This is the first of a two-part blog series about overcoming adversity and adjusting your dreams.
Imagine looking down a dark hole everyday for the rest of your life and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. How does one land there? I grew up the middle child of 3 boys! While I have 2 younger siblings as well, growing up it was the older 3. Jermaine, Jamar (ME) and Jermyl, generally known as Maine, Mar, and Myl or the J boys. Never was there a boring day in our household. We stayed very active, whether that be riding our bikes and scooters outside, to watching WWF wrestling and imitating our favorite wrestlers, Hulk Hogan, Macho Man, Sting, and the Ultimate Warrior to name a few. My brothers and I did everything together, there was never a dull moment. One of our favorite things to do was to play basketball. We would have legendary battles playing together on the same team against other neighborhood kids or testing our skills against one another. My love for basketball happened from day one. If I wasn’t at the park playing, we were in the house watching Michael Jordan play every chance we got on WGN network. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had no doubt, I was going to be an NBA basketball player.
My love for basketball and Michael Jordan kept growing. The days where we couldn’t go outside and play, or days where a Chicago Bulls game wasn’t on, I was busy doing another hobby of mine, which was drawing. I could sit and draw for hours. Most of the time I would draw pictures of Michael Jordan, or a WWF wrestler, or a comic book character. I spent a lot of time drawing NBA logos and Nike shoes. It all made sense to me; I could one day be a Nike athlete playing in my own signature shoes, the Nike Air Jamar! I would come up with my own designs for the sneakers that I would one day wear while living out my dream of playing in the NBA. It’s safe to say I had a big imagination with big dreams. Nothing or no one could convince me I was not going to make it.
4th of July 1994 was like any other summer day except the big fireworks show would be at night and we always looked forward to seeing the bright colors bursting in the sky. My brother Jermyl and I were invited to see the fireworks with our cousins. We were going to see the firework show at Washington Park. Now normally in our neighborhood you had to be in front of the house once the streetlights came on, but on this day we got a pass to stay out later because the show didn’t start until about 9pm. We had a fun time seeing the fireworks and after the show we were supposed to go back home, instead we went roaming around the neighborhood.
48th and Lloyd is where we landed, and the moments that followed changed my life forever. The holiday was being celebrated by everyone throughout the streets. We saw other families celebrating and popping their own fireworks and the five of us had arrived to what we thought would be more fun and joy as the night went on. What we noticed almost immediately was the recklessness that was happening around us. Unsupervised teenagers were popping fireworks in an unsafe way. They were launching their own personal bottle rockets in the direction of innocent bystanders. One person would load the a rocket into a sprite bottle, the second person would be holding the bottle serving as the shooter, and the third person would light the rocket so that it could launch. One after another, back to back to back, they would light these explosives non-stop. These rockets were coming directly at us like they were war missiles, flying one by one past our heads. It was like a game of dodgeball out there, except this did not feel like a game. My cousins and my brother and I all decided this is not a place we should be and told each other let’s get out of here before something goes bad. BOOM! It did go bad! The next firework landed directly in my right eye. Imagine some missile coming at you that you never saw coming going over 70 miles per hour and it explodes right into your eye. Well that’s exactly what happened to me.
I instantly dropped to my knees, and chaos was all around me. A whole crowd of people rushed around me in a panic, and I was as bloody as any crime scene you could imagine. I remember some kids yelling oh my God his eye is gone, it’s missing! More panic set in, heart beating fast, I placed my hand gently near my eye to feel if something was still there. My eye was still there, but there was too much blood to open it. Jermyl was crying and I was completely disoriented. We weren’t too far from my cousin’s house and my cousin told me we need to get you home. That walk home, only one block away, felt like miles! I remember saying these exact words “my basketball career is over” and there it is, a dream shattered.
Well my dream was not the only thing that shattered. I was rushed to the emergency room and they told me I had to have emergency surgery immediately. I was told that my eye was shattered and they would have to sew it back together. I never even knew an eye could get stitches. It seems like our eyes would be too sensitive to have a needle stitching it back together. My optimistic mindset before hearing such bad news was, maybe I just have a cut above my eye and maybe I just need stitches from a cut above my eye. At least that is what I hoped for. Once they told me I had to have surgery, I was so scared. Every piece of news they dropped on me led me to being even more scared. Nothing they said made me feel any better. The next thing they told my parents was that we need to remove his eye, he could potentially go blind permanently because his immune system could attack itself in trying to replicate his damaged eye. This condition is called sympathetic ophthalmia. According to the National Institute of Health, “Sympathetic ophthalmia is a rare, devastating disease defined as bilateral uveitis following an eye injury. The condition may result in permanent bilateral vision loss in an otherwise healthy patient with no ocular morbidities.”
To say my world was crushed is an understatement. I was devastated. It wasn’t just that my eye was broken or shattered, I felt my soul was taken from me.
Imagine looking down a dark hole every day for the rest of your life and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is no hope. What I wanted was snatched from me. The morning of the 4th of July 1994 everything was fine. i had no idea that later that day my life would change forever. What’s going to help me, what’s going to happen now? I could go blind. No more basketball, no more drawing, no more playing with my brothers. Just a dark hole to stare down! I spent 3 weeks in the hospital, they evaluated me day after day to see if any signs of vision were coming back, but no light ever came back on. Each day felt more and more dark around me. To be continued….
