Cleve

Click Here For Myspace Layouts !Hey! How are you doing? My name is Brian but my friends call me Cleve. I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It's not the first place I would have chosen if I had a choice, but I didn't. From the time I started walking, it seems like I was always playing one sport or another. It was always either football season, baseball season or basketball season. One thing that I learned early in life was that no matter how hard it was to keep playing, you Never Quit. I remember my coaches telling me that, when you get to that point when you are completely exhausted and you feel like you can't go on, that is the point when you're going to find out what you're really made of. As soon as I turned 18 I joined the Fire Department that my dad was on. By the time I was 21, I had graduated high school and was playing sports in college. Everything was going great until one morning I woke up and I wasn't in my bed. I woke up in a hospital and I couldn't move anything in my entire body, and when I tried talking, no words came out of my mouth. I next realized that I wasn't even breathing, there was a ventilator machine that was breathing for me. Shortly after that I remember my doctor telling me that I had been involved in a car accident and that I had broken my neck. Next, this guy starts telling me that I was paralyzed from the head down and that I was going to need the assistance of a breathing machine the rest of my life. At this point I was faced with the biggest decision of my entire life. I had to choose if I wanted to live or die. Well, I didn't have to think about it very long. I chose to live, and fight and overcome what some doctor was trying to tell me was impossible. I mean, who was he to tell me what I could and couldn't do. So I turned it into a challenge, and I knew that in order to win, I was going to have to become mentally stronger than I had ever imagined. So I started fighting and every day there was a new challenge, but with each challenge I overcame I got stronger. My whole life, when someone told me that I couldn't do something, it just made me want to do it just to prove them wrong. God gave me a life, and I knew that if I respected my life and fought to preserve it, he would bless me. After about three months in the hospital I was off the breathing machine forever. I returned home after almost a year in the hospital. It took me about another year to adjust but I was already starting to put together a workout plan. I started getting in the water with a physical therapist. I also went to a Rehabilitation Center in Miami to do biofeedback therapy to try and increase the signals down my spinal cord to my muscles. I also started using an electrical stimulus unit to try and keep my muscles from atrophying. For the first couple of years I didn't have much results but I never quit fighting. I knew that one day I would overcome what I was told wasn't possible. I did everything that I could to keep myself healthy. I started taking vitamins every day, eating a lot of protein, vegetables and drinking tons of water. As time went on I kept attending biofeedback therapy in Miami along with doing many very unique workouts. Each year my muscles were receiving more signal and getting stronger. I began to gain control of muscles in my upper body. When I got to this point, I really ramped up the pace and I started working out six to eight hours a day every day. Next, I started moving muscles in my back and stomach. A few years ago I started standing on a regular basis and now I have a wheelchair that will go into a standing position. I am now doing situps in the water and on a physical therapy table. I am so close now that I can taste victory. If you set your mind to it, there isn't anything that you can't do. I thank God every day because he has provided me with every resource that I have needed to make a complete recovery. I wouldn't change places with anyone else in the world. I remember a long time ago one of my coaches told me that: "The true measure of a champion isn't about winning, rather the true measure of a champion is measured by how he finishes the game." It's time for me to finish the GAME!
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