April 3,
2011This is part of the Brejcha Personal and Disability Resource Site, and after reading this page you can Click here for a Menu . But for now, Welcome to my:
Copyright 1997: F. Alexander Brejcha
April 3,
2011
This is a brief (sort of like an abridged War and Peace) autobiographical sketch to share a bit of who I am -- and the forces that turned me into the sick and twisted individual I am :-). No, I take that back. It's the rest of the world which is a bit weird. I'm just fine.
I am male, divorced, 53 years old, and after 43 years in the USA: an American citizen -- I finally gave up my Swedish citizenship in 2000 because I lost my Procrastinator's Club application in one of my many moves (the last one 6 years ago when my ex-wife [wife at the time] and I built an accessible house [we're both wheelchair users with M.S. who still live together but joined by her first ex-husband whom she re-married and who works part-time caring for me]). Confused? Well, it works for us. Other personal data: I have brown hair and blue-grey eyes, 6'1" (stretched out or when on my standing frame -- 4'6" when in my wheelchair), around 193 lbs (down from 240, partly thanks to an exercise machine designed for wheelchair users -- a financial OUCH because it was rejected by my insurance despite a letter of medical necessity -- now I just have to remember to use it more, and also due to weight loss during a six month hospital incarceration due to a severe bed sore - see Treatment Precautions for Paraplegic and Quadriplegic Patients with Sacral Decububitus Ulcers , a medical journal article I wrote for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery about the experience to educate doctors on proper treatment (which I did not get).
But back to personal history: I was born in Sigtuna, Sweden, on December 1, 1957 (with equine and canine baby-sitters) of a Swedish mother who was a teacher and Austrian father in the horse business who once worked at the Spanish Riding School of Vienna with the Lipizzaner horses. Then we moved to Åmål where I lived and went to Södra Skolan (the Southern School) until the age of ten (Note 9-24-97: The last was added [blushing] as an e-mail from Åmål came in from former elementary school classmates in Sweden who found my web site after reading an article about me in a Swedish newspaper and who chided me for not mentioning this -- I am so sorry :grin:). It is a beautiful little town I do want to visit again (last visit was in '85). And while there, former President Clinton will be happy to hear that at the inquisitive age of 9 my mother removed any chance of my taking up her own smoking habit by making me smoke a whole cigarette -- but I inhaled (I had to) -- my own fault for wanting to know what it was like to smoke. 'nuff said? Thanks mom! But just tobacco. My own attempt with Marijuana left me so nauseated and coughing (and un-high) that it strengthened my anti-smoking beliefs.
In 1968, at the age of 10 -- after dad got my baby-sitter pregnant, I emigrated to the United States with my divorced (need I say why?) mother (like I had any choice) and we came to New York on January 10, after I had started to learn the frustrating realities of the English language (as a writer, I am now grateful that I did!).
Then I discovered how absolutely immense this country is.
We were headed for California, and after driving for days, and days, and days ["are we there yet?"]... we made it to Denver, Colorado where we settled from from 1968 to 1970 because we found a family with a mother from our Swedish home town. There I learned the dangers of making assumptions. In the sixth grade I got very mad at a substitute teacher one day and decided to verbally and colorfully vent my frustration in Swedish -- albeit in a soft conversational tone and with a smile -- only to have my teacher reply -- equally sweetly -- IN SWEDISH! Turned out that his wife was Swedish and his... 'vocabulary', was even richer than mine. Live and learn.
In 1970, with mom's new husband,'we moved to Pennsylvania where I started Junior High in King of Prussia, and three years later we moved again (just a few miles to Valley Forge Mountain, near the park) and I went on to an abbreviated Senior High program in Phoenixville. Then I moved away from home at 17 and got a small apartment (and discovered life with roaches!) in Philadelphia when I entered Temple University on the early admission program in '75. The program was set up so that the two courses I needed to fulfill my high school requirements were also needed for the undergraduate art education program I was enrolled in. I graduated Phoenixville Senior High with the Bicentennial Class in '76 after completing a year at Temple, and I worked various jobs full-time and attended school part-time until 1980 when M.S. changed my life.
Change in Life: M.S.
