[meteorite-list] Steve Schoner

From: M come Meteorite Meteorites <mcomemeteorite2000_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:23:47 2004
Message-ID: <20030311143343.51516.qmail_at_web10301.mail.yahoo.com>

Hello all

This is a email Steve have sent to me few days ago:

To all,

I would like to thank all of you that sent me kind
letters of encouragement while I was in the hospital
for over a month.

I am recovering. It is hard to say where I will be a
in the months ahead. My language skills are good, but
there are areas of my brain that are not so well.
Hard to say what I was like before this happened, but
I do know that there areas that I will have to focus
on to come back fully.

It will be a long period of rehab.

It is amazing what a month in the hospital can do to
ones muscles.

Anyway-- here is what happened.

I fell ill in in the early part of Jan. I was ill for
two days, and getting worse by the moment. Then on
the first day of the illness one of the plant lights
came on, and I wanted to turn it off. I got up to do
so, and I noticed that my right side was going limp,
but still not completely gone. Then when I got to the
light, I found that I could not turn off the light. It
was as if I could not figure it out-- Shutting a light
down.

It did not make sense.

But there it was... I could not figure it out. I knew
then that something was very, very wrong with me. Yet
I could not express what it was. I was quickly losing
my ability to speak.

I slept through the night, and into the next day, and
my wife was wondering what was wrong with me. After
seeing me, she decided that it would be best to take
me to the hospital...which she did.

It was there that the real nightmare began... The
condition was rapidly getting worse and I was
beginning to lose consciousness. I went through two
MRI's then the lights went out as I went into a coma.

A very strange thing happened at that point. I saw a
number of very strange things. I could see my brain
being "worked" on by someone with medical tools of
some kind. I tried to turn my direction to the sound
to see who they were but they vanished. Then, a most
amazing thing happened... I saw my folks, my father,
brother, wife and a doctor in the room together. Now,
what makes this so strange is that I wear very thick
glasses, so thick that I cannot see with out them.
Now, even though I was in a coma, unable to see, and
not having my glasses at the hospital, I saw them
clearly, better than I have ever seen them before.

I heard the doctor say to my parents:
"I just want to give you a warning... Do not get your
hopes up too high, for a person in Steve's condition
usually does not come back. And if so, they are quite
disabled after..."

I heard this clearly, and wondered about it, for at
the time, I seemed okay.

And I also had a religious experience too, a NDE...
very profound and very intense.

What did I have?

ADEM (Acute Dessemminating Encypalo-Mylitus), a very
rare disease that has since first discovered in 1941
affecting about 1500 people world wide. No one knows
what cases it, and there is no cure. It just happens
and those so affected usually wind up as vegitalbles
or dead... very, very few survive retaining all of
their functions.

My prognosis did not look good, for the ones that did
survive were usually 5 to 7. With just a few in my 52
year age group. (In fact, I think that I am the
oldest survivor, but I will have to look it up).

I survived it... Coming out of the coma after 5 days,
and not knowing where I was or what was going on
around me. My right side was gone, could not use it.
And my left brain was in limbo, not able to comprehend
where I was. It did not look good. But I tried to
grasp where I was, and it soon became evident that I
was in a hospital, with nurses around me, and that
somehow, I was there because something had happened to
me. My right side was limp and gone, and I knew that
this was the reason. And I also knew from the weird
focus of my left brain that the world was different
than what I had experienced. And as I probed my
thought processes things began to come back. But I
could not talk until 15 days after, and only in very
broken sentences. Eventually, my linguistic skills
are very good, but my math, and other math related
skills are pretty much gone. And my right side is
back, but it feels somewhat strange as at times it
does not feel like it belongs to me.

I also found that the doctors had cut a 5.5 inch hole
in my head to get a portion of my brain for analysis,
which of course they then sewed up. I suspect that
much of my problems might be due to this, but under
the conditions that I was in, the doctors had no
choice... They had to know... nothing was found...
which is typical of ADEM

Where am I now... I am coming back. Not fully here,
but coming.

And I want to thank everyone here for having prayed
for me in this very trying time.

I am a different person now, seeing things
differently. It takes something like this to really
change a person's perspective.

Best Regards,
Steve Schoner

Regards


Matteo

--- almitt <almitt_at_kconline.com> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I haven't heard any word on how Steve is doing or if
> he is better. I talked to Daryl
> in Tucson about him but haven't heard an update for
> a while. I hope he is doing well.
> I certainly miss his posts here on meteorites as I
> am sure others do. If someone can
> give the list an update I am sure many would
> appreciate it. All my best!
>
> --AL
>
>
> ______________________________________________
> Meteorite-list mailing list
> Meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com
>
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Received on Tue 11 Mar 2003 09:33:43 AM PST