when I first got sick and was recuperating from my operations, but when I didn’t get better and couldn’t do the things I used to do, many of them decided that I was lazy.  They decided that I was pretending to still be sick so I didn’t have to do the work.  I guess they couldn’t comprehend that just because I looked “normal” that didn’t mean I was.  They remembered me running up and down the stairs at the Rosebowl before I got sick, so I guess they just assumed that I should be able to do that after I recovered from my operations too.  I can kind of understand their thinking, but it doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed in the way they’ve treated me.  Since they weren’t around me all the time they didn’t know just how bad off I was.  It’s hard enough for me to think about and deal with everything that’s happened to me, and I come from a family that has a long history of medical problems.  For people who don’t know what that’s like, it must be hard for them to comprehend that someone could get sick and not get better.  When I injured my foot two years ago just before a football game I think some of them started to think a little differently.  I had a large weight fall on my foot just before we were supposed to head out to the Rosebowl, so I had one of my friends take me to the emergency room at UCLA.  The doctor was only going to give me a shot of Demerol if I promised not to go to the game, so I promised and got the shot.  She didn’t want me to be all doped up and hurt myself even further, which I understood.  But, as soon as I got my crutches my friend and I headed for the Rosebowl.  I knew that the Demerol wasn’t going to have much of an affect on me after all the pain killers that I’ve gone through, and it didn’t.  It only took the edge off the pain, and didn’t affect me at all mentally.  My foot wasn’t broken, it was just extensive soft tissue damage, but it was extremely painful.  This happened at the end of September, and I was still in a walking boot for the first part of the basketball season (through December).  For them to see how long it took for my foot to get back to normal, and I use the word normal loosely, it was the first time that my friends were able to see a physical sign of my medical problems and how long it took me to recover from that.  Of course, my foot still hurts me sometimes now, and it’s been two years since it happened. 

I don’t tend to go out with people from work either, so some of them may think I’m just anti-social.  I don’t think they understand just how hard it is for me to sit at a desk for 8 hours, and how much pain that puts me in.  Again, they don’t have any experience with someone who is as sick as I am, so it’s hard for them to understand.  One time we went to a baseball game, and my back hurt so bad that I started kicking the bench in front of me really hard.  My friend told me to stop, and when I looked down I saw that I had taken out a big chunk of the wood with my shoe.  At work I have a chair cover with heat and massage capabilities, a heating pad, and a heater that I use to try to keep me as comfortable as possible during the day.  I rarely hang out with people after work, and when I do I’m usually in a great deal of pain.  When things are planned on the weekends, I don’t usually go to those things either.  I never know how I’m going to feel, and I don’t want to ruin the fun that others are having by asking someone to drive me home.  When I do go somewhere I take pills to help avert nausea and stomach cramps, and hope that I can get where I’m going without any problems.  On top of all that, I don’t drink and don’t enjoy being around other people who are drinking (as I said before), so I won’t go to parties where they’re just hanging out and getting drunk either.  When I do go out, it’s usually for big things, or when something is spur of the moment and I’m feeling okay at the time that the plans are being made.  Some of them understand since they’re more aware of what’s going on, but I’m sure they just don’t know how to deal with what’s going on with me and they aren’t sure how to react.

Honestly, all this stuff kills me.  I hurts me to think about how my life used to be and how it is now.  I used to walk for miles without thinking twice about it, and now I have to wear my walkman to the grocery store to distract me from the pain that seeps into my back, feet, and legs as I walk down the aisles.  I had to stop going to the games last year after 9 years of rarely missing any football or basketball games at all.  I don’t like watching the football games from the Press Box side of the field!  I don’t like sitting in my apartment screaming at the refs to quit screwing the Bruins when they’re playing in Pauley Pavilion.  I want to be able to go to the games, but I can’t.  I want to be active again.  I want to be able to walk when I want to and where I want to.  I want to run up and down the stairs at the Rosebowl.  I want to chat with the Event Staff and ushers at the games the way I used to.  It’s too hard on me physically, and that hurts me emotionally.  That skinny girl who was perpetually going to look about 5-10 years younger than she was is gone.  She’s not coming back and I miss her.  I miss how free she used to feel and happy and energetic she was.   

So, how do I keep going?  Why do I keep going?  How do I manage to maintain my sanity throughout all of the hard times?  It’s not just one thing.  There’s a combination of things that keep me going.  Each of us can find a way to deal with the problems that we face, but I’m not saying it’s easy.  It’s much easier to give in than it is to fight most of the time.  That doesn’t mean that we should give in, but it also doesn’t mean that those of us who do fight should think any less of those who can’t or don’t.  It also doesn’t mean that those who don’t have these problems should think that the rules from their world apply to those in our world.  Even if we’ve been through some of the same things as other people have been, we still don’t know how they’re feeling or how they may deal with what they’re going through.  Everyone is different and we should all respect that.  I hope that some of my methods for coping can help other people as well, whether it’s by doing some of what I do, or by allowing this information to help open a path to determining what will help.  My intent here is not to tell anyone how to feel or act, I’m just giving advice and sharing my experiences and ideas.

Tears, laughter, and my inspiration 

The first part of coping is to know that you should not deny yourself the ability to feel and to grieve about what’s happening in your life.  When I start getting depressed, I cry.  I think about all the things that I can’t do anymore, and all the things that I won’t ever be able to do, and I cry.  I allow myself to get angry and upset and throw things if I need to.  Then, I get over it.  I can’t dwell on those things for too long, because I can’t change them.  They’re always there, even when I’m laughing they’re always there, but they can’t consume me all the time.  So, I usually spend the night crying, and then I decide to do something that makes me happy the next day.  Sometimes I can go for a few weeks without getting really upset, but sometimes I go only a day or two.  It all depends on what’s going on and how I feel physically, but I know that if I feel upset I can’t just hold it in.  That will only make me feel worse.  When I’m in physical pain, I don’t hide that either.  I say, “OW!”  I pound my desk with my fists or hit my legs or squeeze a little stress ball when I’m in a lot of pain.  I’ll scream or growl sometimes too if I’m in that much pain.  I don’t care if it makes other people uncomfortable, or if they think I’m strange.  I am strange!  My body is not normal, and my life is not normal.  If they think I complain too much, that’s their problem.  They don’t realize that I could be complaining all the time because I am in pain all the time.  I can’t remember a moment when I wasn’t in pain.  I don’t even get away from it when I’m asleep.  I have what I call “pain dreams” a lot of times.  For the most part I just deal with it and don’t say anything.  On a pain scale of 1-10 I’m usually at a 5 or 6.  When it gets up to 8 or 9 is when I can’t hide it and don’t try to.

There are always well-meaning people out there who say things like, “there are people who are worse off than you are.”  You know what?  That is one of the worst things anyone can possibly say to a person who is going through a rough time, no matter what the problem is.  When someone says that to me it infuriates me, and I lose respect for the person saying it.  Every person on this earth has struggles that he or she must face, and just because the struggles that one person is facing don’t seem as hard as someone else’s, it doesn’t mean that those struggles are any less important or serious.  It’s not a contest.  If you lose a finger in an accident it doesn’t mean that you should feel guilty about being upset because someone else lost an arm and they’re worse off than you are. If something bad happens to you, you have a right to be upset about it.  Don’t let anyone else tell you how to feel, and try not to tell others how to feel either.  For those of us who are chronically ill or have disabilities, we don’t have much control over certain aspects of our lives, and if someone tries to tell us how to feel, that’s infringing on one of the few things that we do have some control over.  All we can do is share our experiences with others and let them know how we felt and how we dealt with different situations.  The people we share this information with have to make the decisions as to what they’re going to do with it.

I mentioned that I usually try to do something that makes me happy after I’ve let myself get upset, and I want to expand on that.  We all need to have something in our lives that makes us happy.  Hopefully more than one thing, but we need at least one thing to get things started.  Ask yourself what makes you happy.  I mean really happy.  Do you have something that makes you smile when you think about it or when someone mentions it?  If you do, that’s wonderful.  If you don’t have anything, you might want to think about what would make you happy if you were able to do it on a regular basis.  I’ll start by saying that there should be limits on this, if you are trying to find something makes you happy.  It’s okay to do things that make you happy as long as they don’t bring harm to other people or yourself, and as long as you aren’t doing anything illegal or anything that you will regret later.  That said, it doesn’t have to be anything big.  Maybe reading books will do it for you.  Maybe going for walks is the answer, or playing with your kids, or taking bubble baths.  Just think about it and you’ll come up with something.  For some people this may be a difficult task, but if you’re patient and let your mind search for something I’m sure you can find at least one thing.  Again, it doesn’t need to be anything big, and I don’t recommend choosing anything big to start with as it could be something that you just can’t get to yet.  What would really make me happy would be to have a wonderful husband and beautiful children, but that isn’t something that I can have right now, so I have to be more realistic.  

When I feel like I’ve hit rock bottom, and I feel hopeless, I know that the only way things are going to change is if I make them change.  I can’t make pain go away, and I can’t just tell myself to stop being sick.  That’s not going to happen.  I’ve accepted that.  But, I still have things that make me happy, and it’s those things that get me back on my feet.    Sometimes I buy things, or go places.  Other times I just listen to music and play video games, or watch my tapes of basketball games.  When football season and basketball season come around, I watch my teams play and scream at the refs and the teams.  I still do the cheers that I used to do at the games when I’m sitting in my apartment watching them on TV. 

