As a child, I grew up generally healthy. Except for my terrible vision, which started at the age of seven, I have been forever four-eyed. But hey, when you're young, glasses are cool right? Other than my vision, I never really had anything else wrong with me. Now, as a 20-year-old adult, I have countless health problems.
When I was around six, I had my first asthma attack. It was really scary, and I didn't know what was going on. Lucky for me, my pediatrician specialized in treating asthma. I was put on a regimen of an inhalator, Advair, and a nebulizer. I had aspired to be a cheerleader in my elementary school, so I was really disappointed that I might not have been able to. My asthma had to be closely monitored before and after every time I cheered, and during the summer I had to watch my breathing while in the heat. Luckily, now that I am older, my asthma has calmed down greatly.
When I was in sixth grade, I was constantly tired, more so than your average preteen girl. I would fall asleep in class, come home from school only to take a three hour nap, eat, do my homework, shower, and then go to bed. There never was a time where I did not want to sleep. I also began gaining weight. It wasn't just a 10-pound average growing girl gain, but it was rapid, and dieting did not help. My parents took me to the doctor to get a blood test ran, and they discovered that I had hypothyroidism. I was told to go to an endocrinologist to better understand, and treat, my diagnosis. I was put on a medicine that I can't remember the name of, but all I know is that it had traces of cocaine in it, and caused me serious side effects. I was immediately taken off, and given a thyroid scan. Every year for the past five years I have received thyroid scans as well as a blood test every month to monitor my condition. Luckily, it is in remission and not something that I have to worry about now.
The real problems started when I was in the seventh grade, where my doctors had noticed that I had endometriosis. Endometriosis is a disease where your uterine lining does not shed properly, so I basically had a super-period. I lived with constant pain, and as a girl, it is known that you can't really speak of your cramps. You just kind of have to grin and bear it for a week and act like everything is fine. At the age of 14, I was put on birth control. Birth control is really the only thing that is known to keep endometriosis at a livable level. My endometriosis was followed by polycystic ovaries when I was in my freshman year of high school, and that was when the real fun started. Every "time of the month" was known for having visits to the emergency room because I would easily become lightheaded. I missed so much high school because of it, my absentee record skyrocketed to a missed 42 days and countless days where I had to leave early. I would drink sugar packets, 10 at a time, just to try to give myself more energy. My doctors had recommended Gatorade to give myself electrolytes, so I soon became known as the Gatorade girl as I always had a bottle of it with me. After living on ibuprofen 600 MG for around a year, I really couldn't take the pain anymore. What went from kind of bad to live with turned absolutely horrible. I started to have severe pain on the right side of my abdomen, which went unexplained for months. My appendix, the go-to organ when there are stomach problems on the right side, came back clear. I went through an MRI, a CT scan, multiple emergency room visits, two hospital stays, endless sonograms and more tubes of blood than I could possibly have even counted. Finally, my gynecologist decided that enough was enough, and took me in for a diagnostic laparoscopy. While under the knife, he cleared my endometriosis and found a cyst on my appendix. The cyst was removed, but overall my bill of health was still clean. Luckily for me, the pain stopped and my endometriosis got better.
For two years I lived a relatively normal life, and only had an occasional flare up. I finally thought to myself "Hey, this is the best you've felt in years!" Well, that was until my freshman year of college where I got diagnosed with thrombocytopenia. Thrombocytopenia is a condition where your blood does not clot normally, and it was discovered in a blood test. I was put on a strict diet consisting of mainly gluten free foods, wheat instead of white bread, and cutting out basically anything that tasted good, To me, I kind of thought that this was a blessing in disguise as it would force me to eat healthily. What was truly the annoying part, was that I had to take almost 10 pills/vitamins a day. I carried around one of those grandma-style pill boxes in my pocketbook whenever I went out to eat, just to make sure that I did not forget anything.
