Remote Fears & Silver Linings

In all of life’s challenge there comes a Silver Lining…Can you find it?

by Kimberly Arms Shirk

Remote Fears & Silver Linings
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Remote Fears & Silver Linings

In all of life’s challenge there comes a Silver Lining…Can you find it?

by Kimberly Arms Shirk

Published Aug 08, 2016
158 Pages
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs



 

Book Details

In all of life’s challenge, there comes a Silver Lining… Can you find it?

In the four minutes it took the first paramedics to arrive, some decided I was dead. I didn’t like that decision. I wasn’t ready to go. So I fought. September 3, 1997. Nineteen years ago a near tragedy took place in Des Moines, Iowa. While setting up for a Remote Live Television Broadcast a colleague of Kimberly Arms Shirk raised the mast of their Live truck into electrical lines grounding a path for 13,000 volts of electricity first to the colleague and then after a daring rescue attempt, coursing through the body of Kimberly. Burned over 12 % of her body and face, and against all odds, she survived to tell the story of a devastating physical journey and spiritual healing through it all.

 

Book Excerpt

Pain shoots through my head and I jerk awake. I struggle to see with one eye the display on my alarm clock...crap...wrong eye. It's been three years since my accident and I’m beginning to feel like there’s an end in sight. Ironically, in the middle of tissue expansion surgeries, another complication develops. There is cataract in my right eye. My end in sight has grown blurry…overnight. I didn't want to admit it was happening. The very common secondary injury for many burn patients was now my reality. I rolled my head so my left eye, my good eye could now see the fluorescent display that screamed at me 3:12 a.m. I read it as if it was a dare...dare to go back to sleep. Dare to think you could get a normal night’s sleep. Dare to think the pain would subside enough to remind you what good dreams were all about. When I was young, I loved a good dare. Not an out and out dare like when you’re playing that stupid truth or dare game, but a real dare. A challenge to my abilities. If someone told me I couldn’t do something, I was going to prove them wrong, In fourth grade when a boy said girls were slow, I outran every boy in my class for the mile run. In sixth grade the gym teacher made it very clear that girls were not supposed to play football. So I played at recess. And just to prove he was wrong, I intercepted the ball to run it back for a touchdown. This astonished even my teacher as well as the boys on the playground. So after my accident, when no one thought I would live, let alone walk, talk and think on my own again, I proved them all wrong. There is much to be said for determination and hard work. But this digital blue alarm clock was different. It was a dare I could not conquer, yet. I would wake up every night at 3:12 with a pain or symptom of some sort. Some nights it was blood oozing out on my pillow because my stitches had torn. At other times, shooting pain because my reconstructive balloons had too much pressure or a throbbing knee that had not yet healed. But the worst pain of all, it seemed, was not the physical pain. It was the questions. On this night, it was two symptoms rolled into one long flood of tears. Pain, the unceasing, ever present, all-encompassing pain of yet another treatment to salvage what hair I might still have. And the more present long-term pain that lives secretly in my head.

 

About the Author

Kimberly Arms Shirk

Kimberly Arms Shirk is an author, motivational speaker and a Senior Marketing Strategist for Talent Plus. Her story has been featured in News Photograper, Television Broadcast, Communicator, the Key, national newspapers, television segments, a training documentary for Union Pacific Railroad and she has been a featured speaker at the National Press Photography Association Conference and LCMS Women’s Contentment Conference among others. Shirk currently resides in Lincoln, Nebraska with her husband Chad and her three children, Caleb, Logan and Addison and shares her story every chance she gets.