Last summer I surprised myself, as well as everyone who knew me.  I was having a bad spell, and I decided to do something about it.  My favorite player was playing in the NBA Summer Pro League in Long Beach, and I decided that I was going to go down there to watch him play.  I had to take a few buses and trains to get there, but I just decided to go because that would make me happy.  I really enjoyed myself, and I did the same thing this year too.  I was even working up the courage to talk to the guy I was going down to see, but before I got a chance to he got hurt and ended up having to be taken out of the arena on a stretcher.  He’s okay.  He was hustling after a loose ball and ended up jumping into the bench area of the opposing team.  I guess he came down on the side of one of the chairs, and he got a nasty 4 inch gash in his leg from it.  I was so scared when it happened because I couldn’t see what was going on, and from the reactions of the players around him I thought it was something really bad.  Turns out that they were just grossed out by all the blood.  The guy I’m talking about is Earl Watson, a former UCLA guard who is now in the NBA, and if you knew anything about him you would understand why I was so concerned when he went down.  Other people who were there said they were scared too, because this guy doesn’t go down and stay down.  Earl got hurt all the time at UCLA, but he got back up most of the time, and still played in most of the games that he got hurt in after sitting on the bench for a couple minutes or after getting stitched up in the locker room. 

When the 1997-1998 basketball season began, two of the players who were supposed to be starters were suspended to begin the season, and the team was not very deep.  At the beginning, there were two seniors, one junior, six freshman, and then a handful of guys on the bench who only played in blowouts.  One of the freshman was a little guy from Kansas City.  He was 6 feet tall, and weighed about 180 pounds.  He looked so small on the court, but he didn’t play small.  He wasn’t supposed to be starting, but with two starters suspended, he got an opportunity to play in the starting line-up.  He was supposed to be out of the starting line-up once the other two guys were reinstated, but that never happened.  Even though the other freshman guard who started alongside him was more heralded and was a flashier player (Baron Davis), Earl became a fan favorite.  He just always had a knack for being around the ball, getting rebounds and steals and playing with great poise.  He ended up being the only player on the team to start every game that season, as the other players were all held out of the starting line-up for one reason or another.  He continued on through the rest of his career at UCLA as a starter in every game, making him the first player in UCLA history start every game in a four year career.  UCLA’s glory days came before freshman were eligible (freshman were allowed to play for NCAA teams starting in 1973), and with all of the tradition of UCLA teams of years past, it’s not easy to find something to be the first at.  It was especially amazing because of how many injuries he sustained during those four years at UCLA.  Not only did he never miss a start, but he also only missed a couple of practices in all that time.

The first time I saw Earl play during the regular season was at the Wooden Classic, and Earl definitely stood out in that game.  It was the seniors that did the majority of the scoring, but Earl made a lot of plays that showed his heart and determination.  Even though he was one of the smallest players on the court, he was the leading rebounder and shot-blocker in the game.  He took two charges from opposing players, and made some great hustle plays.  After that game he continued to shine with his defense and hustle.  During the non-conference part of the season Earl stopped so many 2-on-1 and 3-on-1 fast breaks all by himself that he drove the opposition nuts.  They thought they were going to get easy points, but the “little guy” thwarted their plans.  Earl was really homesick when he was a freshman and the media didn’t let that bit of information get away from their reports.  He also wasn’t very confident with his shooting, and he would only half-heartedly raise his hands to let his teammates know when he was open because he didn’t really want to shoot the ball most of the time.  All of this stuff combined to melt my heart and make him one of my favorite players, but there was more that kept him there.

Earl was a very good player, and he was always hustling.  He was never afraid to mix it up, and he got hurt quite a bit.  When the Oregon schools came to town, Earl’s parents, sister, and girlfriend all flew out from Kansas City to see him play and spend time with him.  I found out who they were when I watched the tape from the Oregon State game that I made.  When I went to the game against Oregon on Saturday, I passed by Earl’s mother and told her that her son was doing a wonderful job at UCLA.  Late in that game one of the opposing players was running down to the other end of the court for a lay-up and Earl got there just in time to stop the basket.  Problem was that he got tangled up with the other player and they both hit the ground hard.  He just laid there for a minute and didn’t move, and I was thinking, “Come on Earl.  You can’t just lie there or you’re going to upset your mom.  Get up!”  He eventually got up and continued playing, and he ended up passing the ball to Baron for the winning basket at the end of that game.  That wasn’t the first time he was injured in a game and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.  It just stuck in my head because his family was there and I knew they’d be worried. 

In that Oregon State game, there were a lot of highlight plays, but one in particular will live in UCLA lore for a long time. JR Henderson picked up a loose ball and threw it to Earl, who was running ahead of everyone else.  Instead of laying it up himself, he caught a glimpse of Baron Davis behind him, and threw the ball up off the backboard for him.  The 6’1” Baron took off, grabbed the ball as it came off the backboard, and slammed it down through the basket, throwing the Pauley Pavilion crowd into an uproar.  Everyone was going nuts, but the best part of the whole thing was when I got home and watched my tape.  The UCLA center, Jelani McCoy, was right behind Baron when he dunked the ball, and the look on his face was classic.  He pulled his hands back and walked backwards in an “excuse-me” manner.  When a player lobs the ball off the backboard it’s usually for a center or a guy who’s closer to 7 feet tall, not a point guard.  But, Baron’s got hops, and he had no problems completing that play.  The pass got Earl some recognition, but he still stayed in the shadows behind Baron.   Baron was the flashy one who would dunk on anyone and wasn’t afraid to take over a game by scoring if he needed to.  Earl was the more steady player who made the little plays that the team needed someone to make in order to win games.  He was also the more mature player of the two freshman point guards and Baron was prone to fouling out while Earl didn’t foul out until the next to last game of the regular season.  Earl had surprising abilities around the basket, but he didn’t get his first dunk in a game until Stanford came into Pauley Pavilion.  I’m sure it must have been hard on Earl to be in Baron’s shadow, but that didn’t stop him from playing all out all the time.  In fact it probably made him play even harder and smarter.  It got to the point where Coach Lavin would take Earl out as the first player subbed for, letting him get his rest before Baron picked up his second foul and Earl had to go back out there.  Even if Earl had two fouls on him in the first half, he was more likely to stay on the court than Baron was because Earl was a little more under control and less aggressive than Baron was with two fouls.

With each game I watched, the special place that Earl held in my heart kept growing.  He was just someone that I wanted to see succeed.  He worked so hard and he was always amazing people with the little ways that he found to contribute.  His pain-threshold was something I really envied.  I was in pain all the time, and I wished I had half the tolerance for pain that he did.  He’d get hurt and then get back up and continue playing.  There was only one time that season that he didn’t get back up for a while and wasn’t able to play in after the injury, and that happened when the Bruins were playing in Pullman, Washington against the Washington State Cougars.  I had asked my friend to tape it for me since I didn’t have the cable channel that was broadcasting the game at the time, so I had to listen to it on the radio.  When I got the tape I watched it right away because I wanted to see what happened for myself.  Early in the second half Earl was trying to defend on a lob pass to one of the WSU players, when the other player, Carlos Daniel’s arm hit Earl in the head.  Earl fell to the floor and ended up face down.  The officials were asking if he was all right, but he didn’t respond.  They called the UCLA trainer over to check on him as they realized that he was unconscious.  His teammates crowded around him as the trainer checked to make sure he was breathing, and they tried calling to him to get him to wake up.  He was out for five minutes, or at least that’s how long it took before he moved his hand.  You could see the relief on the faces of the other players when he did move his hand.  Most of them had gone over to check the replay and it looked like his neck had snapped back when he got hit, so obviously they were really concerned.  They eventually let him sit up and after a few more minutes he got up and walked to the bench under his own power.  They decided that they would keep Earl on the bench until the game ended and then take him to the hospital afterwards.  At first he was squinting and kept a towel over his head as he sat at the end of the bench and tried to let the fog clear.  With each timeout, however, he moved up a couple of seats, getting closer and closer to the coaches.  By the end of the game he was standing up screaming at his teammates to make the plays.  He started the next game two days later, so I guess he was okay.  I wouldn’t doubt it if he even wanted to get back into the WSU game.   

There are a few games that stick out in my head as times when he really showed me something about who is as a person and a player.  The game against UNLV when he was a sophomore is a prime example of what I’m talking about.  In that game we took a big lead early, only to have UNLV come back and take a big lead in the second half.  It was obvious that Earl was getting mad, but he turned his anger into stellar play.  It all started when he threw a lazy pass that was picked off and the player who stole the ball put up a lay-up and missed.  One of his teammates grabbed the rebound and tried to score, but Earl came out of nowhere and blocked his shot out of bounds.  UNLV in bounded the ball and ran their offense, and Earl stood his ground to draw a charge on the UNLV player.  Possession UCLA.  As both guys got up the UNLV player had some words for Earl, and the officials called the players together to let the guys know that they needed to keep their emotions in check.  Watching the tape of this game, I could see that Earl’s jaw was clenched shut during most of this part of the game, and I have never seen him with his jaw clenched like that during any other game.  Instead of getting into any fights, he just made big play after big play.  He grabbed the ball and forced a “jump ball,” on one UCLA possession, and that season if the defensive player initiated the jump ball, the ball was turned over.  Possession UCLA.  Then, Earl knocked down a three pointer.  Then he got fouled as he attempted another three pointer.  He only made one of the three free throws, but after a UNLV player grabbed the rebound Earl ran over and tied him up for another jump ball.  Possession UCLA.  Then he scored another three pointer.  It was amazing how well he played, and even more amazing because you don’t always see players get mad and then play better.  Most of the time they tend to get into it with players from the other team and lose their cool.  I was so proud of Earl in that game, not just for the way he played, but the way he handled himself.  That is still one of my favorite games to watch, and I’m glad that we ended up winning it or I might have erased the tape. 

