Mad-Town

My boss was recently in Madison and brought me back a couple hard copies of The Onion. Most people don’t know that The Onion started as this little alternative newspaper started by a couple college kids in Madison. Seeing those papers brought back some of my own memories of Madison. When I was put on the vent, I was 13 and a patient at the University of Wisconsin Hospital. I spent three months there recovering from pneumonia. While I was there, I met a lot of amazing doctors and nurses. They were the ones who helped me understand that an ordinary life was still possible with a ventilator, that I would still go to college and get a job someday. They never discussed with me the possibility of living in a facility, something which could have easily happened. And in the years since, I’ve come to realize just how important those people were in my life and how ahead of their time they really were. In the mid 80s, it was still relatively unheard of for someone on a ventilator to live at home. Much of what I have now, I owe directly to their efforts. So if any of my former physicians and nurses from the UW pediatric ICU and F6/4 & F4/4 units are reading this, thank you.