“A Spiritual Journey to Peace and Contentment”

Jim Stovall, best-selling author of The Ultimate Gift, once said in an August 6, 2007 interview with Maurice Broadus, “it takes a life-altering event to move from religion to relationship.”  Mr. Stovall further elaborated that “one’s faith has to go from a theory that you take down and polish off on Sunday mornings to something real that you can live with.”  This is a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree, because it has been lived out through my own life.

I was in my second semester as a candidate for a master’s degree at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D. C. when I began suffering from headaches.  There also developed a loud rushing sound in my right ear – like when you put a shell up to your ear.  At the suggestion of a local neurosurgeon, I underwent an MRI, where it was discovered I had developed a condition known as hydrocephalus, commonly known as water on the brain. The procedure used to correct this condition was considered routine. All that was required was to insert a tube, a shunt, into the meninges surrounding the brain and drain off the cerebral spinal fluid that was currently blocked and thus building up inside my head, pushing the sides of my brain against my skull. So, that was that. Simple. Routine. I would be in and out of the hospital in four days, with a recovery period of two weeks.  The doctor saw no problem in me going to London to do an internship I had been selected for that summer.

        Unfortunately, life had other plans for me.

        After the operation, I was transferred from the recovery room to the Neurological Concentrated Care Unit and it was during my stay there that I began to hemorrhage. The bleed began to compress the brain, shifting the brain to the left as it enlarged. My brain began to buckle. The cortex of my brain began to cut off the flow of oxygen to my brain. By the time the nurse in charge of my care noticed the signs of increased intracranial pressure and notified the resident on call, the bleed had filled about one-quarter of the total volume of my skull, the equivalent of eighteen ounces of blood. 

        As a result of this massive bleed, my brain nearly collapsed in on itself and I started to go into respiratory failure. I was twenty minutes away from death before the nurse called the resident on duty. Upon taking one look at me, the resident called a code blue. I was rushed back into surgery, where one of the surgeons performed a procedure in which he cut away part of my skull to evacuate the blood. During that operation, I somehow contracted e coli meningitis, bacteria that is almost always fatal and, if not fatal, usually results in severe brain injury.

        
         After five more operations, all within a one-month period, my brain finally decided enough was enough. I slid into a coma, moving in and out of a semi-vegetative state for approximately three months. I finally became fully cognizant three months later to find myself paralyzed on the left side of my body, with the IQ of a vegetable, in diapers, being fed through a tube, able to remember very little and facing the prospect of having to relearn what a baby learns in the first years of life, things like standing, walking, and toilet training.  In other words, I suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

            The events surrounding the traumatic brain injury (TBI) I sustained on that tragic day, May 7, 1990 had a major impact on my life for it set me on a journey to discover who I was and for what purpose I was on this earth.  In short, it brought about a spiritual awakening. I have recounted this journey in my recently published book, Searching for the Open Door:  A Woman’s Struggle for Survival After a Traumatic Brain Injury. 

When people experience any kind of misfortune, devastating disease, or loss, it is not unusual for them to end up bitter and angry. I certainly ended my whole ordeal that way. And I continued to be angry and bitter for years. Then, one Sunday, about a year after I was released from the brain injury unit of Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia, while I was in rehabilitation in San Antonio, I went to church with my sister, who lives there, and with whom I was staying. On that Sunday, the pastor delivered a sermon about a shepherd and one sheep that was always running off into the woods, getting lost or otherwise getting into mischief. After several failed attempts at discipline, the shepherd finally broke the sheep’s legs and then carried him on his back until the sheep’s legs healed. From that moment forward, the sheep never strayed far from his master’s side. That sermon really spoke to me, because I felt that, in many respects, the story of that sheep was the story of my life. Hearing that parable was the beginning, I think, of my spiritual awakening, a process that began with my traumatic brain injury (TBI) and has continued for the past fifteen years.

This spiritual awakening did not occur overnight. Upon returning to Washington, D.C. in 1992 to continue my graduate studies, I started going to church with a law school friend of my father’s, more from a need to have some sort of social life than a need to commune with God. Nevertheless, it was during these weekly trips to church that my feelings began to change. The pastor at the church I was attending constantly preached the “Good News,” the Gospel, and the fact that, as an example of the ultimate sacrifice and an example of all that a parent will do to save his child, God sent his only son to live on this earth as a human and to ultimately die for the sins of the whole world so that we mortals could be reconciled forever to Him. “Who was this God?” I asked. “Who was this God, who was so loving and self-sacrificing that he would do this? Was this the same God, who had left me with a traumatic brain injury (TBI), paralyzed and in a coma and forced me to abandon my chosen career path? And what about the God who let six million Jews be murdered in the Holocaust?  What kind of God was this?”

I came to understand that while I would never be able to answer all these questions, what I could do was to try to make sense of my own situation of having to adapt to the realities of having a brain injury (TBI). And so I began to search for the meaning of my existence in an attempt to discover why I was literally saved from death. Did this God that I was hearing so much about have a plan for my life as the Old Testament of the Bible says in Jeremiah, Chapter 29, verse 11?  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” If so, what was it?  In embarking upon this search, I tried to answer the questions: “How can a person enter the hospital for what is supposed to be a routine operation and end up with a brain injury (TBI), paralyzed on the left side of her body, in a coma, unable to walk or talk, being fed through a tube, with the I.Q. of a vegetable?”  And, “How is it that same person, whom doctors predicted would be in an institution for the rest of her life and unable to continue along her chosen career path, survive the odds and live to fight another day?”  How indeed?

A scene from the movie, The Sound of Music, kept playing over and over in my mind. In this scene, Maria has run away from the Von Trapp family household and is seeking refuge in the convent from which she had come. The Mother Superior finally calls Maria to appear before her and asks why she had run away from the Von Trapps. “I don’t really know,” Maria replies. “I just couldn’t bear seeing him anymore.”  It turns out that Maria has fallen in love with Captain Von Trapp and, out of fear of the unknown and because she had no experience in how to deal with such a situation, she fled. The Mother Superior says to Maria, “When God shuts a door. He almost always opens a window.” 

The phrase had always stuck in my mind and as I reflected on events in my past, I could see how God had presented an open door at various turning points in my life. As I examined the various turning points in my life:  my ultimate choice of careers, my decision to leave New York and enter SAIS, the process by which I ended up at Magee, even the events surrounding my meeting my future husband, I began to see the possibility that there was a larger force in the universe at work, a greater Being who had a plan for my life and was constantly shaping events, leading me down a path to an ultimate, but as yet unknowable, goal.  In the end, I came to believe that these turning points were not just a series of coincidences.  I believe now, as I did then, that these turning points were all part of a divine plan to place me where I needed to be to receive the help I needed to recover successfully from my traumatic brain injury (TBI).  My spiritual journey has taken me from a point of despair to a place where I can enjoy true peace and contentment.

Copyright 2007 by Cynthia Paddock Doroghazi