Whenever one of his teammates would get hurt, Earl was usually the first to his side.  He was always there to make sure they were okay.  In the last home game of Baron and Earl’s sophomore year, Earl was playing well and had 18 points before he got hurt.  He got tangled up with one of the Washington players, went down hard as he was twisting around and he fell awkwardly on his knee.  He was in a great deal of pain and it took a couple minutes before he was helped off the court by the trainer.  He sat on the bench and had his knee wrapped up in ice for the remainder of the game.  This game was also what many believed to be Baron Davis’ last home game as a Bruin, and it turned out that it was.  Towards the end of the game he had two spectacular breakaway dunks, and then he asked out of the game.  He went down the sideline hugging his teammates and coaches, and ended up in a group hug with Earl, Rico Hines, and Matt Barnes.  Meanwhile, on the court Earl’s childhood friend JaRon Rush was battling for a rebound when he was hit in the head and fell to the floor unconscious.  The smile on Earl’s face quickly turned to concern and he patted Baron on the chest before limping quickly over to JaRon’s side to check on him. When JaRon finally came around, Earl helped JaRon to the sideline.  Of course, Earl knew how JaRon was feeling since he had been knocked out the year before.  I was wondering what the deal was with kids from Kansas City getting knocked out by players from the state of Washington.  JaRon’s brother Kareem had initially considered coming to UCLA, and I figured that if he had a player from Gonzaga probably would have knocked him out the next year.

The next game was at Arizona State and Earl started again and played wonderfully, including knocking down all eight of his free throws.  But Baron Davis had been having trouble with one of his toes throughout most of the year and he re-aggravated it in that game against ASU.  It became worse two days later when the Bruins were playing in Tucson against Arizona when one of the Wildcat players came down on Baron’s toe as they were going for a rebound.  Baron went to the floor and laid there for a while in a great deal of pain.  Earl went over and laid down next to Baron, putting his head against Baron’s head.  He just stayed there next to him until Baron was ready to get up, letting him know that he understood the pain that Baron was in and that he should take his time and get up only when he was ready to.  That has to be the sweetest thing I have ever seen in my life and, man did he make my heart melt when he did that. 

Earl’s compassion doesn’t stop with his teammates, as he has proven to be just as kind and caring with fans of opposing teams.  When the Bruins traveled to North Carolina to play the Tar Heels, he was hustling after a ball and ended up in the first row of seats.  He landed on top of a little girl who started crying because he scared her.  She wasn’t hurt she was just really scared.  Earl felt bad about making her cry and told her that he would give her his jersey after the game.  The Bruins won the game, and as he had promised, Earl handed his jersey to the little girl as he was leaving the court.  The father later said he thought Earl would forget his promise, and when he didn’t the father was amazed and impressed.  So there are a couple more UCLA fans in North Carolina now.  Of course, Earl wasn’t worried about it at the time, but later he hoped he wouldn’t get in trouble for giving the jersey away. 

Apparently he didn’t get in trouble because he did the same thing the next year.  This time the Bruins were playing at Oregon State and late in the game Earl was at the free throw line.  The 13-year-old ball boy was coaxed into shaking the basket support by some of the Oregon State fans while Earl was shooting his free throws.  The officials scolded the boy and made him move away from the basket.  He started crying hard, and was still crying when the game ended.  One of the UCLA players ran over to the boy, followed by one of the assistant coaches.  They left the boys side as Earl walked over to him and put his arm around the boy.  Earl asked him what happened and the boy told him, then Earl asked if he wanted his jersey and the boy said yes.  The Bruins invited the boy into their locker room and gave him some more stuff.  When he was asked later if he was a UCLA fan he said, “No, but I am now.”

During Earl’s junior season the Bruins struggled.   I mean really struggled.  They were 13-11 at one point and coming off two embarrassing losses to the Arizona schools.  It looked like they were possibly going to have the first losing season in over 50 years and they were likely going to miss the post-season.  Earl had fouled out of the two games in the desert, and I decided that this low point was a good opportunity for me to write a letter to Earl.  I had written a letter to Steve Lavin in 1998 letting him know how inspirational his team was to me, and when he wrote me back, he thanked me for telling him my story and he said that he hoped his players could get inspiration from me.  I didn’t mail this letter to Earl though, I asked the aunt of one of the players to give it to him after the game against Oregon.  I knew the aunt from back in 1995 when she did some work in the student store where I worked.  She had two nephews play at UCLA, and I went down to talk to her every once in a while at halftime or after games.  I’d like to think that my letter had a little something to do with the turn around in Earl’s game after that, but I’m sure it had more to do with the talk he had with his coach as he started his stellar play in that Oregon game.  In the next game against Oregon State he was just as fabulous and ended up being named the Pac 10 player of the week for his performance that weekend.  The next week the Bruins got some much needed good news as JaRon Rush learned that he would be able to play with his team again in the Stanford game on Saturday.  JaRon had been suspended for all but the first three games of the season for some NCAA violations, and he was supposed to be held out for the entire season and part of the following season.  The punishment was far too strict and lasted far too long, and UCLA kept fighting to try to get it reduced.  Once it was, it was a huge lift to all the Bruins, but most of all for JaRon and Earl.  For JaRon, he had been able to fight through the adversity and win.  For Earl, well, as I said before Earl is a compassionate young man, and it was obvious that it hurt him deeply to lose his friend for most of the season and to see his friend go through so much hardship.  Marques Johnson, a former UCLA and NBA player who does commentary for some of the UCLA games once mentioned that watching Earl interact with JaRon’s mother and brother was like watching one family. 

The Bruins had to play one more game without JaRon, but they knew he would be coming back before they started the game against Cal.  In that game, the Bruins got behind by 19 early, and then things started to change.  Suddenly they started playing with more of a purpose.  They were making better decisions, taking better shots, and making the right plays at the right time.  In the second half the Bruins finally tied the score, only to have one of the Cal players throw an elbow into the face of Dan Gadzuric, the Bruin’s center, and then outlet the ball to a teammate for a dunk on the other end.  The Bruins were furious that no foul was called as the elbow was clearly intentional as the player swung his elbows first, missed, then went down and came back up with a second elbow.  That player received a slap on the wrist for that play.  Well, Dan had been playing pretty well up until that point, but when he finally cleared the cobwebs and got back in the game he just flat out dominated the game.  All the UCLA players were just on from that point and they never looked back.  They ended up winning by 21 points, but then it was time to go into Stanford and play the #1 team in the country.  Everyone figured that the Bruins would need to win 5 of their last six games to get into the tournament, and they had already won the first three.   No one expected them to win this game, that is, no one except for the Bruins themselves.   

Once again they were behind early in this game, but the tide began to change when JaRon came into the game.  It didn’t take long before Earl and JaRon hooked up on an alley oop, and JaRon looked really good out there in his first game back.  He picked up four fouls relatively quickly, but he was able to play in the overtime and score the last 5 points for the Bruins to grab a one-point victory over the top team in the country to that point.  The entire team dog piled on top of Earl and JaRon, and Lavin even jumped on the pile he was so excited.  It was an amazing game, and I was screaming and jumping up and down in my apartment during the whole game.  The team had finally come together, and they had their biggest win of the season on National TV against the #1 team.  As great as that win was, there was an even better one to come.  The Bruins came home to Pauley to win their games against the Washington schools, and then it was on to the NCAA Tournament.  The Bruins were given a 6 seed, and two years before when they were a 6 they ended up beating the 3 seed in the second round to move to the Sweet Sixteen.  The same thing would happen this year.

The Bruins made it through the first round game against Ball State, and then they were matched up against the Maryland Terrapins in the second round.  The year before the two teams had met in an early season tournament, with the Terrapins winning by a large margin and their star players playing most of the game.  So there was a little bit of a revenge factor for the Bruins, but they didn’t need that.  They had a player who would play a magical game to lead them to victory, and his name was Earl Watson.  The Bruins dominated the game from the start, but at some point Earl got elbowed in the eye and had a deep gash in his eyelid.  I still don’t know how or when it happened, but he had to go out of the game to get it taken care of, and Maryland went on a spurt and eventually tied the game up shortly after Earl came back in.  It didn’t matter though, as Earl’s play only got better once he came back in.  To start the game Earl had a couple of assists and a pull up three pointer on the break.  On one sequence, a Maryland player stole the ball and passed it back to another player.  Earl was next to that second player, but instead of catching the ball, that second player passed the ball back to the first guy.  He thought he had an easy basket, but Earl hustled back to block the shot.  One of Earl’s teammates grabbed the ball and got it back to Earl, and Earl took a couple of dribbles before throwing an alley oop (from behind the half court line) to his teammate Jerome Moiso.  It was after this play that Earl went out of the game with the cut, and I’m sure the Maryland team and fans wish he had stayed out.   Halfway through the first half Earl already had 6 assists, which was above his season average for a game.  In the game against Stanford he had 13 assists, and in the first round game he had 12, but he was on his way to besting those numbers.  Earl was just everywhere, stealing the ball, making great passes to his teammates, and pointing out where his other teammates should pass the ball to get the best shots available.  His next alley oop pass was to JaRon, and those two hooked up on two more alley oops in that first half.  Maryland had been the top defensive team in the ACC that year, but it didn’t matter on that day.  The Bruins were on fire and the fire wasn’t going to be put out until the game was over.

