In High School I had it made. I thought I had it made. I was like you know, photo albums and class president. I played sports. I was a quarterback. My last year of playing quarterback we won every game except for Boyd-Buchanan. They beat us. I must have gotten too relaxed. I put my cruise control at 55 mph. I headed up through Soddy-Daisy and then the lights went out. I fell asleep at the wheel. No seat belt, cruising at 55. I slammed into a telephone pole. I busted that telephone pole into two pieces. The transformer was swinging above the top of the truck. There was blood all over the place. I was trying to wiggle my toes and my knees to make sure I had all of my moving parts. It wasn’t until about three years later that I started really getting the effects of the accident. I had a closed head injury. The technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now and a closed head injury was nothing more than a closed head injury. No real reason to get in there and see what real damage was done. They didn’t really have the ability to at that time. I had shrunk to 139 lbs. from 180. I couldn’t eat. When I tried to go to sleep, I had nightmares. It was just relentless. It was like hell on earth, spiritual, spiritual hell. So, I remember going (and this is coming from someone who thought he had it made, right) so I go to a doctor down there and said; “There is something wrong with me and I don’t know what it is.” He said; “Well, you’re having anxiety attacks.” Those anxiety attacks were horrible. The best way I can describe an anxiety attack, a full blown anxiety attack, would be like if you can imagine falling. Say you’re working on a skyscraper and you trip and you fall off of the edge, when you realize what has happened and you realize that there is nothing you can do about it. That would be the best way I could describe a full blown anxiety attack. It’s the most hopeless, helpless feeling and you don’t know if it’s ever going to stop. As far as you know, it’s going to last forever. And you know that there’s no way to survive in that type of crisis. I remember one time, right before I told my Mom and Dad that I was going to have to get psychiatric help. Nobody in our family had ever had any trouble like this. I remember going in there and just laying on the bed with my Mom and Dad and trying to explain to them why I was going to have to take my own life. A parent doesn’t want to hear that. They can’t hear that but that’s the level of desperation that an anxiety attack can get you to. I started going to see a psychiatrist and they were treating me for anxiety and depression. So, they were able to give me a certain medicine that made the anxiety go away. But I just felt left with depression. So I have had probably seventeen or eighteen rounds of electric shock therapy. As horrible as those sound, in my life, there was a place for them because they brought me out with a combination of those therapies and the medication.
Maybe ten or fifteen years ago I decided to go to a different doctor. He has really taken my case on. He has worked, we worked tirelessly and we have done it for fifteen or maybe seventeen years maybe. We finally have found the right combination. I will give some credit to my doctor and I’ll give some credit to medication but when it comes right down to it, the truth is, without God, without the Master Physician we are helpless.
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