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Ankerberg: Along the way, in your rehabilitation that went for almost two years, okay, you
learned some things. You went through operations, and that led to despair and a real full realization
of what you were dealing with. Talk about how you came to know what you were really
dealing with. Tada: Well, some people might look at me and
say, “Well, you’ve got your looks, Joni.” But I would trade blonde hair and Revlon®
Golden Bronze Lipstick and mascara any day for hands that would work. But, for the sake
of people watching who struggle with facial disfigurements or whatever, there’s all
kinds of suffering. Handicaps come at us in all shapes and sizes. And I didn’t even
look in a mirror for a good month when I was first injured. I was a healthy 140 pound girl
who dropped down to 80 pounds real quick. The medication was turning my teeth black.
I had a rash from another reaction to a different medication. I was starting to lose my hair.
And, I remember one time a girlfriend of mine from high school—she was a hockey player,
a burly girl, a rough, muscular girl and very athletic, and we were good friends—and she
came into the hospital and took one look at me and grasped the guardrail to my hospital
bed and then shook her head and said, “I got to leave.” And I could hear her outside
in the hallway retching and vomiting. And I asked my sister to quick, get me a mirror,
because I had not seen what I looked like. And when I saw what I looked like, I didn’t
recognize me. My eyes were sunken back into their sockets. I was thin and gaunt, drawn,
pale. And lying there on that Stryker frame, it was as though I had turned into some ghoulish
figure. I remember it was around my birthday, and
somebody had brought into the room one of those smiley balloons, with the big smiley
face. And the birthday had passed and the smiley balloon was still in the corner. But
its smile was becoming gnarled and crinkled and ghoulish looking. And it was like this
big balloon up in the corner looking down on me with this ghoulish, crooked smile. And
I just felt like my whole life was in the middle of some nightmare, like some haunted
funny house where you turn every corner and see some other image, and you’re shocked
awake again and then you think are you ever going to get out of here.
And that’s when I began to sink into depression. I really didn’t know what depression was
until then—maybe not having a date for Friday night; maybe twisting my ankle on the basketball
court. But now this was real depression. This was emotional numbness. This was sinking down
low and deep into a sullen kind of despair in which I could not even feel. As months
went on, I even stopped feeling. Ankerberg: You had operations on your hip,
because the bones were protruding through your skin, without anesthesia, because you
couldn’t feel a thing. And tell us why you had to have that operation. You had two of
those operations. Tada: Well, I lost so much weight that my
bones began to protrude through my hips. My love ledges in the front were just poking
right through my skin, and my tailbone was doing the same. And so I went through a series
of operations to chip of… They took a hammer and mallet and chipped off what are called
the iliac crests in the fronts of your hips, and removed my tailbone. And I had to lie
face down on a Stryker frame for two weeks, during which time, adding insult to injury,
I got the Hong Kong flu. And I cannot describe—when you’re paralyzed, and you’re strapped
to a Stryker frame, and you already, what little bit you can move, you can’t move
at all because you’re on that Stryker frame strapped, and then you get the flu, for two
weeks lying face down. It was like, it was mockery.
And my girlfriend opened a Bible and put it, you know, when I was lying face down on the
Stryker frame like that, lying face down on the floor; she put a little Bible on a little
stool and a pencil in my mouth, and I began flipping this way and that trying to find,
desperately finding answers. I kept landing on the book of Job, because I didn’t understand
it. I was only a high school kid, and this was language far beyond me. But I knew in
some strange instinctive way that this guy, this Job, he would understand. And I think
I was just looking for the Bible to understand me, just tell me that I’m not alone, just
horribly alone in all of this. And so, with that mouth stick, I would often land on Job.
I would drool on the book of Job, because I’d be lying face down reading it like that,
flipping this way and that with a mouth stick. And I saw a man who understood despair.