Just as the announcers were mentioning how Earl had 11 assists, he doubled down on a Terrapin and stole the ball.  He raced up the middle of the court and found his teammate Ray Young in the corner for a wide-open three pointer. Earl had 12 assists at halftime, with no turnovers and his team up by 19.  As A Bruin fan I was really happy, and as an Earl Watson fan I was even more proud.  But, I’ve watched enough UCLA games to know that no lead is secure, no matter how well the team is playing.  I’ve seen too many 30 point leads dwindle to nothing to get really excited and feel like the game was won.  I didn’t need to worry though, as Earl’s amazing game was just getting started.  On the second UCLA possession of the second half, Earl once again pulled up for a three pointer as he came up the court, and he nailed it.  This happened with 19:06 left on the clock.  Maryland missed their next shot and Earl got the ball and did the same thing.  He just pulled up and drained the shot.  Maryland called a timeout because they wanted to slow down the momentum.  When play started again Maryland missed another shot and when earl got the ball he took a couple dribbles and made a long pass (again from behind half court, he did that on several of his assists), and Ray Young caught the ball and laid it up in one motion.  On the next UCLA possession, after Maryland had failed to score again, the Bruins set up in the half court and Jason Kapono ended up lobbing the ball to Earl for the alley oop dunk this time.  Maryland called another timeout, allowing the UCLA players to celebrate the last two plays on the sideline.  It didn’t stop there, however.  Once again Maryland failed to score on their next possession, but Earl wasn’t able to get the outlet pass as the Bruins came back down to the other end of the court.  Jason dribbled the ball up court and saw Earl spot up behind the three-point arc on the wing.  For some reason none of the Maryland players decided to guard Earl and he drained another three pointer.  This one cracked me up for a couple of reasons.  One is that as soon as Jason passed the ball to Earl he put his hands in the air to signal that the three pointer was good.  Earl did that a lot with Jason because you can just feel when Jason is going to knock down his threes, but I hadn’t seen Jason do that with Earl before.  The other thing that made me laugh was the reaction of one of the players on the UCLA bench.  Brandon Brooks was a walk-on who also played water polo for UCLA and had already won a national championship for the Bruins in that sport.  When he saw Earl knock down that three pointer, he just fell to his knees in front of the bench.  It still cracks me up every time I watch it.  Earl still wasn’t done though, as once again Maryland failed to score and Earl brought the ball up the court and pulled up for another three pointer.  This time his teammates were all going crazy on the sideline, jumping around and laughing and cheering.  Jason grabbed Earl and screamed in his ear because he didn’t know what else to do.  Dan wrapped his arms around Earl before they headed to the sideline.  Once again Maryland called a timeout.  This time there was 16:45 left on the clock and the Bruins were up by 35 points.  In less than 2 ½ minutes Earl had scored 14 points and passed for two more, and Maryland had called three timeouts before the first TV timeout would have stopped the clock.

At this point Earl was done scoring, but he wasn’t done playing well.  He had two more assists before being taken out of the game.  The 15 that he had at that point tied him with Derrick Martin for the school record for assists in a game.  Later on the coaches realized that he needed one more assist to set a new record, and they put him back in the game to do just that.  Once again it was his buddy JaRon on the receiving end and Earl threw the ball up toward the rim and JaRon guided the ball into the hoop.  Earl’s performance in this game was one of the all time top performances that a player has had for UCLA   His 17 points, 16 assists, 4 steals, 1 block, and zero turnover performance was really impressive, but in the post game interview Earl was very modest.  He spoke of how he had the easy part in getting his teammates the ball and how they were the ones that had to knock down the shots.  He said he could care less about the assists and all that, he just wanted to see his teammates happy, and that getting the “W” is what would make them happy.  He didn’t want to celebrate winning the game at that time, he wanted to get ready for the next game against Iowa State.  I’m sure he celebrated a little bit though.

One of the local sports reporters said on the broadcast after the game, “When Watson knocked down those threes it was absolutely unbelievable,” and I don’t think I could say it any better.  I was so happy for the Bruins for turning around such a disappointing season and becoming so successful.  I was even happier for Earl though.  He had been booed earlier in the season by some of the UCLA fans (I never booed him, though I was disappointed with some of the decisions he made during those games), and many said that he could never lead UCLA and play the point guard position well enough for UCLA to allow the team to succeed.  But here he was, leading his team into the Sweet Sixteen with the type of game that he can always treasure.  My tape of that game is almost worn out I’ve watched it so many times.  I was so proud to see all of his hard work finally pay off and to see him get the recognition that he had deserved for a long time.  Too many people only remember the big shots at the ends of games, or just look at the box scores to determine the value of players to their teams, but when you do that you can’t see all the little plays that add up in helping a team win.  You don’t see the hustle or the heart that a person plays with.  This time the box score showed a lot of his contributions, but without watching the game you could never really know the impact that he had.  The magical game did come with a price though.  By Monday his eye was almost swollen shut, and he had to have laser surgery because he had a slightly detached retina.  It was scary for him, but he needed it to save his vision as he could have eventually gone blind if it hadn’t been corrected.  His eye opened up enough so that he could start the next game, 3 days after the surgery, but the Bruins lost to Iowa State in that game.

Finally, Earl had respect going in to his senior season at UCLA.  He was no longer looked at as someone who would never be as good as Baron Davis, he was looked at as the leader of the Bruins.  Half way through his senior year he landed flat on his back after a player knocked him off balance when he went up for a shot.  He was in terrible pain and had trouble getting up off the floor.  He tried to go back in the game, but only lasted for a minute because he just couldn’t move well enough.  He wanted to take a few games off, but his streak would have been broken if he had.  He started the next game two days later, and his streak continued.  At the time he had said that he wished he didn’t have that streak so he could have rested, but by the end of the year he was glad he didn’t give in to the pain.  When he was asked about it later, he said that he didn’t want to have any regrets when he left UCLA.  He wanted to make sure he always did his best and took advantage of every opportunity presented to him.

When Senior Day came around, I brought Kleenex with me because I knew that I was going to cry when Earl was introduced.  I was inside Pauley an hour before the gates opened, and as the younger guys were running through some drills, Earl sat on one of the tables along the sideline and just watched them.  I think he was drinking some orange juice while he sat there.  I wanted to go up to him so badly to thank him for all of the memories, but I knew I would start to cry if I did, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to explain why I was crying, so I just watched him watching the younger guys.  I also knew that this had to be an emotional day for him, and I didn’t want to distract him from getting his job done.  The game was against Stanford after all, and the Bruins were trying to beat them for the third straight time while Stanford was ranked #1.  A couple of the ushers walked by and shook his hand, but for the most part he just sat there drinking his juice and taking it all in.  This was the last time that he would compete in a UCLA jersey inside Pauley Pavilion, and he was trying to lead his team to a Pac 10 championship for the first time in four years.  I think I started crying when I saw him lean over and kiss his mom, but I still clapped for him as the announcer read off all of Earl’s accomplishments.  It was strange to think that I’d never watch him play in Pauley again, but it also marked the end of an era for me.  That last year was really hard for me and I suffered through a lot of pain going to the football and basketball games that year, but I did it for Earl.  I wanted to be there for his senior year, even if he didn’t know I was there.  With all he meant to me, I had to be there to support him.  But I knew that once Earl was gone, I would be too.  After 9 years of going to games, this was going to be my last time in Pauley.

Once the game started, it was time to put all that emotion aside and cheer for Earl and the Bruins, the same way that he put aside the emotion and went out and played.  It was a vintage Earl game, with him hustling all over the place, yelling at his teammates on the sideline, and playing his heart out.  I was counting down too, because he only needed a couple more steals to become the all-time leader in career steals in UCLA history.  He got two within a minute of each other, and on the second one he grabbed the ball and called time out as he was falling out of bounds.  The time out was a good thing because it allowed the announcer to inform everyone of the fact that Earl had taken over the #1 spot in steals.  I’m glad he got the record at home as it allowed the UCLA fans to show him the appreciation that we had for him and all that he had done in his four years.  The ovation that he received when he was introduced in the pre-game ceremonies also allowed us to do that, but he deserved so much more than that one moment. 

A couple of ironic things happened in the game after he set the new record.  Somehow he ended up getting cut under his chin, so he had to leave the game to get a bandage put on it.  He also had to change jerseys because he got blood on his, so he couldn’t finish his home career in his number 25.  The Bruins ended up losing the game, and when Earl was being interviewed in the locker room afterwards, he still had the iodine on his chin from the four stitches that he had to get for his cut.  I just thought it was very ironic that he would end up with four stitches in his chin in his last home game.  One stitch for each year that he played at UCLA.  From a guy who probably set a record for most stitches received in a four year career as well as all the other records he set, it was just kind of fitting that Earl would have to get stitches in his last home game.  Earl played really well in the tournament as a senior, making some spectacularly athletic shots and running the offense with the poise that established him as one of the top point guards in the country.  Unfortunately the Bruins lost in the Sweet Sixteen that year as well, but they did lose to the eventual national champion. 

