Sunday, May 13, 2007
Keep Going, No Matter What
When eyes meet in silence, a pact can be madeBack in early March, while posting on the need for a kidney for the mother of competitive eater, Tim Janus, I briefly mentioned that I am on the register for bone marrow donation, and promised to explain in detail in April. It is now May. The delay is due to the topic not being a very easy one for me to discuss. You see back in 1990, I lost a very dear friend of mine, Preston Vestal, to a rare blood disease called Aplastic Anemia. That one event was a turning point in my life and changed who I am. Preston and I were on Math team together in high school and were often paired together for timed problem solving. Partly because we were the only ones who could understand each other. Preston was several years ahead of me with computers, doing things in high school I couldn't accomplish until I was a junior in college. But we shared a love of math and a similar sense of humor. I still remember sitting in the back of the room during Mrs. Garrison's trig class. Preston and I both bored to tear because we "got it" a week ago. So we sat in the back of the class making up stupid songs about the trigonometric functions, sin, cosine, and tangent. Preston and I had discussed being roomates together at Georgia Tech, but when I got a scholarship to Mercer, that was the direction I went. A decision that would one day be full of bittersweet irony. To this day I wonder what I would be like had I chosen Tech instead of Mercer, and had Preston lived. Late in the summer of 1989, I got a call from Preston. He was in the hospital, but they had yet to diagnose his illness. The main feeling I got from him was his sheer boredom. We wound up spending an hour discussing Chaos Theory (a mathematical concept that is quite fascinating, and I strongly reccomend the book by James Gleick). That would be the last time I spoke to Preston, and somehow fitting that we were discussing math as a cure for boredom. And the sad irony that we were discussing chaos. I went on to college, and Preston went to other hospitals, futher away. It wasn't until April that I got a call. Preston had died. My life changed.  (Click for full size) The loss of my friend would have a dramatic effect on my life for the next 15 years. I got very bitter. I got very angry. I got very focused. I vowed that since Preston had been "robbed" of the opportunity to go to college, where he would certainly have shined, that I would go to college for him. I graduated with a double major: Mathematics and Computer Science. One was for him and one was for me. While taking my computer graphics course, my semester project was a program to graph the Mandelbrot Set, allowing the user to zoom in and zoom out to see the infinite beauty and complexity. While to the rest of my class was impressed with the project, I knew that Preston had designed roughly the same program, 5 years early in high school. That was where our discussions of chaos theory had begun. I hit graduate school with the same determination to make a mark for both Preston and I. Eventually I started to crack under the pressure. I felt I could hear Preston urging me forward. I could feel him on my shoulder guiding me along. It took me 15 long and painful years to realize that the problem was not that Preston would not let me rest, it was that I would not let Preston rest. I simply had to put him down because I had worn myself out after all of the years of trying to live up to what I felt were Preston's standards. October and April are still hard months for me (his birth and death months). But I have finally realized that there is nothing I can do to bring him back. And by wrecking my life emotionally does not honor him but disgraces him. So I simply had to find another way. As the time Preston died, the only possible cure would have been a prefectly matched bone marrow donation. Unlike blood donors where there are only a handful of different types and "universal donors" bone marrow has thousands of different types. Because bone marrow donation is unfortunately so uncommon it is not "free" procedure. To get on the registry costs money for all of the testing involved. on some occasions you can find "marrow donor drives" that will help offset the cost. Since there is an alarming shortage of marrow donors from minorities (especially African-Americans) the funds to help with donation costs are usually aimed in that direction. But don't let that stop you. Unlike blood donation, marrow donation is actually a painful process for the donor. They have to crack into your pelvis where the really good bone marrow lives. But don't let that stop you. For the marrow recipient, the procedure is the same as a blood transfusion. It is comforting to know that the success/survival rate for Aplastic Anemia has improved in the past 15 years, but it could always be better. Science is doing it's part, but having more people in the marrow donation register would be even better. And now you don't even have to leave home or get poked with a needle. They can mail you a cheek swab that you mail back to testing and typing. I feel that rather than living my life constantly suffering the lost of my friend in some twisted attempt to honor him, it would be better to save one person from a senseless disease like the one that took Preston. In a sense to cheat the demon that took him away in the first place. I feel that as human beings, we are born with 2 things on our "to do list" that we must accomplish before we're gone. The first I mentioned in my post a year ago after I lost my friend Ken: "We're born to live and then to die. We've got to do it alone, each in our own way, and I guess we ought to love those people who deserve it like there's no tomorrow, because when you get right down to it, there isn't." - Vision QuestThe second is something I learned a long time ago when helping to arrange a cover dish dinner. When you go to a cover dish, you should "Bring enough for your family, plus 1." As you go through life, we should all do everything we can to take care of our familys plus one more person. This is not about some kooky "Pay it foward" scheme, it's about being a part of the human race. We read in the paper about all the murder and crime and people who simply do not give a crap about other humans. That will eventually be our undoing. If we all just simply take care of the ones we love, plus one more, then the world cannot help but improve and we collectively lift each other up, instead of pushing each other down in some fruitless attempt to move "up." Where ever that is. We're all in this thing called life together, like it or not. I firmly believe that whatever you put out into the world will come back to you ten-fold. If you put pain and suffering and crap out into the world, you life will be filled with pain, suffering and crap. And you have no one to blame but yourself. Should you choose to put love, caring, and beauty out into the world, your life will in turn be filled with love, caring and beauty. And you will never feel the urge to "blame" anyone. And it is your move. Make something out of your life. |
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Preston. Wow. Can't believe someone out there is blogging about him. He changed my life too. He was...is...my cousin and we were very close. One of my closest friends. Just wanted you to know that I am so flipped that you are blogging about him and you are in Macon, where I grew up. Am living overseas now for like 10 years though. Anyway, he changed more than one life, that is obvious. Would love to hear from you. Anyway...that is all I have to say.
If you'd like to contact me, email me at seoulfriends at yahoo dot com
Mandy
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If you'd like to contact me, email me at seoulfriends at yahoo dot com
Mandy
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