Why I Didn t Know About The Most Difficult Time Of Their...

If you were to ask a group of people to think of the most difficult time of their life – a time when they were truly at rock bottom – and then asked if, given the chance to do it all over again without any of the hardship, they would change it, most of the group would probably say yes. I wouldn’t. Almost 11-years-old, my parents and siblings helped me along as I stumbled half asleep through Michigan’s cold January snow into the hospital at 5 AM, still wearing my pink Scooby-Doo pajamas. Since I had done the hospital thing twice before this, I wasn’t too concerned. It was just another surgery, another fact of life for me. Like my mother, aunt, cousin, grandmother, and many other women in my mother’s family, I was one of the unlucky ones†¦show more content†¦I knew the doctors would take care of me. I didn’t know that I was wrong to not worry, and I didn’t know that this was the day that would shape me as a person forever . That morning when the nurses finally wheeled me into the operating room, I stayed still as they put in my IV, and obediently breathed in the gas when they put the mask over my face, just as I had those times before. It was routine. Until it wasn’t. It wasn’t routine anymore when I was in the operating room for 10 hours instead of five. It wasn’t routine when I spent 27 days in the hospital afterward, drugged to the point where I could barely speak let alone remember any of it now. What I do remember is that I spent most of that time crying and screaming in pain. No one could figure out what the problem was. They pumped me full of various narcotics, any pain medicine and sedative they could. None of it worked. After seven days of my mother arguing and fighting them, my mother finally convinced the hospital staff to cut the casts off my legs – the ones that they had put on to prevent my heel cords from tightening up again after the surgery. When they pulled them off, everyone finally understood. The cast on my left leg had been far too tight for my foot with all the swelling that occurred from having such extensive work done. Even after the doctors figured out the cast was a problem, they still didn’t know how to help me. No matter what they tried, I