It wasn’t just his playing ability and the things that I have already mentioned that endeared Earl to me.  It was the way he was away from basketball, and the way he constantly proved people who doubted him wrong that really won my heart.  I can’t recall any other player who had articles written about him as a person and not just a player.  There were some articles written during his senior year that spoke about Earl Watson the person, and I keep them with my memorabilia, so that I can read them when I need some inspiration.  He goes back to Kansas City and talks to kids about making the right decisions in life.  He talks to his friends who have joined gangs or gone to jail and tells them to get their lives together.  Even though he was a relative unknown in the NBA, he got a shoe deal and agreed to endorse the shoes as long as the company provided shoes and equipment for the team at his high school.  He realizes that it’s not easy to make the right decisions in life, but he tries hard to make sure that he does so that he can lead by example.  He grew up in the mean streets of Kansas City, but he took the hardship that he endured, and the hardship that he observed as lessons to always work hard and try to be the best person he can be.  Now that he’s in the NBA, he goes out to meet with children on his own, without the media attention that most athletes have when they do public appearances.  It’s not important to him that people think he’s doing something good for the community, it’s important to him that he does something.  He wants the kids to understand that he’s there for them, not his image.  Even when his number was retired at his high school last year, there was only a small blurb in one of the Seattle papers that mentioned it.  I had to search on the internet to find the story in the Kansas City newspaper.  It’s a shame that in our society we can pick up a paper in any city and find stories about what players got arrested and for what, but we can’t find stories about the good things that players do without searching for them.

As far as proving people wrong goes, Earl is really good at that.  One of the assistant coaches at UCLA claimed that Earl would be a four year bench warmer when he came to UCLA.  He ended up starting every game and he set a new record for most minutes played in a career.  When Baron Davis left after their sophomore year, people said that Earl couldn’t play the point guard position well enough to lead the team.  He did struggle mightily in the middle of his junior season, but by the end of the season Earl had become one of the top point guards in the country.  I remember reading one article that remarked on how Earl had always been in the shadows of other players in his time at UCLA, but that the time he spent at UCLA would always be remembered as the Earl Watson Era.  When he was interviewed he would say that other players were the heart and soul of the team, but when the other players and coaches were asked it was always Earl that they pointed to.

Some people still said he wasn’t good enough, but he went on to be only the second player in school history to record over 200 steals and 600 assists.  People said he wasn’t good enough to get drafted into the NBA, but the Seattle Supersonics took him in the second round.  Then people said he wasn’t good enough to make the team, but he did, and ended up being the backup point guard as a rookie.  I was so happy when he was drafted and then when he was signed, because I wasn’t ready to live my life without Earl’s influence just yet.  He’d been such a large part of my life for so long that I just wasn’t ready to let him go.  I went onto the internet and checked what people were saying about him on one of the Sonics message boards, and I saw people saying that he wasn’t very good and they were upset that the Sonics took him.  At first I just sat back and didn’t respond, but I couldn’t hold my tongue forever.  Eventually I let them know that Earl was a very good player, and some of them decided that I was dumb and Earl was a scrub who would never do anything.  As time went on, I watched some of those same people who had been so down on Earl start fighting over who jumped on the Earl Watson bandwagon first.  When I responded and said that I had been driving the bandwagon around for years, I was told that I wasn’t fit for the bandwagon as I was the head of his fan club.  I then decided that no one could join the fan club unless they had seen him complete an alley oop dunk in a game.  Many of the Sonics fans didn’t believe that he could dunk, and they definitely didn’t believe that he could throw down an alley oop dunk since he was only 6 feet tall.  Once he finally got an alley oop pass that he could handle, I had a lot more company in the Earl Watson fan club on those message boards.  Apparently the Sonics fans weren’t the only ones who weren’t aware of Earl’s jumping ability as I remember reading about how one day in practice Earl had risen above everyone to try to throw down a one handed jam off a rebound.  The writer said that the ball didn’t go through the hoop, but the way Earl got up caught everyone in the gym by surprise.  I just laughed and though to myself that if they were surprised by that then they obviously weren’t too familiar with Earl’s skills.  I’ve seen him do that before in a game, so it didn’t surprise me at all to read about it.  I also knew that they were in for quite a few surprises once Earl started playing for the Sonics.

Now he’s signed with the Memphis Grizzlies and people are doubting him again.  When you look at the numbers he put up last year they’re not that impressive offensively, but his role was not to participate all that much on the offensive end.  When you’re playing alongside a player like Gary Payton and you’re a point guard, you’re not going to have the ball in your hands all that often.  Still, he had some games where he was able to score in double figures, including a wonderful performance in his homecoming as the Sonics beat the Lakers in LA.  Earl’s contributions came mainly on the defensive end, and he surprised most people in the league with his tenacity on defense.  He spent the entire season in the top 4 in two steals categories in the NBA, and led each of those categories at certain times of the season.  The Seattle announcer even said at one point that Earl had his hands on the ball more on the defensive end than he did on the offensive end.  Earl didn’t just get steals, but he poked balls away, got in the faces of players, and made so many opposing point guards so uncomfortable bringing the ball up against him that they would often find someone else to dribble the ball up court.  Whenever I see that happen it makes me smile because it means that he’s having an impact on the other team by making someone else have to make the decisions that the point guard would usually have to make.  Grizzlies fans have no idea just how much of a positive impact Earl is going to have on his new team, and I can’t wait to see him prove his new doubters wrong.  I know he will. 

The way that he has never given up, and has always fought through the difficult times, that has inspired me to keep fighting.  His words stay with me as much as his actions, and when I don’t want to fight any more I think of him.  Earl doesn’t give up, so I can’t either.  There are no words that I can find to express how much he means to me and how inspirational he has been in my life.  Even when I speak of him in this glowing manner, it still doesn’t say it all.  I guess the only thing I can really do to express my thanks to him is to try to help other people.  I used to think that there was no way that I could ever have an impact on other people’s lives the way that Earl could because he had the fame and I was just a regular person.  Now I know I was wrong.  In telling my story I can help people, and I am determined to do just that.  This is one more thing that I can thank Earl for.  Thank you EJ.

Making Decisions and Finding the Right Path

The ability to realize what you can do and what you can’t do, what you can control and what you can’t control is something that we all need to be able to do in our struggle to get through adversity.  Most of the time the things that we deal with don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason, and they don’t seem like there could be anything positive to come out of them.  But all those clichés are true, every cloud has a silver lining and that which doesn’t kill us will only make us stronger.  Everything that happens to us has a chance to destroy us or to improve us.  If we can find a way to turn at least some of the bad things that happen to us into learning experiences, and if we can realize that it’s okay to hurt, but not okay to let it consume us, we’ll be better for it.  I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I don’t believe that we should just sit around waiting for things to happen.  Something happens and then we have decisions to make about how to deal with what happened.  It’s more like there will be a trigger and we have to decide what we’re going to do from there.  We can’t control the triggers, but we can control the decisions.  Once we make the decisions, another trigger may go off and we’ll have to make more decisions.  Sometimes it seems like all of the triggers are going off at once, and we have to believe in ourselves if we’re going to get through these times.  It may seem impossible, but there is a way.

            I spoke briefly about the young coach of the UCLA basketball team earlier, and I want to return to him for a moment.  He drives me nuts sometimes, and has said and done some things that have disappointed me, but there’s one thing that I will always admire about him.  It’s not just the way he handled the Maples Massacre, but the way he has handled himself and his team with the constant rumors about his job and the never-ending criticism that he has endured since he took over the program in 1996.  UCLA has the most National Championships, both NCAA and Team (non-NCAA affiliated) in the country, even though UCLA is one of the youngest schools around.  There is a standard of excellence that is expected of the sports teams at UCLA that is higher than most.  It’s there for all of the sports, not just basketball.  This is one of the top 25 reasons why “attending UCLA is so special” - Through the 1999-2000 school year, UCLA leads all colleges in NCAA team championships won with 82, including an NCAA-leading four during the athletic year. All 82 championships have been won since 1950.  (from the Official Site of the UCLA Bruins)

With this pressure being placed on all of the sports teams at UCLA, it can be a burden as well as a wonderful opportunity to be a coach or a player at UCLA.  But when you are a player or a coach on the basketball team, it’s even more intense.  Every day in practice, and every game that’s played in Pauley Pavilion, all you have to do is look up to see the standard that you’ll be measured against.  There are 11 Men’s Basketball Banners hanging from the rafters, as well as banners for other sports like Women’s Basketball, Men’s Volleyball, and Women’s Gymnastics.  But it’s the basketball ones that the coach and players must deal with.  UCLA won the NIT in 1985 (with players such as Reggie Miller and Jack Haley), but that tournament is filled up with teams that weren’t able to make it to the NCAA Tournament, and once UCLA won the NCAA Championship in 1995, that NIT banner came down.  It just wasn’t good enough to hang in the rafters with the National Championship banners.  UCLA has had 54 consecutive winning seasons, which is an NCAA record.  They don’t even hang the jerseys that have been retired from the rafters in Pauley, and only two women and six men have had their jerseys retired from the basketball program at UCLA.  Even with all the greats who have donned UCLA basketball jerseys,   it just isn’t done except for under certain circumstances.  Winning is of the utmost importance at UCLA, but there’s even more pressure than just that.  John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood, coached his teams to 10 National Championships between 1964 and 1975.  No one who has coached at UCLA since John Wooden has been able to please the alumni who were used to the excellence that the UCLA program enjoyed in those glory days, even though it took John Wooden quite a few years to get to the those Glory Days (he became the Head Coach at UCLA in the 1948-1949 season).

