What I Want to Be

©2016, Olan L. Smith

Dear Lisa,

Courage has very little to do with who I am, but I have been blessed, like very few humans. I have been shown firsthand the deepest secrets of the universe, so knowing does not take courage or faith, to say I see; therefore I have faith is a contradiction of terms. At first, I thought I was the only one who had seen the truth, and I had to tell the world...but after time I found out that as a visionary I was only one of many who had looked into a secretive world of knowledge via visions, in fact at this moment we number in the hundreds of thousands, and we are growing daily.

My second TBI happen twelve and a half years into my second marriage, and I stopped driving when my youngest was sixteen. The last driving trip was to my oldest daughter's play in Junior College. As I was driving twenty-four miles to the college suddenly a car appeared out of nowhere. I had no time to brake, only time to swerve (without checking my mirrors), and I came within inches of hitting the car ahead of me, and thankfully no one was in the left lane. What caused the magical appearance of a vehicle in front of me was a frontal lobe seizure, and I had lost a few moments while traveling at seventy mph, and it's just enough time for a car to pull out a mile in front of me, on a four lane highway with limited access. It was then I realized I was both a danger to myself and to others if I continued to drive.

As we have discussed before, dear Lisa, I have a Vagus Nerve Simulator (VNS) implanted in my chest to control my seizures, and it caused a loss of vocal communication; and that was difficult for a man who was a man who clear communicator; when it was running people could not understand me; it is still a problem on the phone, at times. Now, I hardly notice it, but still have problems with tonality and projecting my voice to be heard, but conversational speech is okay. Few people notice it at all, but then they don't remember what I used to sound like. I have stopped smoking, as of two days ago (November 22nd 2013), knock on wood...and my neurologist says my seizure medication levels were low this summer. He has increased the medication, and the seizures have slowed, but not stopped, and this last episode that landed me in the ER, I believe, was a TIA attach. I have had one before about eighteen months ago. My father had a history of TIA's (transient ischemic attacks) before he died at age 87 of a massive stroke. His first one, to our knowledge, was when he was 79, but Mom protected him while she was alive, so we probably don't know the first one for sure, only the one we had to manage. The human body adjusts to new medications over time, and medication levels or changes in medication have to be adjusted to have the same effect on reducing seizure activity. I was over two years old without any seizures (to my knowledge), so I was blessed for two years. I have mild short term memory loss and overall cognitive function loss from the upper two percentile to average, as determined by neuropsychological tests. After my last brain injury, my ex told my neurologist, "My husband used to be brilliant, look at what he has been reduced to." Since then, I have rebuilt my neuropathways once before, but they are temporary and I cannot afford another brain injury, and start over again.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this message, my spirituality is my strength, and it was a free gift, and my guides helped build my new neuropathways. I have found many others who have received the exact same message, and they have written about them much better than I could. One of those bestselling authors is Barbara Marciniak, and her knowledge is nearly identical to mine. My Christian faith was an accident of birth; I belonged to the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, and yes, my undergraduate degree was in Bible, with a focus on ministry. I went into the ministry after recovering from a very bad auto accident at the age of eighteen. I was in a coma for twelve days, with a cracked skull to two places; one was six inches long, from just above my jaw line to the crown of my head on my left side, the other was a two inch crack from my brain stem running up the back of my skull, it was also on the left side, and my entire left brain suffer a contusion, with the right frontal lobe suffering a concussion. When I came to I was blind, unable to speak or walk, and was paralyzed on my left side of my body. I had a near death experience, but that I will explain in another letter, but as a result of the injury I was bedridden for about six months, and my mother was my physical therapist. In other words, I had a lot of time to think about what I was going to do with my life, and I chose to go to Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon for my education. I knew I could choose art or drafting, but I didn't know that my aptitude was highest in science, though I had a strong interest in it. My graduate work was in Education, to match my first wife's degree, whose degrees were also in education, and theology. I spent a lot of time becoming what my wives' wanted me to become.

Love, peace, and freedom.

Olan