This is the story of Antonio, my fiancé. A story that always makes me cry and makes me appreciate him every day. I am honored to write and share this story.

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Screeching tires, lights flashing, and people yelling. Those were the few seconds before Antonio’s life changed forever. Growing up, he never thought he would have a near-death experience. Little did he know, that at the age of nine he would be a part of a car accident that would nearly take his life. At such a young age he didn’t know why God had put him through this, but as he grew up, he truly realized that it was all part of God’s plan for his life.

It was a Friday night in June, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Antonio and his family were unloading groceries in his grandmother’s driveway when out of nowhere, they heard the engine of a car that was getting closer and closer. The car was racing, and unfortunately for the family, lost control and rammed straight into Antonio’s family’s car. The impact made the family car whip around to the left and hit Antonio resulting in him flying into a steel fence that his grandma’s house had. He was launched 30 feet.

“I really only remember when my dad came running at me,” The blow that Antonio suffered from the fence, split the left side of his head.

“He took off his shirt. I remember it was an orange shirt and it was stained with bleach. I guess bleach fell all over him,” Antonio’s father applied some pressure to the side of his head to reduce the bleeding.

Antonio felt that the ambulances took an eternity to arrive. When the paramedics picked him up, his sister who was eleven, and had not suffered major injuries, got into the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Antonio’s parents were in the other ambulance since his mother lost consciousness after hitting her head on the asphalt.

“My sister was singing the F.U.N song from SpongeBob to keep me awake, F is for friends who do stuff together, U is for you and me, N is for anywhere and anytime at all, right here in the deep blue sea.”

The paramedics were worried that if he fell asleep, he could very possibly go unconscious and maybe into a coma, so his sister sang this along with him to keep him awake, as she told him to keep his eyes open.

The fact that public hospitals had no money, Antonio explained that his uncle was holding a light while they were in the operation room and the doctors were trying to close the big cut on his head. What is really impressive is that after a few days, when Antonio finally got up, there was a bloodstain on his pillow. That blood was coming from the back of his head because he had another cut that the doctors did not see.

Nevertheless, miraculously that cut closed itself, leaving only another scar on the back of the young boy’s head.

He spent two weeks in the hospital and he had a long healing process.

“As a 9-year-old boy, with two huge scars on my head, you can only imagine how self-conscious I wanted to cover them at all cost,” he shared, “I hated them.”

It wasn’t until he turned 16 that realize he lived almost half of my life trying to cover up who he truly was. When he finally cut his hair and people were able to see his scars, Antonio got comments about his bald spots. People called him “scar head.”

However, he never let those comments to get him because he knew deep down that his marks were a story of survival.

Antonio recognized that he will never forget that day. “The fact that my life was almost taken from me in the blink of an eye is a scary thought” and continued, “We don’t realize how fast a life can really go away, like in heartbeat.”

He shared how this experience taught him a life lesson forever, “I tell my family and my fiancé that I love them every day because you don’t really know what can happen tomorrow.”

Antonio is today a 22-year-old and studies video production. He wants to dedicate his life to making documentary films about immigrants facing hardships in the U.S. He devotes much of his time to community services and to God, which he says is the least he could do since “There is no time to lose.”