Help Garry deal with life after transplant

Hi all, my name is Garry Archbold, and I am a proud son of immigrants, a really big anime fan and the direct result of the hard work of so many villages. I am also a recent graduate of Stanford's Program in Science, Technology and Society. I have also been in the hospital for the past 3 months waiting for a heart transplant to treat heart failure that was discovered when I was 15 years old after I had a stroke in my occipital lobe. Thankfully, I've been able to live a full life and make a whole bunch of meaningful relationships. (I am currently writing this a mere 60 minutes after hearing that a heart has become available.)

This past September the timeline for a new heart was significantly shortened by a series of strokes that left my visual field even more limited and my life in flux. By the grace of God and my support system, I was able to get through not being able to look down, being scared to walk outside by myself and struggling to enjoy the pieces of media I would normally lean on for comfort. The week before Thanksgiving, I came into the hospital for a catheterization after which I was transported to my first room here at Columbia Presbyterian. During my 3 months in this place, I had 8 different roommates, before getting moved to my own room, and have made myriad meaningful relationships that have helped me get through a truly rough patch in my life.

This has, by far, been the most difficult challenge I've ever undergone. Candidly, being in here during Thanksgiving and Christmas was not all that bad, but New Year's was very difficult. You know, even folks/cultures that subscribe to different calendars still celebrate New Year's. Either way, I am sitting here so thankful to have persisted and incredibly scared of the mountain in front of me - a 6-hour surgery and almost a year of recovery, is very wild lol.

I am going to attach my personal statement from when I was 17 years old to this post, so you all can see that this has quite literally played a role in my life this whole time.

Either way, thank you all for everything. Everyone that has taken time out of their day to talk to me while I've been in here/everyone that has helped me even get to this point. I hope everyone is doing as well as they possibly can right now. Thank you.

These funds will be used for:

Personal Statement

The fleeting sunlight of the day shone on my face, as my mother spoke. “I don’t think we are going to have a car tomorrow,” she said. My face, the result of years of experience, quickly adopted an expression intended to put my mother’s feelings before my own. It was a sharp pain; a small, localized, pin-prick-like pain that had drawn my attention. A couple minutes passed before I felt ready to break concentration and once again wear my mask, but something was off. I looked away from the sun to find that the “sun spots” were not going away; I could barely see. Initially, I did not give my symptoms much importance, attributing them to my inability to deal with my emotions, but, as time progressed, they became impossible for me to neglect; the once small pain had grown to encompass the entire right hemisphere of my head, while the acute vision-loss had transformed into a seemingly absolute blindness. When we got home, I tried everything to get rid of the pain—teas, pills, prayer—but nothing worked.

The next morning, I woke up to a series of whirring sounds that at first seemed to be random, but became more systematic, the more I listened. I quickly tried to find the answer to the question that was banging against my skull—“where am I?” My world was quickly submerging itself in a sea of psychological unrest, and the fact that I was in a cramped space was not helping. The next thing I knew I was gasping for air and my body was convulsing; I was “out” once more. When I came to, my head was throbbing, my sight was clouded, and my feet were connected to a machine that seemed to be massaging them. I eventually tried to see past the haze that saturated my vision to make out a figure in my room, a doctor? I yelled, not conscious of how loud I was being: “What’s going on with me?” She insisted I calm down and wait until my mother came back; she only wanted to say it once. A couple minutes passed before my mother returned to my room and the figure felt comfortable answering my question. In a calm voice, she told us I had a stroke.

I remember not being able to understand how my fifteen-year-old self could have had a stroke; honestly, what were the chances that I would be the one to draw the short stick? I found it really difficult to displace the slew of disappointment and anger I was feeling. My life was on a seemingly endless decline and my lack of maturity was making it really difficult for me not to take it personally. I started to think the world was out to get to me, especially when I overheard my doctors trying to find a way to tell me that my heart was failing.

After a grueling stay, I was forced to attend visual and physical therapy. It was really hard for me to find motivation to go to a place to show off my deficiency, but my mom didn’t give me a choice. My progress was stagnant until, I found myself being able to pick up spoons and read at a reasonable pace; I was actually getting better. I grew up a lot over the course of the next few months. I returned to school to find myself months behind academically and isolated socially. I did not understand what was happening in class and my friends knew nothing about what I was going through. I had never felt so alone. I wish I could say that it was a single moment of lucidity that got me out of my “pit of despair,” but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It took a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that I would never be the same person that I was before my stroke and even longer to view obstacles as necessary steps in my development. Now, looking back, it’s still hard to believe that I got through all of that, but I can’t help but think I’m stronger for it. My signature phrase, according to my friends, is “it’s not that deep”; no matter how grave the situation is or how perpetually “shitty” everything may seem, it is never that deep. This “it will pass” attitude has continued to get me through my troubles. Even now as I embark on a journey toward higher-level education and heart transplantation and everything in between, I can’t help but think, “it really isn’t that deep.”