Personal Narrative: My Hero's Journey

As a child growing up in an agrarian community, every day I would ride my bicycle around the country roads exploring. I would ride for hours, without a care in the world simply pedaling away. On my bicycle, I felt invincible. Like a rocket ship blasting through space, my only cares were to explore and discovery. I was mesmerized by beauty of the sky and landscape passing before my eyes. In each passing moment I was overcome with a sense of peace.

We all wake one day and find that the bicycle no longer exists. The country landscape had be transformed, and the bicycle that once accompanied me on my youthful explorations had become intangible. We search again for the bicycle, longing to recapture this peace. We awake each day hoping to regain it, as the product of

A young man smiled at me one day, his name was Donnie. There he sat in a wheelchair in the hallway with his father by his side waiting on a test. Donnie has Down Syndrome and was fearful of his upcoming lung scan. I crouched down beside his wheelchair and held his hand in mine. His hands told a story of a young man heart in a middle aged man’s body. His eyes had a youthful exuberance. I had been working as a nuclear medicine technologist at Howard Community for 3 years. He and I quickly became friends, as I told him about my newborn daughter who also has Down Syndrome. A big grin came across his boyish face. My daughter loved it when I would play games with her. So I was momentarily inspired, and suggested to Donnie, we were going to make this test like a game. He would be a fighter pilot and I would help him get through this flying experience together. I became a friend of Donnie’s every time he would visit the hospital when he wasn’t feeling the greatest. Donnie would catch me up on all the nice people he met while he stayed at the hospital. He had grown especially fond of me because “I would make the tests fun.” Sometimes his father wasn’t always around,