WALTMAN: Through suffering has come clarity

It's come to this: my final column for the Daily Nebraskan, what with the whole graduating thing.

My last contribution to the paper is going to be a story about myself, but I'll get to it in a little while.

I thought I would do something a little different than asking cryptic questions, giving didactic advice or giving the written middle finger to my critics.

You see, the critics are why I began writing in the first place. I'm not such an outstanding writer that my thoughts deserve a place in a public forum, but I wanted them there – in that forum – because I wanted to be challenged. What is college if not a time to have your beliefs tested?

Crap, and there's a cryptic question. I wanted to avoid those.

But anyway, critics: Thank you.  Responses in letters and online continue to reshape my outlook over time. So keep testing us columnists, but do try to do so constructively.

I could have done without one random Facebook message saying that 9/11 was a conspiracy by the U.S. government and that I should be tried in "International Courts." The message was, "Promising to end (me) soon" (except all in caps). Scary, but it makes for a good story.

And speaking of stories, onto mine.

I want to recount an experience I underwent in my late teens for the better part of two years as a Daily Nebraskan columnist, but I was unsure how to tell it without sounding self-pitying or self-indulgent.

I've struggled with how to tell it, but I concluded that I'll just tell it, and people will take away from it what they need to.

Like the entirety of my opinion run, it's not perfect, but here it is.

When I was 17 I was diagnosed with a 3.5 inch in diameter (you read that right) brain tumor at the base of my skull.

It was benign in a bad place. It was embedded within my cranial nerves that control my hearing, speaking, and swallowing. To remove it, I had a 15-hour operation, with a piece of my skull removed and a titanium plate where it used to be.

The Six-Million Dollar Man analogy applies, but it was more a One-Million Dollar figure, and I was not granted cybernetic powers. What I was granted with was a half-paralyzed face, a chronic cough and a shattered voice.

At 17 I was overly concerned that I looked different. Ugly, even. I had a huge scar, my face was uneven in expression, and my now-deaf right ear was stuck to the side of my head.

I kept thinking people must look at me differently because I felt different and wrong. People would say I looked like there was nothing wrong with me, but I didn't believe them. I used Scotch Tape to push my right ear back into place for several months, which attracted more attention.

Eventually I matured into accepting people's feedback: that even though I looked different, I did not look wrong.

I still have the incurable cough. I occasionally run out of class to control it and wonder if people think I have emphysema (I don't).

Then there's the speech. I was a good singer before. With a paralyzed right vocal cord (despite four reparative surgeries) that was no longer

possible.

My voice was taken away from me. At the Daily Nebraskan, I took it back.

This year I learned I've had a total of 18 MRIs. They're unpleasant. I've had radiation when the tumor recurred a couple of years later. It's even more unpleasant. For those who fight bravely against cancer with such treatments as chemotherapy, I admire you. Yet I do not understand how you do it. I never felt so terrible.

The type of tumor that I had was very rare, one in a million cases. My father speculated that it may have been caused by a car accident I was in when only six months old: that perhaps with my brain still developing I had an undetected head injury at the time.

In the hospital, injured, at six months old, my Catholic grandmother insisted I be baptized. 

At the time, the souls of unbaptized babies who die were believed to go to a state of limbo, without the joy of being with God. The Catholic Church evolved their stance under Pope Benedict XVI: They now pretty much proclaim even unbaptized babies are saved.

Just as the baptism as a result of the car accident is now invalid, so are subsequent health problems as a result of that car accident.

Although I can draw good things from it: maybe some strength, empathy or the scar which I can say is a knife wound from my gang days, ultimately I probably would have been the same person regardless.

This is the dilemma I was alluding to earlier: What is it that can be drawn from such an experience?

The most important thing I learned was not from the surgeries, radiation or the rehabilitation. It's from how I treated my high school friends afterward. I loved to make them feel awkward, to remind them of how much better they had it than I did.

Ultimately what I learned is simply this: No circumstance in life gives you the prerogative or imperative to treat people however you want. However jealous you are of people who have it easier, or however unfair you perceive your situation to be, let go of that inner power struggle. Accept your problems as part of your own unique experience, and treat people with kindness, respect and compassion.

Crap, and there's the didactic advice. I wanted to avoid that, too.

Clint Waltman is a graduating senior film studies major.You can reach him at opinion@dailynebraskan.com.