Isha Smith has a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.
Smith, 25, seemed to have the world at her feet last spring. A former Upward Bound student, Smith graduated from MSU's James Madison College and followed her adventurous spirit out to Washington D.C., where she took a job selling luxury cars. After a short while, another professional opportunity arose more in line with her educational training -- working securities for American Express.
Then last April, in the process of transititioning from one job to another, Smith became increasingly tired. Chalking it up to the strain of long sales hours and the pressure to ready herself for the new position, she ignored it. But her tiredness grew into exhaustion, then dizzy spells, then fainting and eventually, a coma. Her roommates found her on the floor of their apartment one evening last spring.
"I was given 48 hours to live," said Smith, who eventually survived a month in a coma. Her condition affected every vital function in her body, including her liver, lungs, spinal column and brain. She endured four blood transfusions and a tracheotomy, and spent much of her time intubated. At one point, she was so weak, she could not even drink from a straw. She could not speak and developed tremors that rendered her hands useless. Her doctors were stymied as to what caused her condition. And she feared the consequences of not being able to communicate.
"Basically, they thought I was a vegetable. I couldn't talk or write. I thought they would try to kill me," she said. "In my mind I was trying to devise a way to escape. At first I didn't even realize what had happened to me, but I could tell from the way the doctors and nurses were talking it was something serious.
"Everyone expected me to die. They told my mother not to get her hopes up," Smith continued. "Finally a night nurse started talking to me and basically I showed her cognitively I was fine."
After two months in a D.C. hospital, Smith was stable enough to be flown home to a hospital in Lansing. She began talking -- more like whispering, she says -- another two months after she arrived back in Lansing. Tests were run to determine the source of her illness, but everything came back negative. Finally, in August, she was OK'd to go home from the hospital.
In the time since then, Smith regained her strength. Presently, she is paralyzed from the waist down, something her doctors say may be caused by the nerves from her kidneys slowly strangling her spinal cord.
Smith is slowly returning some "normalcy" to her life. This semester, she is taking classes at MSU again, hoping to eventually get into an MBA progam.
Of her whole experience, Smith says she's learned a lot about herself, her family and her faith in God.
"God is beautiful. Everything about my life is different now. I've always been independent -- I was always the kid that never called home," she joked. "But I've learned that you never know what you can do until you have to do it, and faith may be the substance of things unseen, but it's very real. It has power. It's present," she said. "I've also learned I'm not Superwoman. And that everyone is human."
Considering everything she's been through, Smith sometimes considers it a blessing just to be able to talk, she said.
"I've seen more specialists than I'd like to say. I've learned that it's very difficult for doctors to say 'I don't know,' probably because society sees doctors as god-like and that because they have a certain level of knowledge, we think they should have all the answers. I'm more interested in learning to treat the symptoms.
"I'm new to the whole idea of disability," said Smith. "To people who have disabilities, I'd like to say, 'God never puts more on our shoulders than we can carry.'" she said.
"I'm in love with life as never before."