Then came the diagnosis of anxiety. My doctors had known from a young age that I had always been anxious, but more so than an average teenage girl. While away at school, it got so bad that I would have panic attacks over the littlest things. I would get a very tight feeling in my chest, and my breathing would become shallow. I automatically thought it was asthma and ran to get my quick inhaler or take a nebulizer treatment. However, it was strange to me that neither of these things worked. I went to my doctor while I was home on a visit for Thanksgiving, and he wrote out a prescription for Zoloft, an anxiety medication. He was convinced that it would work and that what I was feeling was not asthma. To my surprise, the magical anxiety pill did work.
What came after my anxiety was something I had never expected to happen (again). While I was eating lunch one day, I got a sharp pain on the upper left side of my abdomen. It was so bad that it knocked the wind out of me, and I couldn't even see. I went back to my dorm and called my parents. They did not seem worried, and told me maybe the food just went down the wrong tube (What a normal parental reaction, am I right?). I brushed it off, but I was still kind of nervous. I had been through this once before, so something similar really scared me. Within the coming weeks, my pain happened more and more frequently. I wound up going to the emergency room twice while at school, yet both times I was sent home. I knew something was wrong, after all, it was my body. My parents decided to take me home for a week, just to get tests ran and visit doctors for a probable cause of my undefined pain. I visited six doctors, ranging from my pediatrician, my parents' doctors, two GI doctors, and a general surgeon. I was admitted to the hospital twice, and so many more tests were done than the first time around. I had two colonoscopies, two endoscopies, multiple sonograms, 46 tubes of blood taken, two MRIs, three CT scans, and a GI scan. The results were kind of shocking: I had a 7CM hernia, colitis, diverticulitis, reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, gastritis, and yet still nothing to explain my phantom pain. Over the course of two months, I was also put on a lot of pain medications. At one given time or another, I was on morphine, Toradol, Oxycontin, Percoset, Tylenol with codeine, and Dilaudid. Luckily for me, these medications caused me to basically become a zombie, so I don't remember much of what exactly was happening to me. Still, even with all of this, my pain was excruciating. All that I knew was that I could not live this way anymore. My general surgeon agreed that enough was enough, and took me in for another diagnostic laparoscopy. He found nothing to explain the sharp pain while in surgery, but did do a full dissection of my bowel and removed my appendix. Unfortunately, after surgery, I did go through withdrawals from pain medication. My body became addicted to whatever I was taking prior to getting the operation. The surgery was a success, and since then, almost a year and a half later, and I have not had the same pain since.
Now, as a junior in college, I recently had yet another surgery. I fell down some steps my freshman year of college, and never got the injury fixed. I lived a normal life on a broken foot for almost five years, until I took off a pair of shoes wrong. At this point, if that was the least of what I went through, I'd take it. I kind of became an exercise junkie during this year of college, however, that shortly changed once my peroneal tendon began dislocating -- almost 15 times a day. I had trouble walking, my foot turned purple all the time, and I was in dire pain. I went to my orthopedic surgeon, and he ran an MRI. He discovered that I would definitely need to have surgery to fix this problem. What I thought would just be putting peroneal tendons back into place, turned into cutting a muscle. I wound up having a muscle that only 10 percent of the population has, which caused this injury to be so bad in the first place. Now, three weeks out of surgery, and I am yet again in the healing process. Only three more weeks to go in a cast, two months of physical therapy and six months of recovery to go!
Even though all of these things have definitely been hard to go through, I made it through them. I survived things that I didn't think I would be able to. I have felt excruciating pain and came out of it OK in the end. I have battled addiction with pills, and I have won. Overall, I think I'm pretty lucky. Even though some of my health problems will follow me through life, I now know how to deal with them. Hopefully, this healing period will be my last, and there won't be any more new findings or phantom pains ever again. Through all of the feelings of "what if", the medications, the hospital stays, and the tests, I have made it through.
I'm a survivor, and I'm extremely proud of myself for overcoming these battles.
