Surgery of the Year 2012
Many of you have viewed this picture on my Facebook page
and dozens of you have wondered what happened.
I was unable to get to everyone's questions at the time and was very eager to spend time on healing. I knew there would come a day that I was ready to talk about it. Just a matter of time before I carefully orchestrated the right words to testify to this moment of my life.
After having waited nine years to be able to address this situation, All of the events that lead to it had to reconcile. This was not a choice of mine.
It could have only been our Creator.
In the seventh grade, our school nurse held a health screening where it was determined that I had Scoliosis, which is an abnormal curving of the spine. Everyone's spine naturally curves a tiny bit. But people with scoliosis have a spine that curves too much. I didn't live at home and my mother did not give me access to my medical or identifying information.
This diagnosis went unchecked.
I had a bit of a severe abuse problem at home and would not frequent there. I left at nine years old.
Couldn't live with my dad.
Having survived numerous street brawls and shootings, I somehow made it to see eighteen and had moved in with my first boyfriend. For my nineteenth birthday, he crushed my skull. Three days after my face was reconstructed, was to be my last performance as a model and dancer in the Puerto Rican Day Parade.
During the parade, there was a shoot out around the corner and traffic went wild. When our vehicle was hit, I was ejected about a half of a long city block and landed on the left side of my head and body, having broken my right wrist protecting my face.
All of that happened in 1996.
Having been admitted into the hospital DOA that day, after they revived me, I slipped into a coma for a long time. Several months later, the doctors told my father to pull the plug and give up hope, but he was so far gone on crack that he was in some serious denial - which is how I confirmed that even the bad things in life have a purpose. A month after my father said to keep me alive awhile longer, I woke up. The doctor then said I'd be a vegetable. That didn't work well to be a vegetable when I'm a dancer, so I wouldn't accept that. To date, the only thing I haven't done again was dance.
A year later and I was almost normal. So onto life as usual, opened a new business and was doing well with my new boyfriend.
The night that Shawn and I got engaged, we stayed out late in celebration with his brother and girlfriend. We all went back to his mother's house to crash, and at six in the morning, there was this urgent knock on the front door and it wasn't the police.
Shawn and his brother Shannon pushed their way through the vestibule, shawn grabbing the door first, only to catch a bullet in his head, the second shot grazing Shannon and whizzing past me. The shooter? Shawn's best friend - who said, "You think you can have all the money and the bitches!" Shawn was so dirt poor and he only had me, but I guess perception is everything, huh?
Soon after, I found out I was pregnant with our first child. Needing help, I thought my dad might clean up his act to help me with the baby and the businesses. He seemed to have imprinted on Shawn Jr at first sight. The only problem was that my father still had nightmares of my mom, he began to beat me all the time, to make sure I didn't think about doing what she did to us. I wouldn't have, but he was still on drugs and a bit delusional.
To cut the story short, he was putting my head through walls daily, until he got locked up.
Shortly after, a local guy who had been in love with me for years and stepped into my life wanting to step upto the plate. In all defeat and fear, I went with him and we were making plans to get married, until he started hanging back in the streets. All of a sudden he came in wanting to beat me down, because all of his friends were doing it and their girls liked it.
This was about the time I left, but now he's kidnapping kids and shooting at me. I had to leave town.
After losing my career, businesses, home, friends and brother, I finally left Philadelphia in defeat. My life and my kids were all that was left. My father brought us to Florida with a change of clothes and a few pictures, and two weeks later, put my head through a wall, to which my four year old daughter asks me if we could just go away again. We went to a shelter and have been struggling to keep a roof over our heads ever since.
Last year, by push coming to wheelchair, the time had come for that surgery to take place. But there were so many other illnesses at that point, that I ended up in the hospital for almost a year, with the brain surgery being the last in a string of surgeries that removed most of my digestive system.
This particular surgery was a partial skull removal and replacement with parts of my cervical spine cut out. Somewhere along the line of all that happened above, my skull overlapped twice. They still cannot fix the front without reconstructing my face again, and it is not an imminent threat.
Today, I am simply thankful for the opportunity to be here with my children and another chance to complete my work.
I have a vision and will not succumb to anything other than to manifest the destiny given to me.
Kahala Lei
from the Pages of My Life
copyright 2013
