Where did I go?  Did I go anywhere?  Where did my understanding go?  Where do I start to fill up the nothing?   What now?  Where were all these questions coming from but most frightening, how and where do I find the answers?  I’ve never felt what I felt back then; I didn’t even know those emotions existed.  Why was I thinking what I was thinking and was I really thinking at all?  I was so confused and so frightened…  I couldn’t stop the noise the world of disability was slamming me with. I was shocked.  I was really, really angry at the doctors for not telling me that this could happen to me while being treated with the gentamicin.  I was furious with myself for not taking action I now felt I should have.  I was terrified that I lost my job.  I lost my independence, my spontaneity, and my adventurous spirit.  I felt I had lost everything.

          There I was, home with nothing to get up for.  Thoughts consumed me. I knew what happened to me and how it happened based on what the doctors told me but I was never provided with  management tools or progressive ideas of what my future might hold.  I didn’t know how to control what this transition did to me and I had no idea how disabling it was going to prove to be.  I was in a world that was oddly invisible to me.  I couldn’t recognize anything anymore and nothing fit the way it used to.  It was all about starting all over, but from where?  My independence was squashed, and my comfort was pulled out from under my feet.  I wandered in and out of sadness, despair, and fear.  I felt as if I had died and I could not be buried.  My body and mind was trapped in a deafening yet silent noise and as each day uncovered unrealized and unwanted barriers, I was caught in the experience of what happened to me over and over again. But then one day something changed…