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"STEPHEN THOMAS ANDERSON, My
Husband, born 4-6-49, died 1-27-96, is with me every day and I
am still in love with him. He doesn't have a body
anymore. I really miss him. It's been 2 years but
I didn't notice those years. I still live in the years
he was alive. It doesn't work very well, though, because
people and life expect you to go on as if nothing had ever
happened. I try to figure out what he wants me to do,
and I have goofed most times. I know he wants me to make
his web page . . . He died in VietNam and after they put
the sheet over him and the nurse was taking out his IV, she
noticed that the plasma in the IV was infusing. That
doesn't happen when you're dead, but they had pronounced him
dead, so she had to yell at the doctors to listen to her and
they finally did and they put more IVs in him so he could get
better.
He was 18 years old then- just out
of VietNam, with a gunshot wound in the abdomen, and having
been gutted and sewn back together in a make-shift hospital.
They re-sected his right ascending colon. They sewed him
up with wire and he still had a big hole in his back where the
bullet came out after it clipped his spinal column.
There's a lot of other stuff but that's for later. He
came out of all that ok- using a wheelchair and being in
hospitals for a while. The doctors said he wouldn't'
walk again but he did. He fought so hard and he had such
inner strength. He had God with him even then. He
walked after a couple of years, then taught himself how to
write software and build computers and became a computer
design engineer in mid 1970's .
He worked on the space shuttle and
did a lot of amazing things, then in about 1990 he was going
through stuff that a lot of vets go through- with pain
killers- because he was still ALWAYS in pain- you could still
see the hole in his back above the stitches made of wire on
his abdomen- and one day we were driving south toward San
Diego and he said to me "If I don't get help now
I'm going to die soon" and I knew he meant it, and we put
him in a rehab place and he got better. They gave him
Torodol, which is an anti-inflammatory, and he injected it
himself, but it was too expensive so he got pills after a
while. Plus the needles were so big it was heartbreaking
to know that he had to do that. The doctors didn't seem
to care about helping him much- except to keep him out of
pain. That didn't help him in the long run, but after
that hospital stay he fought it really hard, and he won.
We decided that we wouldn't do
anything that we didn't want to do. He said that he had
always wanted to make movies, so we dropped everything and
enrolled him in a school for cinematographers. He went
through that for four years. We learned a lot about the
motion picture business during that time, and joined a lot of
the clubs, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, SMPTE,
and others, and went to their get together, screenings, talks.
He loved his life making movies with his new friends that had
his same interests. He had just finished making a
VietNam movie with fellow students, had just gotten into
Marquis Who's Who in America , and things were finally
"Happening" the way he wanted them to, and he
got cancer. The government admitted that it was from
agent orange (after a lot of testing and everything else).
He graduated from college about a month before he died.
He is my husband and I am really proud of him."
Kim Anderson.
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