On April 24th 2004, the day I turned five — a day which most kids would spend celebrating with ice cream and presents — I was in the hospital due to a freak accident.
I was born and raised in Haiku, Maui Hawaii. When I was four years old, and after living on the secluded island for over 20 years, my parents made the decision to leave the beaches of Maui and move to the mountains of Park City, Utah. I would soon trade warm soft sand and ocean for the cold white fluffy stuff I had only seen in my books about Santa Claus. This was not only a big change for our entire family, but it would end up changing my future forever.
Fresh off the jet from Hawaii just days before, we were in Monument Colorado visiting my grandparents. It was my fifth birthday, the sun was shining and the snow glistening, it was a perfect day for sledding and Toboggan Hill was on the top of my list. Bundled up in more layers than the Pillsbury doughboy, my older sister Sydney and I walked outside anxious to begin our first experience in the snow. We ate snowballs and made snowmen. It was just like the stories about the North Pole, without the reindeer. Something that was particularly intriguing were the icicles that hung in rows from my Grandma’s deck railings like strings of Christmas lights. Walking underneath the 2nd story deck we saw one of these perfectly formed pillars of ice. In curiosity, I gazed up at the twinkling sight but was dismayed by the sun blocking my view. I positioned myself right underneath it to get a better view. My sister curiously poked the icicle, loosening it from its upside down perch and releasing it straight into the pupil of my eye.
The moments and days that followed were a blur. I was too young to know it at the time, but I am told that the icicle pierced my cornea like an arrow to a bullseye, that for 24 hours my family did not know if I would have sight in my right eye, and that I was lucky to have had a young Colorado eye surgeon repair my eye to such perfection, he won the praise of a renown pediatric ophthalmologist from Utah’s Primary Children’s Hospital. But I remember this: I had to wear an eye patch for months after my surgery, in fact I had to wear it when I started Kindergarten that fall. I don’t know if it was my unusually long hair (not so unusual as a kid living in Maui but not quite as common in Park City), together with the patch that motivated my classmates to give me a nickname, but that was when I was dubbed Pirate Boy. It’s not easy being different, having something about you that attracts attention by your peers, especially when you’re the new kid. But being a pirate was kinda cool. So I owned it, and I made a lot of new friends.
