I am the type that just keeps going when I am injured. Before I start explaining what happened, let me share a story that people may understand a little better to compare and show how I keep going. My senior year in high-school, I fell headfirst off an obstacle course onto pavement. I hit so hard that I lost hair, smashed my legs somehow, and scraped up the hand I use most. I could barely walk, hurt to grip a pencil, and had a massive headache. I refused to go to a doctor and instead went to take a Spanish test.

Now for the actual story. I could hear and feel a thumping in my head. I brushed it off for a while and just went around my normal activities, driving, work, and helping at Church. I finally decided to go to a doctor who told me it was just an ear infection. I believed it and went back to my normal routine. It just got worse, so I went to my normal doctor who thought it was something minor and almost sent me away. As they reached the door, they had second thoughts and sent me for blood tests.

I went back home to prepare for work, and the doctor called to tell me to get to the ER immediately. I had extremely low amount of all three major components of my blood and needed transfusions. The local hospital did not do transfusions, and the closest one that did was a few hours drive away. Life-flight was busy at a bad accident, so I had to be taken by ambulance. It was in the ambulance that I realized how bad one of my blood components was. The paramedic told me that he had never seen someone awake and coherent with as low a hemoglobin as mine. I was later told by a doctor that the two other components of blood were low, and I could have bled out from a papercut, or died from something as simple as the common cold. I was literally walking around oblivious to how close to death I really was.