I was diagnosed with M.S. in 1980 (see Medical Records) when I was up to over 90 of the 128 needed credits for my Bachelor's degree. My art education studies were going well and I had a local gallery interested in my work, but they wanted me to have a few more pieces before they would do a show. Unfortunately, the first problems I had with the M.S. (aside from some gait disturbance and balance problems) were extensive fine coordination impairments and some visual problems (the latter fortunately cleared up fairly quickly). And as luck would have it, my specialty in art was etching -- which requires extremely fine detail work and concentrated nitric acid. Wonderful when your eyes and hands don't work right!
After a little time off, I transferred to the psychology program -- losing the majority of my credits -- and continued part-time while working full-time in my job. Fortunately it was a position where my gradually decreasing mobility was not an issue. From 1980 till 2007 (ironically on April Fool Day when my employer closed and I was unable to find another accessible night job [needed as my attendant care is set up for me working nights and I can't keep up with a day shift job]), I worked the overnight shift as a telephone operator, and dispatcher for cardiac arrest codes, O.R.teams, and trauma teams, for two Philadelphia hospitals (our lines are connected) and I also acted as answering service for several hundred doctors' offices (the answering service closed after a few years - but that just gave me time for writing and web-weaving later on.. At first, the night shift was good for studying, and later, when progressing M.S. and a new writing side-line made school+work impossible, I kept busy in between calls with my notebook computer by working on my writing, and later on this web site. That left me time for volunteer work and personal 'stuff' during the day.
But back-tracking a bit to school days, in the very busy year of 1984, I was inducted into -- and the next semester elected vice-president of -- the Temple University chapter of Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology. And after several more semesters, I was accepted into the Psychology Department Honors Research Program, and with the approval of the hospital where I worked, I began formulating a study of open-heart surgical patients. I wanted to study the correlation between pre-operative depression and complications in post-operative recovery. I was particularly interested in any correlation between pre-operative depression and PCD, or post-cardiotomy delirium. This is a fascinating near-psychotic state which sometimes develops in the ICU after surgery and then resolves with no sequelae. After a thorough review of medical journals (MedLine search and journal photo-copies courtesy of the Department of Psychiatry), I had found a number of PCD studies, but with contradictory findings -- and often with procedurally invalid results (no control for the Hawthorne effect when comparing chart review studies with experimental ones) -- and few studies looked appropriately at depression. Ergo: a ripe subject for study.
And along with my Psi Chi vice-presidency, I started a different use of my first computer, a transportable Commodore 64 (a neat little [relatively] eighteen-or-so pound, large briefcase-sized unit with integrated 5" color monitor, keyboard and disk drive). I started, printed, edited, and did much of the writing for the Psi Chi/Psych Majors' Newsletter. I started it as a resource for my fellow-students and for fun (and to be honest, probably to score points with my professors)
Now you can understand another reason why I only went to school part-time. But more seriously, another reason was that I was hidingmyself in the safe world of school and work, and at home with reading and watching movies (and with depressive spending racking up a hellacious credit card debt that had me reeling until I was finally forced into bankruptcy), all to avoid facing the major depression I was going through myself. Hind-sight is wonderful. Ironically, while I was studying psychology, I was blithely unaware that I was suffering from problems myself.
Whatever. My M.S. kept progressing until '85 when I was totally wheelchair-restricted. I moved out of the city (at Looking Out and Looking In is a reprint of an article I wrote on that for a regretfully short-lived monthly newspaper New City Philadelphia.
The new psychology studies were fascinating, and the straight A's I got in it pulled up my good, but not outstanding, G.P.A. -- but something was missing: creativity. Already a voracious science fiction reader, I decided to put my computer to some less concrete use and to try some fiction writing on the side. Not unexpectedly, my first thirteen attempts met with rejection (some form letter, but also few nice personal ones). And not yet having the supreme ego needed to survive in this profession (no longer a problem -- can you tell?), I was not yet applying Heinlein's rules (in brief: a writer writes, a writer submits, and a writer keeps writing and submitting), and I was taking a lot of time to get started.
