Humans of LP: RJ Pray

“When I woke up from surgery I was in recovery, and I didn’t remember very much. It was interesting because I couldn’t feel anything, and I was just laying there. I could only open my eyes and hear, and I couldn’t talk or anything, so I was just laying there paralyzed. I saw the nurses, and I’m like just thinking what are they doing. I couldn’t ask any questions or anything, and then they put me back to sleep. I woke up in my hospital bed. I couldn’t get out of bed for a day because they didn’t trust me to walk or anything. They took me off of the medicine that would make it so that I can’t walk, and they would give me a different kind of medicine for my pain. I was in the hospital for four days. I went in on a Wednesday and came out on a Saturday late at night. I was out of school for two weeks. I have what is called Chiari, a brain malformation. It’s in the base of your brain. The base of your brain is basically leaking through a little cavity you have where your spinal fluids go back and forth. I had a 15.3 mm blockage, and if it got any worse, I could be paralyzed from the neck down, so they removed the base of the skull, like the bones down there and then they shrunk the tonsils on my brain. They removed the upper half of the C1 vertebrae, the top vertebrae.”