LIFE ALTERING OCCUPATIONAL CHOICES
...I have had to make in my lifetime was to play sports in general. Being in sports obviously means that you are going to be active. By being active, that can possibly alter you physique and other bodily formations. The decision also goes back to the first one I mentioned, as well. I have met new people while participating in sports, I have been to places I probably would have never been had it not been for the team traveling there for a game, and I have learned new things, as well. I have learned more than just the sporting aspect of things. You learn the “team” concept, and your team becomes like a family to you. It’s the first place, besides at home, where you really learn to care for other people. This can shape such things as your personality and other behaviors. To kind of stick with the same subject of sports, I would again like to mention the risks. By me making the decision to play sports, I put myself at risk for injury. So was the case in 2002 and 2003 for me. As you have heard numerous times, my knee (ACL) has drastically affected my life. Things were changed for a period of time and are still honestly trying to get back to normal. At this time, I think I really found out who my true friends were. It may be sad to say, but some people who you thought were your friends tend to shy away when you can’t do anything with them or you don’t feel like it, or you flat out just can’t do it. Example: I used to go up to the gym on the weekend and me and a couple of friends would get a pick-up game going. After my injury, of course, I could not play for a few months so they stopped calling me. I rarely hung out with them after that. Now I realize that I would have been unable to play the game with them, but it still would have been nice to get out of the house and be able to hang with the guys. But on the flip side of this, the friends I didn’t know I had began to appear. I had people showing up at my house checking up on me whom I had never really considered friends. I am glad that this occurred, however. Today, my best friend is one of those people. It’s just weird how one event in your life can spiral into a number of things. Another decision that I have made also correlates with my injury. I decided (with a little help from the doctors) that I would not play sports my senior year. Now I had played three sports my entire high school year. What a change this would for me! I then had more time for my studies and more time for volunteering and doing other things that interested me. My grades went up (not that they were terribly bad). I went from a 3.5 average to a 3.8 average. At this time, I also got involved in the health care field. I started taking my classes for nurse’s aid training, when normally I would not have been able to because I would have been at basketball or football practice at the time. So everything basically just fell in line...