The Eclipse That Was More Than Just An Eclipse

WARNING: This story will mention suicide, the troubled teen industry, and self-harm. If this story does not fit well for you please click out of this link or read whatever you feel comfortable reading from this article as it is not all about suicide.

If you are struggling with suicide or depression please contact your therapist or guardian, or call a suicide prevention lifeline, a hospital or a counselor and get the right help you need. In Indiana that suicide lifeline number is 9–8–8, but for the rest of the country, please contact (800) 273–8255 if you are feeling in trouble.

Five months and one day removed from attempting to take my own life, I was now labeled by my peers at my boy’s school as a “troubled youth.” Little did I know that being a troubled youth and witnessing an eclipse would make me find a piece in myself to realign the stars right in my life.

Being troubled was not easy after this attempt. My reputation was almost ruined as not even my friends in school knew what had happened to me.

With a back filled with rods and screws that I still have today, and even after having a five-hour surgery to repair my burst fracture, I transitioned from three different hospitals in the southern Indiana area up to that point since December 2016.

I ran away five times overdosed on pills three times, and completely ran amuck causing my mom’s head to spin as she had to take care of my grandmother who had progressed through dementia at an assisted living, my mom had to keep her head on a swivel this torture both my grandmother and I were causing.

I was finally was placed in one of the last placements in my childhood called Campagna Academy, a home away from home for me as I was able to not just reflect on what I had done, but to also repair the pieces of my life.

On the week of August 21, 2017, I had given a speech to the kids on my unit, One East, before I was about to be discharged from the facility either during that month or in September once the paperwork was filed with my family and the new high school I was about to attend in my hometown of Bloomington.

That is Bloomington South High School where I would graduate high school during a pandemic in 2020.

Some kids cried and teared up at my speech which I didn’t expect, but was greatly appreciated. I knew I was about to go home and my life would be better again once I arrive back to my old environment.

I will admit, I didn’t feel all the way ready to come home as I went through one last med change and the most intensive treatment any kid ever had at my therapy office.

For those who are not familiar with the Campagna Academy phase program, phase four, is your final phase to prove that you could be reliable enough to come back home or serve less time in a juvenile detention center before going home. Sometimes it can be court ordered that you showed changes in your life, and sometimes we will have to wait and see how you do.

Or else, you are going to jail or going to prison.

However, it all starts on phase one, the new kid stage as you transition through the program, phase two only means you get community passes with your family, and three/four means you get more special privileges like a radio or more time out with your family in your hometown.

We also had a family night at the center two weekends from now which we were very excited for on the unit, and as my memories of this life fades away from my brain, I would say that we were having more fun as a unit then and things were slowly getting better for the kids on our unit after two months of violence.

Back at home, my grandmother, who I mentioned had dementia and was placed in an assisted living, was spending her last few days at this point at a Loogootee nursing home in Indiana after she took stumble out of her shower and was rushed to the hospital immediately by staff at the assisted living.

For about two weeks, she spent her time at the Loogootee nursing home waking up at 4 am and being brutally mistreated by the overworked staff members, but we stayed by her side until her insurance couldn’t pay to keep her at the nursing home anymore.

My mom even said that she would eat an entire box of candy bars and chips because she was so stressed, and worst of all, her son and daughter were having problems, and she had not worked through her issues as a child making her life a living hell.

On the morning of August 21, 2017, the day of the first great American solar eclipse, I had to go visit my neurosurgeon at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana that afternoon at 1 pm central time. An appointment I had never known about leading up to this day.

I remember a staff member, one of my favorites ever on that unit, named Mr. Wendell, a short Black guy who loved listening to gospel music as a former singer himself in a church choir, and he was going to take me along with another kid named Derrick to Indianapolis to be checked on at the hospital by our neurosurgeon.

We both broke our backs and had to have major surgery after jumping off bridges and balconies. I will not go into Derrick’s story due to patient confidentiality and the fact he was about 16 years old when the incident happened to him, but I will summarize it the best I can from when I was there.

He was escaping from the police to get away from his abusive household and he jumped off two overpass bridges in his hometown and jumped straight into a pool of water where he broke his back.

I broke part of my back on an apartment balcony near our apartment complex and won’t go into much detail but today I am walking and working a normal life as a functioning adult because of the doctor I was visiting at St. Vincent’s Hospital who performed by surgery at IU Methodist Hospital in downtown Indianapolis.

