Jason's journey

"...My mamma always said; Life is like a box of chocolates, ya never know what you're gonna get...", reflected Forrest Gump while sitting; child-like; at a bus stop. Do I think Jason Watson is New Zealand's version of the 'special' movie character played so well by Tom Hanks? In some ways... but more than anything I thought it would be a fun way to start this article.

Until he was 16 Jason didn't have a disability but rather suddenly; as it is prone to do; life went 'pear-shaped'. "No-one likes to think too much about the possibility that one day they could be walking around without a care in the world, the next they could be living a life with all the hallmarks of a made-for-TV movie".

In 1986 Jason went to his local doctor complaining of headaches and double vision; thinking that all he would need was glasses, Jason wasn't too surprised when he was referred to a eye specialist at Wellington hospital (the fact that the appointment was the same day should have tipped Jason off that things were a bit more urgent than just poor eye-sight).

For Jason, that was when things started getting absolutely surreal and after some surprisingly thorough examinations, the eye-specialist led Jason to a small room with a newly acquired device sitting; imposingly; in the middle of it; the machine was a C.A.T. (Computer Aided Tomography) scanner. The younger brother of the modern M.R.I. (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, the C.A.T. scanner is a device that takes three-dimensional x-rays of inside the body; in this case Jason's head. But the 'fun' was only starting; Jason had to be injected with a rather warm radioactive dye that would highlight the exact location of any 'anomaly'.

The 'anomaly' was a brain tumour about the size of a chicken's egg and situated at the back of the brain where balance is controlled. Of course it had to be removed; but before they could do that they had to equalise the pressure inside Jason's head with the world outside his head. As Murphey's law dictates; "If something can go wrong it will"; and in this case we can blame Jason's appetite.

On the way to the hospital Jason stopped into a Fish and Chip shop to feed his adolescent hunger-pains and in doing so unwittingly delayed the surgery twelve hours while his meal digested. Food and anaesthetics don't mix and if they do the result is invariably vomiting while unconscious, choking and death. Seeing as Jason was only given a fifty percent chance of surviving the brain surgery anyway, the surgeons wisely chose not to reduce the odds any further!

What followed the surgery was; to Jason; a haze of dream-like sequences as he was given powerful drugs to keep him in a comatose state while his brain recovered enough to begin to heal itself. "Imagine having a non-stop nightmare for six weeks and to make matters worse, nothing you do will wake yourself up"; that's how Jason describes the time immediately after his brain surgery.

Jason describes his first conscious month as; "Like a big reset button for my life had been pushed". It was a time when he had to learn to do everything again; talk, feed himself, even the more obvious: toilet. For Jason it was a roller coaster ride, one moment he would be filled with the joys of learning to do a task again, the next moment he would be savagely confronted with the memory of what he had lost. Eventually he learnt to use that sensation, but that sense of loss was never going to go away totally.

"It's not easy being disabled, it is made a lot harder when the disabled person knows what it is like to not have a disability"; says Jason with a distant look in his eyes; "becoming disabled is a bit like quitting smoking or drinking, but you can't just start it again if you find quitting too hard; you don't even get the benefit of your health improving"

Jason walks with the aid of two elbow-crutches (which had to be specifically made to meet the demands of his 6 foot 5 inch frame), his gait is a little mechanical and he jokes that for every two steps forward he takes one step backwards; maybe you've seen him walking around town?

It is hard to understand the immense effort that it has taken Jason to come to the point where he can live a relatively independent life. He doesn't complain about the limitations of his disability or the isolation that his disability can bring, instead he prefers to be optimistic about what his future holds.

Our first-ever prize winner! [name witheld as requested]- Ed.