“I’m calling the police!”

This was the first time I had said these words, and I was looking into the face of a well-intending nurse on her eighth attempt to give me an IV. I had never been a calm person where needles were concerned, and this was no exception.

I may have let my usual composure slide a little, since I was half-conscious at the time. I am told that the nurses and doctors in the room all broke out into laughter – I’m sure it was welcome in such a somber situation.

Just a month before, I had been a sixth-grader at Carver Middle School, a language magnet school in Miami, about to deal with final exams. I can remember getting some severe headaches, but thinking that they were probably just brought on because of the stress of my first set of finals. But there was one nagging question – why couldn’t I move my neck without excruciating pain?

I remember telling my father how much pain I was in, and hearing him reassure me that I’d feel better in the morning. My next memory is waking up in the hospital nearly three weeks later.

My mother later told me she came home from work the next day to find me lying asleep under the piano bench. The women on my mother’s side of the family have a history of worrying (and yours truly is a self-acknowledged nervous Jewish mother-in-training) so it’s not surprising that she took me to the doctor right away. It was assumed that I had meningitis, so the doctor suggested I get a CAT scan at a local hospital.

No one would have expected the findings – I had something called an AVM (Arterior Venus Malformation), and there was bleeding in my brain. I stayed in the hospital, and the doctors put in a vent to take some of the pressure out. At that point, the bleeding had stopped but there was still a risk that it would start again and be fatal, so my parents decided to go ahead with the surgery.

Since I was half conscious during this period, I’m not surprised that I wanted to call the police, or that I thought my name was Rebecca Jones and I lived in Hawaii!

I was fortunate to have an excellent brain surgeon perform the 9 hour surgery. However, at some point during or after the operation, I had a stroke and was paralyzed on my right side for half a day following surgery. I also lost my peripheral vision on the right side of both eyes. It turned out that I was able to learn to walk again and regain hand movement, after a lot of physical and occupational therapy

I’ll never forget the first sentence the occupational therapist asked me to try to write before my upcoming orthodontist appointment – “I am so excited to go get my braces tightened today!”

The summer after surgery was one of the worst summers I’ve ever had. In addition to having four or five books to read for the summer reading program at my school, I still had to continue with occupational and physical therapy. One of the books included a character who lost his vision and was able to regain it, and my family had to explain to me that I would not be able to regain mine. I also had to adjust to living with about eight new learning difficulties.

Since math and science became two of my most challenging areas, it helped to have good teachers for the next two years of middle school, as well as a high school guidance counselor who helped me to choose professors who would understand my strengths and difficulties.

More difficult than dealing with the new academic difficulties and pressures, however, was having to adjust to working much harder to pass my classes. Many students at school still said, “Rebecca gets straight A’s,” since the year before my surgery I received a trophy for having the school’s highest GPA. They brought it to me in the hospital, where I was relearning math starting with 1+1.

Once I got to high school, I saw my middle school friends go off to honors and AP classes while I took several general-level classes. At a public school of 3,600 students, most of the classes I took had about 50 students in them.

Even though I initially dreaded taking classes at lower levels than my friends and dealing with conduct problems of students who didn’t want to be there to begin with, I soon realized that there were other students in those classes who, like me, had more trouble in classes like math, science, and AP class levels – and unlike me did not have diagnosed learning difficulties that they could easily get help for.

As the daughter of a college professor, I knew that, although my parents did not expect high grades from me, they did want me to try to get through high school. As I marched off to high school a block and a half from my house at 7 a.m. every day, my mother would remind me of a Woody Allen quote: “80 percent of success in life is showing up!” All I have to do is think back to my 7:20 classes in high school, and 9:55 classes at Guilford don’t seem so bad after all!

When I first began to look into colleges, my mother got me a book titled “350 Colleges with Comprehensive Programs for Students with Learning Disabilities.” Since I came from a long line of Bostonians, one of the first schools that I visited was in Massachusetts. But the main message that I got from them was that they would help me to learn to advocate for myself in order to get accommodations for my disabilities. I remember thinking, “If I hadn’t learned to accommodate for myself by now, I would be in big trouble!”

I wasn’t thrilled with that school, or the three others I applied to. A friend recommended I go to a college counselor. I remember telling him I was interested in going to a medium-sized school in a big city in the Northeast with a good subway system and a large Jewish population. The next time I met with him, he said, “I have found the school for you” and told me about Guilford. (I wondered if he had heard anything I said about my criteria for a school!)