After my release from the hospital, my parents sat me down and asked gently as if I was a toddler, “ Do you remember anything special that happened in the hospital? You told us about something after a seizure.” A flash of the memories I had somehow hidden from myself suddenly flooded my brain. A month prior during football season of my eighth grade year, one of my teammates experienced a deadly car accident and wasn't supposed to survive. My parents explained, ”The EMS workers took him by life flight, and there isn't much chance of any recovery.” I instantly fell into shock, and I became extremely overwhelmed, which eventually shifted into anger. I felt furious at God because my teammate had such a nice soul, so I couldn't believe that he could do something that horrendous to him. I prayed for my teammate but also released some of my anger and shouted to God, “If you can do something like this, you can't be real, and if you are real, you are going to need to prove it.”
In the beginning, I was sick and throwing up non stop, so I stayed home from school. Eventually, my mom then announced, “I arranged a doctor’s appointment later today. I'll take you.”

During the appointment in the examination room, I began to pass out over and over again. I’d wake up only long enough to look at the fluorescent light for a second before only seeing pitch black. Soon they wheeled me to the emergency room where I lay awake for a short period of time, and I was my normal goofy self. My whole family arrived to see me, even my grandma and grandpa. The nurse soon stepped into the room and asked, “Do you know these people?” I decided I would mess with her, so when she asked one by one who each family member was, I stated, “I know all of them but one.” The nurse was so confused.

She asked, “Who don’t you know?”

I replied, “The old man sitting right there! He just follows me wherever I go. He’s creepy.” It looked as if the nurse were about to call security until I told her it was a joke and that he was my grandpa. Sadly, I soon fell back into the darkness of passing out.

The EMS workers then transferred me to Toledo Hospital by ambulance because it was determined that I needed additional care. At Toledo, nurses hooked me up to so many machines as if I were one myself. They hooked me up to an I.V, added multiple sensors on my chest to monitor my heart, and attached sensors to my head with sticky glue. The nurses gave me a drug called versed to try and calm me. I had an opposite reaction to the drug. The seizures always began in my right leg until it eventually engulfed my whole body. The doctors took me to the ICU in a room across the hall from my teammate still struggling to stay alive. The doctors failed to figure out why I was seizing, so they kept giving me more, only which only made it worse.
 

While they tried to figure out why I seized multiple times in an hour, I rested in my deathbed for three to four days. While undergoing one particular seizure, I laid uncontrollably  on the hospital bed as my mom and dad sat near. I opened my eyes to bright blinding light, not the dull gray hospital room. I was standing. My parents were gone.  At first I felt scared and disoriented by the brightness, but then I saw him I understood completely. It was unreal how calm I felt seeing him in his white robe accompanied by a rainbow sash, encompassed by the light. I thought, ‘I am never going to see my parents or the rest of my friends and family ever again.’It was real. Time slowed almost to a complete stop, and he waved, as if he were saying goodbye. Just as quickly as it had happened, I was back.

This moment of time was different, though. I was lying down again in the soft bed. I could see my dad leaning over top of me, rubbing my sternum, attempting to get me to breathe. Behind him, I could see my great grandma with her curly chestnut hair with tears dripping from her wrinkled face. I only recognized her from pictures because she had been dead for nearly fifteen years. When the next seizure engulfed me, the moment came to an end.

Days later after my release when they figured out the seizures were caused by the medicine, I recalled myself shouting, “If you can do something like this, you can't be real, and if you are real, you are going to need to prove it.” Once I made the connection, everything made sense.