We made the voyage around 12:30 pm central to go two hours south to Indianapolis to visit our doctors at St. Vincent’s.

The sky turned very dark green as the moon was making its way around the sun. There was a very heavy mix of cloud cover and possible rain in our area. It was very smoky and oddly strange to see the sky mix in different colors. It looked like we were about to get struck by a tornado.

In Indiana we couldn’t see the full eclipse because we were getting a half-eclipse in our area. The full eclipse in 2017 stretched from Oregon south through Tennessee and Georgia.

Signs throughout the Indianapolis highways read, “Please park your car during the solar eclipse to avoid being blinded.”

Walking into the neurology center of the outpatient center, I remembered sitting in the waiting room which featured flowers hanging on their vases, and some people even read magazines. on their vases, and some people even read magazines. On TV, both CNN and The Weather Channel were covering the eclipse with wall-to-wall coverage airing across the country.

Little did I know that watching this on TV would not be as good as watching it in real life which is what I try to tell my mom today, but she is still hesitant about watching this year’s event.

Five minutes later, a nurse assessed me after walking into my room, and later doing X-Rays. Mr. Wendell and I waited in the office for the neurosurgeon, Dr. Eric A. Potts, to come into the room and scan my X-rays.

Our appointment with the neurosurgeon was rushed and went well for the most part with no questions to ask him. It was in short, a pretty routine appointment with hardly any questions because I didn’t know what to talk about.

Leaving the office, the sky was illuminated with one of the weirdest light combinations I have ever seen in the sky. It was an ever worse dark green and the sky faded to near darkness.

Doctors, nurses, and paramedics stopped what they were doing at the corner of the entrance to the building to watch the half-eclipse that left in less than 10 minutes.

I remember hearing the nurses go, “Oh! Look at that! Oooh! Ahh!” and then some as the eclipse was making its voyage around 2:45 pm that afternoon.

I even got a chance to look at the sun for a split second until Mr. Wendell told me to wear glasses that one of the doctors gave to everyone who was viewing the first American solar eclipse in over 90 years.

When we left Indianapolis during our four hour trip to go back to Schererville, Indiana, a drizzle of rain poured from Indianapolis to Lebanon as, I will say, it was an honor and a privilege to get the opportunity to look at the eclipse in full circle with a group of people, because what I learned next would later make me appreciate the eclipse a lot more.

At Campagna, the principal of our school (she worked the Lake County School District was technically not our principal) saw kids and their staff walking back to their unit when all of a sudden, several kids were wanting to look at the eclipse.

The staff said no, which caused many kids to rebel and fight the staff tooth and nail to look up at the sun with no protective equipment.

The kids screamed and threw things, others almost went into the unit’s nurses’ station to attack staff, and the units and cottages where kids were housed for all sorts of reasons were ordered to be on lockdown the whole day.

Once I came back the unit was still pissed off that they couldn’t watch the eclipse and myself along with Mr. Wendell and Derrick did.

It was crazy the stories I learned, and the Lake County principal woman did not apologize but said the safety of the kids were most at risk that day.

Years later I learned that with no protective equipment there would be no way the kids would look up at the eclipse as they wanted to thrill seek the moment and not take it in. That was what happened one other time on the unit and two girls needed CPR because kids wanted to thrill seek every moment outside. In short, the kids were not safe to be outside or anything could have happened to them and no one would have known about it.

Years later, I would say the eclipse gave me an open mind about the world but it was more or a privilege to see the event and watch it first hand. A lesson I took out of that was to appreciate life to the fullest and through my last article where I posted about death, appreciate the time you have before you die and live life to the fullest.

Which sounds cliche but works.

After 2017, I left Campagna on October 20, 2017, and went back home to my family where we faced many highs and lows. I will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism in December and I will find my life more as I work at a job and in life.

My grandmother passed away in 2020 and to this day we are still going through issues with her house but we are trying our best as we hope to have a better life financially in the future.

By the time the year was over, my grandmother stayed at the assisted living on the week of August 25, 2017, until her passing on February 11, 2020. We even had her funeral at the center so the staff could also say their last goodbyes to her because she was a calm patient at the center after years of being abusive to my mother.

This eclipse in 2024 will be special but I will always view the 2017 eclipse for this reason as the pillar to repair and restore my life and will have a special place in my heart for the partial eclipse it changed for my life.

Again be appreicative, know that you could miss opportunities but take everyone you can do and live life to the fullest