My Life
It is funny how much my life sounds like a block buster movie if you just pull out all the major events and ignore the day to day fluff. Kidnapping, bank robbery, severe car accidents, cancer scares, it’s a plot made for action movies or at least a lifetime movie. For most people it seems like an insane amount of trials and pain but for us it was simply something that happened, something to be acknowledged and moved on from. Life does not stop simply because bad things happen, after all. That is the main thing life and it’s crazy challenges has taught me, you keep going.
My early childhood can be summed up in three words: Lack of Control. I was born premature and small. My first baby pictures are of me covered in wires in an incubator. I was sent home only to return with pneumonia soon after.
When I was three I had surgery to widen my urethra. Between this and undiagnosed Irritable Bowl Syndrome most of my early childhood was me fighting to get to a bathroom often enough or as soon as I noticed I might need to go to prevent an accident. My own body was out of my control.
After years of tests and having to deal with impactions I was finally diagnosed with IBS. By then I had a better handle on my body and what would set it off. Strangely the more fiber I get, the worse my IBS is, so in treating me for years with tons of Metamucil and such growing up, all we accomplished was making me worse.
The next big event happened when I was eight. While my sister and I slept upstairs my mother was kidnapped at knife point. She was taken my father’s cat to the bank he worked at and used as a hostage in the robbery. She was eventually dropped off at a construction site. The two men were never caught.
I found out most of the details to the kidnapping years later. At the time I was woken by my father and told to follow my sister. We climbed the chain link fence to our neighbors house who we gave a note from my father. We stayed there until the afternoon when our Aunt came to pick us up and take us to her house. At eight I did not see much change, we gained an alarm system and a dog but life over all was still normal.
Life went on until the next big milestone, the car accident. I was twelve.
