I survived being a throw away teenager with no support of any kind from my parents. I did horrible things to survive. Sometimes I feel shame over this and sometimes I admire myself - how in the world did I survive? Some situations were life & death situations. Now that I am almost 50, earned a college degree and have a happy home with friends. I sometimes view my old self like a person I do not know entirely. Street smarts are great but I don't recommend getting street creed to improve your personality.
Here is to all the survivors out there - teenagers, homeless and others who were only told they were nothing and would never be nothing. We survived and thrived.
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BOOK EXCERPT
What It Takes To Survive
Why some people walk away from a plane crash or thrive after a job loss, while others don't stand a chance. And what's luck got to do with it anyway?
Tim Archibald for Newsweek (left); Courtesy of Stanford Hospital Clinics
Ellin Klor, and a scan of the knitting needle that pierced her heart
Published Jan 24, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Feb 2, 2009
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The knitting needle pierced her heart. Then it saved her life. Ellin Klor savors the irony, but it wasn't always so, especially when doctors cracked open her chest in the operating room to pry out the wooden needle that had punctured her breastbone and penetrated her right ventricle. Jan. 9, 2006, was her lucky day. After dinner with her family, the 58-year-old children's librarian was anxious to show the gang in her knitting group some new patterns, so she grabbed three bags stuffed with books, yarn and needles and headed to a friend's house in Palo Alto, Calif. Already late, she could tell from the other cars that some of the knitters had arrived. She hoisted her bags from the back seat. "The scourge of a librarian," she recalls, "carrying too much stuff around." Klor climbed the first of two wide steps, stubbed her foot and suddenly fell down, landing chest first on a sack filled with unfinished knitting. Klor, 5 feet 4 with soft hazel eyes and a generous, round face, had long considered herself a bit of a klutz, so her spill wasn't exactly a surprise. When she took a breath, her chest hurt, but she figured it was nothing. Inside, the knitters were already working in the living room. Klor wanted to get started, but the ache in the middle of her chest was getting worse with each breath. It wasn't an ordinary pang. She looked down at her red Façonnable sweater and lifted it up. The next
image is ingrained in her memory. A jagged splinter of a wooden knitting needle, nearly four inches long, was jutting from her chest. It had clearly broken in half, piercing her clothing and lodging in the middle of her bra right between her breasts. "Oh, my God," she whispered. Her friends gaped at the needle and urgently calculated the options. First and foremost, should they try to pull it out? "No, don't touch it," Klor declared. It was pure instinct: she didn't want anyone to go near the injury until she was at the hospital. Doctors would say later this was the first decision that helped save her life. Plucking the spike would have been like pulling a plug or uncorking a bottle, and she might have bled out in the living room.
Klor and her friends faced the next critical question: should they jump in a car and race to the emergency room? "No," Klor decided. "Call 911 right now." Waiting for the paramedics was a second lifesaving choice. If the needle had moved even the slightest amount in transit to the ER, the injury to her heart might have proved fatal. So Klor carefully sat down on a sofa to wait for the ambulance. She felt alert and even noticed something very odd. She had been impaled and yet there wasn't a single drop of blood anywhere. How was this possible? The next string of images flew by like a strange TV drama. Paramedics. Stretcher. Sirens. IV. Oxygen. Emergency room. CT scan.
At the Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, Klor waited anxiously for the ER doctors to tell her the extent of her problems. To distract herself, she focused on her daughter, Callie. Her thoughts also turned to her husband, Hal, a rugged research engineer who once hiked two miles on a broken ankle. Sometimes he teased her lovingly that she was "a little wimpy." What would Hal say when he heard about this?
When the ER team finally briefed her on the results of her scans, she felt the first flood of fear. Their tone was urgent. The needle had penetrated her sternum, the long flat breastbone that's supposed to protect the heart, lungs and major blood vessels from trauma. Over the years, this team had extracted every imaginable object sticking from every conceivable body part, but they told her a knitting needle was unprecedented. Paparazzi style, a young doctor snapped her photo and then took mug-shot close-ups of the offending object. Then the doctors delivered the scary news: the point of the needle had grazed her heart, nicking the right ventricle. They could see internal bleeding. They needed to operate as soon as possible.
Less than an hour after her tumble, trauma surgeons would cut her open, crack her sternum, stitch up her heart, wire her breastbone back together and sew her up. They would leave a seven-inch scar from her neck to the middle of her chest. They would save her life. And then, by chance or fate, the knitting needle would save her life all over again. In fact, Klor's real struggle for survival was just beginning.
Why do some people live and others die? Why do a few stay calm and collected under extreme pressure when others panic and unravel? How do some bounce back from adversity while others collapse and surrender?
Discuss