My Story.

Hello everyone. My name is Robert Van Nort, but I hope you can all come to know me as Robbie. This is my introductory post to my blog “Be the 1%”. My goal for this blog is to let you know about my life experiences with my traumatic brain injury. I hope that the right people will see this blog and I can help others in one way or another. 

​To start off, let me give you a backstory to why I’m trying to be an advocate to those who are struggling with either medical issues or just issues with themselves in general. My traumatic experience goes way back to when I was just a young 15 year old kid in high school. Now before I start, I hope that this nightmare that I’ve lived through for the last 12 years or so will actually benefit at least some of those if not most of you reading this. I’ll start off by saying that I was an above average to average young man. I was a successful athlete with great grades and lots of friends in school all throughout my childhood. It looked like I was going to be somebody special one day. I had made it all the way to sophomore year of high school and things were going great. 

One morning on October 5th 2009 I woke up and went to school. It seemed like it was going to be an ordinary day, except for a nagging headache. If you ask any of my friends at that time, they’d say they remember I was completely normal that day, but I had said I had the headache. I made it all the way to geometry honors class second or third period that morning. I still remember the topic for class that day. It was tangents and I had no idea what a messed up metaphor that this subject was going to become for me and my life. Not too far into the class, my headache had escalated to a very painful and agonizing feeling for me. I had asked my teacher at the time if I could go to use the restroom. I tried to stand up, but I was unable to. This is the point where my journey through life would begin its “tangent”.

My teacher noticed it was pretty odd that I asked to go to the bathroom but I was not leaving my seat. I have to admit my memory begins to get a little hazy at this part of the story… You’ll find out why in just a few sentences. I suddenly started to black out and collapse onto my friend’s desk to my left, I was coming in and out of consciousness. My teacher and one of my good friends began to help me onto the floor and try to figure out what was happening to me. I’d say that in a way I was lucky that I was in that class and had that friend because they just both happen to be EMTs. Once the two of them had realized I was not just sleep deprived, the 911 call was made to have me transported to the hospital.

Now I’m pretty much unconscious from now until the next few days, but I know enough about what transpired in that time. I was rushed by ambulance to the local hospital to be properly assessed. A CAT scan showed I was experiencing an AVM(Arteriovenous Malformation) Rupture. As soon as the hospital professionals came to my diagnosis, they had me immediately transported to a different hospital that was more equipped to handle me and my life-threatening situation. If you thought the teacher and friend of mine being EMTs was lucky, wait until you hear this one. The hospital I was being transported to had one of the best neurosurgeons in the country ready and available to take me. Upon my arrival, or so I’m told I underwent my life-saving 6 hours of emergency brain surgery. Don’t hold it against me, but my memory at this point in time is a little fuzzy. Following my operation I was then put into the pediatric ICU to hopefully start the beginning of my unlikely recovery. And that there folks is where I’ll leave you at this point in my story. Please check back in to hear more in my next post. Stay tuned