But my fourteenth attempt, a submission to Analog Science Fiction and Factyielded an encouraging letter from the editor, Dr Stanley Schmidt, which basically said: "...nice story, a couple of problems (which he detailed), and it is too long". Not being too good at taking direction, I added several thousand words and fixed the problems (at the time, not consciously realizing that in adding those thousands of words, I also got rid of a lot of unnecessary ones). Then I waited, until I got another letter: "Much better. Just about right, but on page..." and so on. Several specific page numbers with minor corrections, which I quickly made and sent off -- cursing the inevitable minimum delay of at least six months for a response; though I kept busy with what became my second sale. But this time the response was a contract (followed fairly quickly by a check!). Now I was a professional about to be published in one of the top genre magazines (I never bothered with small press, easier magazines)!
That was in '88 (given lead time, the story was not actually printed until April, 1989, but for those six months (and yes, for a long time after the story was printed), I was walking (er, rolling) on air, but as a second sale followed quickly, it also made me stop and think about where I was going. As much as I enjoyed my psych studies, a Bachelor's wouldn't mean much, and a Master's -- preferably a Doctorate -- would be the only worthwhile target for what I wanted. But at the slow rate I could afford to go -- time and money-wise (still dealiing with unrecognized depression of my own) -- this was a goal very far down the road. On the other hand, writing was an alluring prospect.
So I dropped out of school to focus on writing on the side -- replacing my desktop and transportable Commodore computers, first with a thirteen pound NEC lap-top (an amazing machine with a reflective LCD screen, two floppies, and an incredible 640K of RAM[!], which was replaced by a 386 notebook, and then a 486 SX-33 notebook with a color screen -- by now an obsolete antique, but still nicely functional. And a couple of years ago, I replaced my dying 286 desk-top with a nice multimedia Pentium so I'm a happy camper now [it made setting up this web site much easier] and then added a Pentium notebook [and then up-graded that one to a Pentium II with DVD/CDRW, 512 RAM, 20GB drive and 15" monitor and a touch-pad since I have a hard time with a mouse and don't like track balls]). But dropping out of school was a tough choice -- especially abandoning the depression research study which after three semesters of research and preparation was ready to go as soon as the Human Studies committee finished their review.
But occasional regrets aside, it hasn't been a wasted effort. In addition to dozens of non-fiction magazine and newspaper publications, I have had sixteen stories, novelettes and novellas published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, a novelette in Science Fiction Age, another in Absolute Magnitude, and mystery and romance stories in We and Today's Black Woman, a clinical article in a medical journal (Treatment Precautions for Paraplegic and Quadriplegic Patients with Sacral Decububitus Ulcers ) in the October 2001 issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (based on my own surgery that should not have been needed, but for wound care mismanagement). In addition I have had other non-fiction newspaper and magazine stories, articles, and commentaries published; as well as numerous webzine stories (see my Bibliography).
(7-11-04) My first three books were published with iUniverse. Below, on my home page, and on my bibliography are pictures of the covers. Click on any one and you'll be taken to an order page with more info on that book and you'll also be able to "Browse before you buy".
First is:
Click on cover picture for info and to order No World Warranty Blending
high tech with romance and action, this epic science fiction tale involves using
nanotechnology and genetically altered plant and animal life (altered to
reproduce at an accellerated rate) to build a second home for humanity after
misused nanotechnology almost destroys Earth. Through nanotechnology, we convert
a dead planet the size of Mars into a living world for us to colonize - however,
by the time we get there it turns out we're not alone; and not exactly welcome!
It is based on, and continues, two Nebula award recommended novellas written for
Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine - the second of which was given
an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction, 8th
Annual Collection, (1991, St. Martin's: New York).
The second is
Click on cover on left for more info and to buy
People First! This is is a multi-genre anthology of some of my short
fiction (2/3 previously published and 1/3 original - much of it science fiction
previously published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, including a
Nebula award recommended novella written for
Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine which was given an honorable
mention in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction, 7th Annual
Collection, (1990, St. Martin's: New York). Each story has a disABLED main
character in exciting and challenging situations . This book was motivated by my
own extensive disABILITIES and desire to entertain mainstream readers and
inspire readers with disabilities to LIVE! But it's meant to be a fun read for
all, using science fiction, romance, horror, and suspense — and if it also
happens to inform, motivate, and inspire, then so much the better.