So, Steve Lavin has been the head coach at UCLA since 1996-1997, and he has been on the hot seat since 1996-1997.  There has been constant controversy since he began coaching, and controversy is what got him the job in the first place.  There have been players suspended, players leaving early for the NBA or quitting the team period, and of course players getting hurt.  There have been blowout losses each year, and losses that no UCLA fan is willing to accept each year because they’re to teams that UCLA should never lose to.  There have always been rumors about Lavin’s job status, and it even go to the point where another coach was contacted in regards to the position, giving the LA media a chance to go crazy with stories.  It gave the fans at the opposing schools something to taunt Lavin with, and opposing fans feel no need to spare anyone’s feelings when they find something to taunt you with.  The Cal fans held up signs with pictures of Rick Pitino and wrote, “I’ve got next.” on them as a jab at Lavin when the rumors were floating around that Pitino had been contacted about the head coaching job at UCLA.  As Earl once said about the fans at Stanford, “they’ll talk about your mother, they’ll talk about your sister.  If you don’t have a sister, they’ll give you one.”  There’s nowhere to hide when you’re the coach at UCLA when there’s controversy going on.  Most of us would probably get really upset and not be able to separate our frustrations and anger from our work and the people that we spend the most time with.  Not Steve Lavin.  He never allowed all of the outside distractions to interfere with the job he had to do.  He didn’t bring it to work with him, even though all the guys on his team knew what was going on.  He knew he couldn’t do anything about all the rumors, all he could do was continue coaching his team and getting them ready for the games they had to play, one game at a time.  As long as he was the coach, that’s what he had to do.  That’s all he could do.  He wasn’t going to let all the negative attention or the death threats get him down.  He wasn’t going to go off and quit before they fired him, just because it would be easier.  He was going to work hard and make sure that his players understood what it meant to face adversity and deal with it.  He was going to make sure that the young men that he was coaching learned about what life is, and that it’s not always easy.  His determination and strength are truly inspirational, but the way he handles himself when these situations arise is amazing.   

It’s so easy to take out our frustrations on the people we work with, but especially when you’re a coach and the people you work with are young men who don’t execute the plays they way you want them to or don’t play defense as hard as you expect them to.  It would be so easy for him to take his frustrations out on his players because he might feel that they’re the ones who are putting him in the situations he’s been in.  But, instead he has taken players aside and told them that he will feel the same way about them whether he’s coaching in high school or at UCLA.  He doesn’t want them to feel responsible for what happens to him, he just wants them to become better people and players.  His players don’t look at the losses that they’ve experienced during each season as complete disappointments.  They look at them as experiences that have given them opportunities to learn and grow.  One thing that shows this is another comment from Earl in the post game press conference after the win against Maryland.  When asked about how the early season struggles prepared the Bruins for the tournament, Earl said, “It’s great we played those games and it’s great we struggles, cause now we’re mentally stronger.” 

Spirituality

            I want to put a disclaimer here before I continue.  This section contains ideas that may conflict with the religious beliefs of some people who are reading this document.  What I say is not intended to try to change the beliefs of those who participate in organized religion or who have religious beliefs.  If you don’t agree with my beliefs, that is perfectly fine, and if you feel that reading about something that differs from what you believe in may upset you, then please skip this section.  I am not interested in a religious debate, I just feel that it’s important for me to share my beliefs as they have a lot to do with who I am.  So please, only read this if you are willing to keep an open mind as you read my opinions.

            When I was young my family made me go to church.  The rest of my family is religious and they wanted me to be able to learn about God and believe in what the bible had to say.  I went to church on Sundays and went to vacation bible school during the summer.  But as I got older and started to learn about geology, the whole idea of a God creating the world and that this God’s book would only be written about the humans that lived on it just didn’t sit right with me.  If you compare the history of the earth to a calendar year, humans have only been on this planet since 11:59 and 59 seconds on New Year’s Eve.  If humans were such an insignificant part of the history of this planet, then why would the book skip over all the rest?  That’s just too humano-centric for me, and I couldn’t deal with how contradictory that seemed.  One of my teachers once told the story of Noah’s Ark from a geologic standpoint.  There was never a flood that covered the entire world, there is no geologic evidence to support this.  The teacher explained a different scenario.  The Mediterranean Sea is bordered by two large continents, and at one point the continents collided where the sea now connects with the Atlantic Ocean, cutting off the supply of water to the basin.  The water level in the basin slowly lowered, and since people of that time needed to live near water to survive, they lived lower in the basin.  Eventually the water level of the Atlantic Ocean spilled over the land that had sealed it off from the basin and over time began to fill the area with water.  This may not sound right on a level of human understanding as we aren’t used to thinking in terms of geologic timescales, but on a geologic timescale it does make perfect sense.  The water filled in the basin and eventually created the opening that we see today.  To the people that lived during that time, that region was the world.  They had no knowledge of locations outside of their own realm, so in their stories if it happened where they were it happened in the entire world.  The earth was still supposed to be flat at this time, with the sun revolving around the earth.  To me, the Bible is a history book of sorts.  It tells the tales of the people who lived at that time and their interpretations of what happened.  For the most part the Bible has good messages, but it is also contradictory at times.  Through the years as people have found out more about the world, the excuse has become that the Bible is open to interpretation when it fails to account for certain things.  I’m not going to go into everything that I think is wrong with the Bible and organized religion as I would rather focus on what I do believe.

I believe that we are all put here on earth to learn.  We live, we learn, we die, we come back and start all over again.  All of the things that we have to deal with in our lives are tests.  The people who seem to have everything come easy to them, the ones that never seem to have any major problems, and the ones who are selfish and conniving, those are people with younger souls.  I’m not talking about children here, I’m talking about people who go through their adult lives in this manner.  Their souls haven’t lived enough, or been able to get past enough tests to be able to deal with harder things that many of us experience.  This doesn’t mean that we should envy them or hate them or pity them.  This is just a stage in the life of the soul, and it’s one that we’ve all gone through.  As we come back in other lives, we have to pass certain tests, and if we don’t pass them we have to take them again in our next lives.  Life will never give you anything that you can’t deal with, you just have to find a way to get through.  Those that take the “easy way” out by killing themselves or by losing it and giving in, they have to do it over again until they get it right.  As we move further along in the lives of our souls, we face more hardship and adversity.  Only in fighting through these things and passing all of the tests do we get to move on to whatever is next.

            People speak about God and the Devil in different terms than I do.  I don’t believe in any Gods that exist in the books of religions.  I think there may be some superior being out there, but it’s not the one that we hear about.  The Devil is not actually some evil spirit that tempts us and lures us down into hell.  Hell isn’t even a place that souls go to rot because of the horrible things that they did in life.  The Devil is the entity or being that tells us we have not passed all of our tests and that we have to go back through another life.  Hell is living on earth as a person and having to go through all of these tests.  This isn’t saying that living is a bad thing, but in our pursuit of whatever comes after being mortal and passing all of our tests, having to go back to the place where we’re mortal instead of moving forward is considered going to hell.  Look at it this way, if your life has been one tragedy after another, and you’ve managed to find a way to keep going on, you’re getting close to the Promised land.

It is not at all easy to deal with many of the problems that we face.  It’s not supposed to be.  I say that life will never give us anything that we can’t handle, but that doesn’t mean that it will give us things we can handle easily.  It’s hard to get through some of these things, and it’s so easy to slip up and give in.  Please just believe me when I say that there is a way, and you can get through it.  There may not be a pot of gold at the end, and you may have to settle for being happy that you can get the laundry washed, dried and put away all on the same day in some cases, but you can get through.  We all must believe in ourselves and ask for help when we need it.  We must search for our own answers, but it doesn’t mean that we have to go it alone.

            I’m in no way perfect, and I have a lot of things that I need to do to pass all of my tests in this life.  I don’t know that I will be able to pass them all before my time is up, but I know that I have to try.  At some point I need to face my fears and deal with my demons.  I hope that I will have the strength to take care of these things before it’s too late, but I have to handle things on my own time.  I can’t just rush out and try to fix everything all at once, I have to do it because it’s right and because I have the strength to deal with it, not because I need to do it in order to move on. 

It is devastating to lose a child, especially when it’s a young child who was so full of promise, and who you had so many dreams for.  It is also devastating when you have a child who is sick or handicapped or who becomes disabled.  I believe that many of the children in these situations, the ones who are killed at a young age, or the ones who need to be taken care of for the rest of their lives, are what I consider testers.  They aren’t really born to live lives for themselves, necessarily, but they’re born to give the people around them tests.  I hope that doesn’t sound callous, it’s not meant to be.  They may have some tests that they need to pass themselves, but sometimes they’re given life to provide tests for others.  I wish no one had to deal with these kinds of things, and what I’m saying may not be comforting.  But maybe, just maybe it will help someone start to make sense of a senseless tragedy.

I don’t think that organized religions are all bad.  I believe that everyone needs something to believe in, and organized religion handles that for most people.  We need to understand tolerance and we need to be kind to others.  We should always respect people, but we shouldn’t fear people just because they’re different.  Everyone we meet, whether they become our friends or our foes, they all have something to teach us.  They all have their own stories, and if we keep ourselves from learning what they have to teach us because we don’t like the way they dress or the way they look, we are cheating ourselves out of knowledge.  What is the meaning of life, and why do we have to live through so much?  We need to learn tolerance, we need to learn not to judge or try to change other people, and we need to learn how to deal with adversity.  That may be oversimplifying the meaning of life, but I believe these are some of the main objectives.  I also believe that I don’t need to have all the answers now.   Nobody has told me that these things are true and that this is the way life is.  I have come to all of these conclusions on my own, and I cannot say whether or not my ideas are accurate.  All I can do is strive to meet the goals I have, fight through the adversity I face, and try to be as good of a person as I can be.  Everything else will work itself out. 

