How does anyone ever get into jet ski rentals? What goes through someone’s head one day and makes them think, “hey I should start renting jet skis.” For me it was a little bit of a journey, and it was this journey that led me to a kind of weird combination of skills that made renting jet skis seem like a solid idea.
I got sick at a young age. Most people when they say that people instantly assume cancer, or something else awful. But sometimes I’m even kind of jealous of cancer patients, they have a lot of options, usually quicker diagnosed, and they have the potential to be cured. I know that’s terrible to say, cancer is an awful disease, but when your diagnoses is something that will never go away, with only a few treatment options, you end up in weird minority of people that the vast population really doesn’t understand very well.
I wasn’t always sick of course, I was a swimmer in high school, played basketball every day, I loved snowboarding and hanging out with friends…you know, the normal teenager stuff. I would go hiking, and I even got ridiculously good at guitar hero, it was kind of sad. Then unfortunately a couple weeks after graduating, my autoimmune symptoms started.
It wasn’t terrible at first, it definitely scared the crap out of me because I had no idea what was happening with my body, but it was manageable. At first it was just like symptoms of mono with the addition of severe sinus inflammation. It sucked and I wanted to not deal with it, but I could still function. It stayed like this for about a year until things got worse. Basically as soon as my intestinal tract got involved, it was game over.
After my intestines got involved I became bed ridden. And I don’t mean like “hey, I’m just going to chill in bed today, I’m just feeling a little off”, I mean I could barely make it to the kitchen, I was extremely weak, and my whole body was inflamed. On top of that my brain fog was so bad, I could barely form sentences at times. Everything I was dissipated. I lost the ability to drive, play instruments, all of it. I felt like I was in prison for a crime that I never committed.
This went on for 3 whole years as I went from doctor to doctor, bed ridden. We also didn’t just go from small doctor to small doctor, we went to institutions like Duke and The Cleveland Clinic. At first we assumed it was a weird infection just because of the rapid onset of my symptoms, but nothing ever showed up.
I was finally able to find some relief in a Lyme Disease Diagnoses. I know what you guys are thinking, this is going to be a story about how to get tested for Lyme etc. Well it’s not. I never tested positive for Lyme, in fact none of the Lyme specific drugs worked at all. In fact the ones that did work were the Babesia drugs, the anti-malarials. And take a guess what else anti-malarials work great for….auto-immune conditions. Any time they would take me off anti-malarials I would go back to my previous semi-bed ridden state, the only thing that kept me from getting as bad as I was, was avoiding certain foods (and the list of what I could eat got smaller and smaller over time, as to keep a certain level of functionality).
So when does the jet ski rentals come into play? Hold on…I’m getting to it. I eventually got functional enough through food avoidance, certain supplements and some medications to start a part time job. I had became obsessed with cars at some point through all this (because losing the ability to drive made me realize, driving is really pretty cool). So I started a job at a local automotive performance shop. I started out just doing some basic website and ebay stuff, posting items online, taking pictures of items, setting up our barcode system etc. Nothing crazy. There was even a time during this when I had a port in my chest, I would go to work with an IV pole, and do my IV drip while I worked. Fun times…..
Anyways, as my functionality improved (more or less through trial and error of food changes, and supplements at this point), my boss started showing me how to work on cars as we did a lot of custom builds etc. And over time I was able to work on cars like Nissan GTRs’, Lotus’s, BMW’s etc. I’ve built quite a few 1000hp cars, and even one for myself. Losing everything just gave me a want to learn how things work, and b able to do things for myself.
When I eventually felt comfortable enough I decided to start college finally. I was 25 at this point, and all of my friends that went to college were already finished, and the ones that were still in school were close to becoming doctors. It was funny at times as some of my teachers were close to my age, but it led to some good friendships. There were some up and downs during school, I definitely wasn’t finishing in 4 years, but I was determined to get that degree.
I moved to Jacksonville FL with just my junior and senior year left. The bad thing is I had about the worst relapse of my illness yet right after moving here. Prior I had just gotten back to being able to do some light workouts, for the first time again in a few year, and this only got to last for maybe 2 months. The relapse left my intestines in the worst shape they had ever been in. I got down to 120 pounds while being 6’ 1”, and I got really weak again. I realized pretty fast I would have to limit my diet further again, and even ditch some of my helpful supplements as now I was reacting to things that I found very helpful just a short time before.
I switched to online school via Capella to keep making some progress while I used trial and error to sort out my health again. I did eventually get to where I was able to do some physical activity again, like work on cars with the help of power tools, but never to the point of exercise and workouts again. I did this for about a year to keep myself afloat, using the money I made working on cars from my residence to pay the bills and doing my school work online.
It was close to the end of my school career that I decided I wanted to do something a little easier on my body. I loved cars, and I had recently fallen in love with jet skis now that I had moved to Jacksonville. This had me coming to the realization that “hey I can rent the jet skis, and just fix them if anything happens”. I knew how to work on them and do the repairs, but that way I was only fixing my own things if needed, and not putting so much wear and tear on my already inflamed and weak body. I knew that even with finishing school and potentially getting a day job that I would still need something to supplement that money at some point to actually pursue better treatment and potentially get more functional over time, and I figured what better way than to start something where I could do something I love to do.
I love being on the water, and I just love water-sports in general. A day out on jet skis with customers never felt like work, it was a privilege. But I don’t think I would have ever made it to this point unless I fell in love with cars because of losing the ability to drive, because getting the job at the performance automotive shop gave me the skills and confidence that I could run and operate a business like this.
I don’t want anyone to feel bad about me because of this post, if anything I just want to show people that anything is possible still, even with a disability. As of now I’m just a guy that would like to enjoy the things he missed out on over the years, while hopefully showing people that it’s still okay to have a good time no matter what age you are. We don’t have to get in the rut of only working and sleeping just because we are adults now, retaining our youth and having a little fun is still just fine.
Anyways guys, that’s a very very condensed version of my story. But I look forward to meeting each and every one of you, whether its renting a jet ski, jet kart, or swinging by just to say hey, let’s just all have a good time.
Thank You
Tyler