Samples
are available here
The third is
click on cover on left for more info and to buy
Laugh or Cry: Finding the Lighter Side of disABILITIES Co-authored with
Hollywood producer Sharon Hulihan who also has M.S., this large print collection
of anecdotes and essays by and for people with disABILITIES is aimed at
entertaining and educating both mainstream and disABLED readers by showing the
strength of humor as a healing and empowering force. For more info on the book
(in addition to the link you get by clicking on the cover picture, go to
book description/samples)
In the meantime, I have also been devoting a fair bit of time to disability advocacy work, both on an individual and on a community basis, through this web site, helping several local disability groups, and serving as a volunteer executive officer of my local borough government's disability commission for several years.
I am VERY frustrated by the fact that writing takes me a lot longer than it did before the M.S., but at the same time, the writing has actually been partly responsible for an improvement in fine coordination -- it's great occupational therapy! The first few years I was totally unable to button my shirts without a special tool, and I had to write (when not stabbing away clumsily with two fingers at the keyboard) with a built-up pen and use an adapted fork and knife. Now I don't need any of that (except for needing the button-hooker for the top-most button if getting dressed up). And I may still be a two-finger typist who has to look at the keyboard because I can't feel my finger positions or control the individual fingers enough for touch-typing, but while my speed is still only a third of my original, it is still more than double what it was the first five or six years. And with better voice recognition programs, I should be able to continue as a writer even if my M.S. gets worse. Note: 10-1-00: after my long hospitalization, my M.S. has gotten worse, but even if I need some help now, I am still working, webbing, and writing.
But how do I feel about the M.S.? That question was raised some years ago when I was a guest writer at the Chicago WorldCon in '92 (?). A fan in the audience at one of my panels had just read Examination (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November, 1990), and he posed an interesting question (as close as I can remember):
"Suppose aliens came to Earth and landed near your home and they had medicine which could prevent M.S. from ever developing -- and to make it more interesting they had a time machine, and they offered to send you back in time so you could give it to yourself before any symptoms developed. Would you do it?"
I had think about that a while -- at least thirty seconds -- but then I knew the answer: "No."
It wasn't that tough. Yes, I am angry and depressed sometimes because of the things I can no longer do, but the M.S. has also been directly responsible for a number of significant and necessary changes in me. I was your typical nerd -- from unfashionable hair and attire to pocket-protector and too many pounds on me (okay: still too many pounds). Unfortunately, I was not gifted in more potentially lucrative fields of study like many former nerds now running computer companies and earning mega-millions. I was also terrified of getting up to speak in front of people -- even my own class -- and I could never work up the nerve to ask a girl out.
But with the M.S., I was gradually becoming more and more noticeable, first with limping and stumbling, and then with a steady progression of mobility aids from cane, to crutches, to manual wheelchair, and then power chair. Everywhere I went I was on display. And with my writing efforts came occasional convention appearances, and my advocacy volunteering led to addressing groups of people on disability issues. Nothing like this to start loosening up.
And, with increased confidence (or was that decreased embarrassment as I had to shrug off inevitable stares?), I also made inroads on the personal front. Over the course of several years, I wound up meeting and loving several special ladies who are each still dear friends even if three of those relationships are over - but the latest settled a life goal as she was my wife for five years, and still shares my house and life - along with her ex-husband who still cared about her and whom she re-married and he works part-time caring for me. As both Tatiana and I have more M.S. related problems, it was the best solution. These relationships had a lot to do with my newfound mental balance (though I'll cheerfully admit to being a little crazy -- it's what keeps me 'sane').
Overall, the M.S. has been responsible for me conquering paralyzing fears and gaining new insights and sensitivity.
Would I surrender all that to be able to walk again?
No!. But I am mad about losing a great job - though happy to get a decent SSD check and not having to commute 66 miles a day anyore.
I finally consider myself very fortunate. There is much more I need to do and learn -- and now that I have made these changes in myself I sometimes sneak a peek Heavenward to mutter: "Okay, I've learned my lessons. Can I get up and walk now?"
But with science and medicine progressing as rapidly as they are, that too may happen. In the meantime, I'll (eventually :grin:) try to conquer one of my primary remaining failings -- procrastination -- and work a little harder on my writing and exercising. But through it all, I will be sure to appreciate all that I have to be grateful for. And I'll keep reminding myself of my home page mottos.
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