Raising Children

            Though I don’t have any children of my own, all of the kids in my family and observations that I have made of children and the way they behave have taught me one thing.  The most important part of raising children is communication.  Do you want to raise good kids?  The best way that you can try to raise good kids is to be able to communicate with them.  When they’re small, you may be able to get away with the “Because I said so!” line, but you can’t use that for too long.  If you want your kids to do something or not do something and they ask you why, explain it to them.  If you want your kids to go to church, explain to them that it’s important to you that they go.  That it makes you happy to be able to share something that you believe in with your children and that if they don’t go it makes you sad.  If you don’t want them to draw on the walls with their crayons then tell them that if they do it’s hard to clean off.  If they do it anyways, make them help you try to clean it off and show them just how hard it is.  If you don’t want them listening to a certain type of music because of the lyrics or the messages that it puts across, explain to them why it is that you don’t approve of the music.  Let them know that the things that are said in the songs aren’t right and that they go against what you believe in.  Tell your kids why you don’t want them to smoke or drink or hang out with a certain group of kids.  Explain it to them, but listen to them as well.

            It’s important to let kids know that they can voice their opinions and ask questions the things you tell them.  It helps them to understand that it’s okay to question things later in life and make more informed decisions.  If we always make the decisions for our kids, they may end up without the ability to lead or make their own decisions when they are grown.  Of course, as parents or people who are responsible for children it is also important that we have rules and hold the kids accountable if they break the rules or make bad decisions.  Below is a great excerpt from one of the articles that I mentioned earlier that speaks volumes about this subject.  This is from an article in the L.A. Daily News by Billy Witz.

            Trouble never has a problem presenting itself to Watson, who remembers kids smoking pot in elementary school, classmates carrying guns, and attending too many teen-agers’ funerals.  When trouble came calling, Watson had two influences to keep him at home: basketball and his big brothers – Victor, Dwayne, Fernando and Joseph – who are fiercely protective of him.

            When Watson began hanging around with a kid who once pulled a gun on him during an elementary school pickup game, that was enough.

            “(Victor) sat me down and he was like, “What do you want to do?’ “ Watson said.  “ ‘Do you want to go to college and play basketball and do whatever your dreams are or do you want to be a gang member and go to jail?’  I was like, ‘Man,’ and he cut me off and said, ‘You’ve got to choose now because if you don’t choose you’re going to end up handing with these guys and end up somewhere you don’t want to be.’

            “I said I want to play basketball and he said, ‘Well, you can never talk to them again.  You can talk to them at school, but I don’t want to see you outside of school hanging with them.’”

My own therapy

            After numerous attempts, I have finally found a medication that helps me sleep, and I haven’t had to increase the dosage from what I started out on.  It’s amazing to just be able to fall asleep more easily and to sleep through the night most of the time now.  It used to take me  hours to fall asleep, and I woke up at least two or three times a night.  Now I wake up during the night on occasion, but it’s usually because of noises outside as opposed to my body forcing me to wake up.  The medication isn’t some magical pill that will cure everyone, so I’m not going to mention the name here.  It’s important to work with your doctors to determine what’s best for each person.  I don’t really feel much better because I’m sleeping better, but it’s important to be able to get to restorative sleep when you have Fibromyalgia.  I’m sure there are benefits that I just don’t see.

I also tried to cut caffeine out of my diet.  I don’t always stay away from it, but I try not to have too much.  I have never been a coffee drinker, but my one vice is soda.  I try to drink caffeine free diet sodas when I’m at home, and that change made a difference in my sleeping habits as well.

I can’t do much in terms of exercising, especially if I have to go somewhere to do it.  So, I decided to buy a recumbent exercise bike.  It wasn’t that expensive, and it’s been a tremendous addition to my life.  I usually ride the bike while I’m playing video games or watching sports, and it makes it much easier to get in the exercise when I’m doing something else that distracts me.  The recumbent bike keeps the pressure off my back and knees, which is a great relief and makes working out a much less painful experience than other things that I’ve tried 

Recently I have added a little bit of strength training into my routine.  It’s not much, as I have only been using one pound weights, but I actually moved up to two pound weights for some of the moves.  I bought a book about strength training a couple years ago, but once the winter came and my body started aching too much for me to do anything I forgot about it.  I’ve recently found it again and it’s inspired me to work a little harder.  I don’t follow it completely, but I have taken what I need from it.  One of the best things is that in the book it explains that you don’t have to give up the foods you love to lose weight, as long as you are burning enough calories and building muscle.  Of course we can’t eat all the junk food we want, but if we have cravings it’s okay to fulfill those desires sometimes.  If we want to eat a big meal at a family gathering we can, one day of eating a lot is not going to make us put on a lot of weight, but too many days of doing it will.  So, if I want a burger I have one.  But I make sure that I don’t eat them all the time and I usually up my goals for the bike that night.  I try to ride the bike every night and do the weights every other night, but on the nights when I don’t feel up to it I don’t sweat it.  The best thing is that I’ve been doing this for about a month and I’ve already dropped into a lower weight range.  My weight fluctuates daily and I have seen my weight increase 6 pounds in a three hour time frame, so I don’t really go by one specific weight but a weight range.  I could never get below one mark before, but now I’ve managed to stay below it for a week.  It’s nowhere near the 125 pounds that I used to weigh, but I don’t expect to get back to that.  That’s an unrealistic goal for me.  Right now it’s just about moving down bit by bit and building up my muscles.  I can feel the muscle in my left bicep now, and even though it’s small, at least it’s there.  I haven’t had any strength in it for a long time.                                      

Don’t Depend on Doctors for all the Answers 

            Sometimes we put all of our faith in doctors, but they don’t always have all the answers.  I’ve had my own horrible experiences, there are plenty of stories out there of people who haven’t had good experiences with their doctors.  Some doctors think that the pain we complain of is all in our heads, especially if these women are the ones complaining.  I am hopeful that the doctors with this viewpoint are fading out, but there are still some out there.  Many doctors just don’t know all of the answers either.  This doesn’t mean that they are bad doctors, but they just don’t have enough information to be able to help us as much as we’d like them to.  There are plenty of good doctors out there, but if they’re going to be able to help us they need us to do some of the work too.  Doctors generally have the knowledge and expertise to be able to determine what tests should be done and what treatments we can try when we’re sick.  But, we need to take an active role in our health whenever possible and work with the doctors to devise plans of treatment and to decide what works and what doesn’t.  The relationship between a patient and a doctor should be a partnership that both parties are actively involved in.  Going into a doctor’s office with a list of concerns, questions, and needs is a good way to start.  Doing our own research on what ails us is good too.  Recently, my second cousin did some research on the internet because she wanted to see if she could find some relief for her seizures.  She finally found something and my family says that she is back to being the person they used to know.  She has suffered for so long, but her determination to try to get healthy has finally given her an answer.  Congratulations Laura.

            A former co-worker of mine had severe migraine headaches, but her doctor wouldn’t give her a prescription for pain killers.  Instead, she would have to go to the emergency room or wait until her doctor’s office opened up to get relief from her migraines.  I told her that she needed to stand up for herself and tell her doctor that she wanted a prescription.  Now she has one, and she told me before she left our company that she was so grateful for my advice because she didn’t have to suffer so much anymore.  Here’s to many more pain free weekends, Ginny.

            My mom has taught me to stand up for myself in all aspects of life.  If something doesn’t seem right, I question it.  This is true with doctors, at work, and personally.  We’ve both suffered so much, and she’s had to deal with her own doctors and mine as well.  Neither of us is perfect, and we aren’t always willing to go to the doctors or deal with them, but we have reason to feel that way.  You can only hear, “Hm, that’s strange”, “well, I can’t find anything wrong in this test”, and “you’re too young to have so many problems,” before you get irritated beyond belief.  Oh, I’m too young?!  Did you hear that body?  You’re too young to have all these problems, so stop it.  Funny, my body doesn’t seem to care.  We can only hope that when our doctors tell us that nothing can be done, that they just mean at this point in time.  Someday maybe someone will find a way to fix us.  Until then I have someone to share pain stories with.  Thanks for making me into such a stubborn woman Mom.  I wouldn’t be anywhere near the woman I am today if it wasn’t for you, and I wouldn’t have made it through all of this if you hadn’t been there for me.

Sharing the Pain

            It’s not always easy to share our problems with others.  When we do, we can open ourselves up to be hurt.  But, by keeping it all inside we can hurt ourselves even more.  I don’t mean to imply that we should all walk around telling perfect strangers about our problems, but when an opportunity to share your story comes around you may want to do just that.  When I was sick, one of my co-workers asked my boss what was wrong with me.  My boss told her that I was born with one kidney and two uteri, and the other woman was shocked.  Not because of how strange it was, but because she thought she was the only one who was built like that.  No one else in her family had any abnormalities like that, and she thought no one else in the world did.  At my current job I’ve found women who have Endometriosis or Fibromyalgia.  We don’t sit around and talk about this stuff all the time, but when we’re having rough times, it’s nice to be able to send an email to someone else and say, “I HURT!” and have that person understand.  Not everyone that I work with understands or even knows what my life is like, and that’s fine.  Not everyone needs to know.  But when people ask me why I’m not feeling well, I tell them.  It’s partially for me, because it helps me to deal with it, but it’s also for other people.  Even if the people that I talk to about this stuff don’t suffer from any serious ailments or disabilities, they may know someone or come to know someone who does. 

When I tell my story on message boards (in much less detail, of course) on the internet, it’s not because I am looking for sympathy.  It’s because someone asked why I have such strong feelings for a basketball player who isn’t a star.  So I tell them.  Most of the time, someone will thank me for sharing the story with him or her.  They usually say that I have given them a little perspective on life and that they appreciate what they have just a little bit more.  Knowing that I have had a positive influence on another person’s life makes it just a little bit easier for me to deal with.  My pain is not for nothing.  Something good can come from it, as long as I’m willing to talk about it.  Maybe someday I’ll even be able to speak in front of a group of people about this, but I’m still too emotional right now.  I really have to be in the right mindset to be able to talk about this with someone face to face, or I start crying.  I may sound strong from what I have written, but I’m not strong all of the time.  It’s a work in progress.  It just gets easier as I deal with it more and talk about it more. 

What the Future Holds for Me

One thing that I have realized from all of this is that I have to be patient.  I can’t rush things or expect things to happen overnight.  If I take my time and allow myself to move slowly things are going to be better.  Taking small steps and taking time to think about things before I act on them is going to be invaluable and help me to be able to succeed.  Another thing that I have learned recently is that I have to try to take control of my life.  I’m sure most of us have wished that we could be taken care of by our parents again when we’re adults.  Sometimes we just don’t want to have to be responsible anymore.  But when did our parents decide that they wanted to be responsible?  Don’t they sometimes want their parents to take care of them too?  At some point we all have to make the decision to take control of our lives and do what we need to do, and I’ve started doing that more.  My mom will still be there when I need her, and if I need her to help me out she won’t hesitate to get on the phone and set someone straight.  But she can’t do it all for me, and I know that.  Still, it’s nice to know that she’s there to back me up. 

I have always been a very emotional person, and I cry at the drop of a hat.  I used to wonder why it was that I would cry when I watched some team that I didn’t even care about win a national championship that I didn’t care about.  I thought that maybe it was because I was regretting the fact that I would never be able to do what those young people did, but that’s not it.  I finally realized what it is when I was watching the Women’s College Softball World Series this year.  The Bruins didn’t make it to the championship game, but I turned the game on anyways.  The announcers were talking about how the pitcher from Cal was playing with a heavy heart because her sister had been murdered a few weeks before.  She pitched a wonderful game and Cal ended up beating Arizona to win the title.  I thought about how wonderful it must be for her family to be able to see their daughter accomplish one of her dreams in the wake of losing their other child.  I’m sure it was bittersweet, but her family was trying to continue living and doing the things that they knew would make the sister proud. 

It was when I was crying this time that I realized what I was feeling.  It wasn’t that I was upset that I didn’t have the opportunity to do something like that, it was that I didn’t have anyone in my life that I could be proud of the way the parents of those kids were proud.  I didn’t even have anyone to console when they were disappointed and came up short of their dreams.  I didn’t have any kids, and that’s what’s been making me cry.  I’ve got a lot of young cousins and two nephews, but I’m not around them very much.  I don’t see my family very often since I live in LA and most of them live in Northern California while my mom lives in Oregon.  I need to have children at some point or I’m never going to feel complete.  I may end up trying to adopt children because I’m still not too sure about having my own kids, but whatever choice I make it’s not going to be for a while.  Again, that patience thing comes into play.  I’m not at a point in my life where I can take care of children, and I need to get to the point where I believe it’s right before I do.  I don’t have a man in my life, and I don’t expect to have one anytime soon.  I don’t know if I’ll have one by the time I’m ready to start my family, but if I don’t I won’t let that stop me.  It’s probably going to be hard for a thirty-something, chronically ill woman to adopt children on her own, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it.  I’m taking steps right now to try to improve myself so that I can start my family at some point in the next few years.  If I do adopt, I want to have a multi-cultural household if possible.  I think it would be a wonderful experience for myself as well as for the children to grow up in a family with no color barriers.  I just hope that I can live up to my ideas of being able to communicate with the children who will one day be mine. 

For now, I’m determined to find a way to get my story out to people.  I want people to read about my life and understand what I’ve been through.  I want them to be amazed by what I’ve gone through and how I’ve been able to keep going.  I want them to be able to pick up a little something from this, whether it be a new appreciation for life or the motivation to do something to improve their own lives.  I also want to encourage people to write their own stories.  A handful of people that I have spoken with have told me that they just don’t think they can write very well, or when they write things they second guess themselves and throw what they wrote away.  I’ve told them that the best thing to do is to just sit down and write whatever comes into their heads.  Don’t worry about it making sense or saying something the wrong way.  You’re writing it for yourself, not for anyone else, so just write whatever you want. Just write and then put it away, and come back to it after a day or two.  If you still don’t like it, don’t throw it out.  Put it aside.  Someday you may be glad you did.  What I’ve been doing with this story is just writing and then asking some of my trusted friends to read it and let me know what I should do to make it flow better or to allow people to have a better understanding of who I am and what I’m trying to say. 

The best thing about all this writing is that I have finally found what I want to do with my life.  I’ve been in a funk for so long, just getting up, going to work, coming home, getting up, going to work, coming home.  Throw in a trip to the grocery store or the doctor’s office here and there and that was my life.  I didn’t want my work to be the best thing about me, but I feared that it would be.  Once I decided that I had to share my story I found my purpose and realized that I was on my way to leaving my mark on the world.  Since I made that decision I am not as depressed as I was.  My attitude is completely different and I’m happier because I’m doing something other than just going through the motions.  I still don’t feel very well physically most of the time, but the times that I do feel a little better than normal I try to walk more or ride my bike longer.  I’ve got a long way to go before my dreams come true, but now I’ve got the dreams as well as the patience and determination to make them come true.

January 2007 update: 

I finished the first full draft of my first novel in early 2006, but I wasn't happy with the middle section of the book.  I didn't have my direction and I didn't like the way I was connecting the beginning and the end.  But, after a talk with my friend about ideas for my book my brain cleared and I had my direction, both for the first book and for the next two books that I've already started writing.  I'm excited to get my books published and I'll update this site as soon as I have more info to share.

July 2004 update:

Well, I'm 31 now and I've finally figured out what my purpose is in life.  I had a spiritual awakening last month when I was listening to a radio show called "Angels in Waiting."  It's on an Orange County radio station called KOST, and it's a show that allows people to call in to talk to Mediums who do short readings with people who wish to talk to those who have passed on.  The discussion that they got into one night convinced me that I had to stop worrying about all the things that I'm not or that I don't have and start appreciating the things I do have and the person that I am.  I am currently writing a novel that is partially based on my life and my story, and partially made up to be more entertaining.  I'm getting rave reviews from my coworkers and family members who are reading it as I'm writing, and that's a great feeling.

August 2003 update:

Since I put this site together I have encountered numerous people who found inspiration in my story and have thanked me for touching their lives.  That makes me happy because I used to think that I would never be able to have such a positive affect on people's lives.  I was also able to meet my dearest friend because I was brave enough to share my story and she was open enough to get to know me.  My life has changed dramatically since she's been in it and it's definitely for the better.  Sometimes you just need something a little different in your life to change things around and she has been that for me.  It's not that she has changed me, it's just that she has helped me to break out of my shell and let parts of me that I had hidden break through.  She's a truly amazing woman, even though she's my little Hermanita.  Thank you, Carolyn.

I should probably update Earl's situation a little bit since he's still a big part of who I am.  I was able to watch one game this year in the summer league and it made me happy to see him again.  He was the team captain and it was nice to see him have that role again.  He looked much more confident and focused than he did in his first season and a half in the NBA.  Last season he made his mark in Memphis by proving to the team and the fans that he could jump and run the team.  He was able to start two games last season and in his second start he faced off against Jason Kidd and led his team to victory over the Nets.  He had quite a few amazing dunks last year, and a couple that even shocked me, but one of the most amazing plays that he made was blocking Shawn Bradley's dunk attempt.  Now, Earl is a pretty good shot blocker for his size, but he blocked a 7 footer's dunk attempt!!!  That play was just one of several of his that made it onto the NBA Tonight's top 10 plays of the week.  I'm looking forward to watching Earl play again this season, and to seeing more of his amazing leaping ability on display.

April 2003 updates:

I am 30 now.  YIKES!!  I have been riding my exercise bike and lifting dumbbells since September, and I have lost 30 pounds in that time.  It could easily have been more, but the cold weather that we've had off and on in LA for the last few months has made it tough for me to work out consistently.  But, daylight savings time is in effect and the days should be getting warmer, so I should be able to knock off some more weight soon.  I started with 1 pound weights in September and by December I was using 7 1/2 pound weights on some of the exercises that I was doing, so it doesn't take that long to be able to build up, even for a weakling like me.

GREAT NEWS!!!  For all of the Endometriosis sufferers out there I have found an amazing way to cut down on the pain!  I swear, I don't know how I would get through each month without this, as it takes me from being at a 9-10 in level for the duration of my cycle down to mostly a 3-5 if even that.  Sometimes it gets up to a 10, but pain at that level is uncommon now.  I cannot believe it and I only wish that I had known about this sooner!  It truly is amazing.  So, what's this secret?  It's called MENASTIL, and it's an all-natural, topical treatment.  The bottles are tiny, but for me they last three months, so at less than $30 dollars a pop it's a total deal.  I encourage you to look this product up on the internet and decide for yourself if you want to try it, and if so, look on a search engine to find the best price.  I was able to purchase it for $24.00 off the catalogcity.com site through As We Change.  Much better than the normal prices of $39.00.  You rub the bottle over the area where you are experiencing your cramps, and then you should put heat over the area to help even more, and then you can have an almost normal life again.  You'll have to like the smell of peppermint, but it's not an offensive smell.  Most people tell me that it smells good.  It also does wonders for your sinuses if you waive it under your nose (but don't rub it on your nose!!).  I have a heating pad at home, one at work, and then I buy these little $1.00 heat pad things that adhere to your clothes for when I'm going to and from work.  When things get bad then I take a pain pill, but I rarely have to do that.