I'm a Grenade: Part 1

I became dangerous when I was 13 years old.

I was ready for a fresh start in high school. I was ready for dating. I was ready for fun. I was ready to start this new journey.

But I wasn't ready for what really happened.

...

I was a "normal" girl growing up. I went to school, had some friends, lost some friends, laughed, cried, and did so much more. I was happy and healthy. I was ready to see what being a teenager was going to be like, secretly hoping that it would resemble Bella Swan's and have a moody vampire lure me away to his secret world.

Unfortunately that wasn't going to happen.

In October 2007, only a month into being a high schooler, I acquired some random yet intense pain in both of my legs, it was so intense that I was in bed the whole night. It was strange but it passed.

Until it didn't, when exactly a week later the same pain happened again, but this time more intense; this became almost a weekly occurrence.

During one of these episodes, I couldn't sleep because of the pain. Since I couldn't walk, I crawled down thee flights of stairs, muffling my cries in my pajama shirt until I reached my basement. My parents always told my sister and I that if we ever had trouble sleeping, we could watch TV downstairs until we became tired enough to sleep. I tried sleeping on my two couches, arm chair, and floor but every surface caused too much pain to sleep. My parents found me silently sobbing on the floor at 6 am the following morning.

Because this pain was only getting worse, my family decided to take me to the Emergency Room, where I actually had to be taken in in a wheelchair (this is a separate episode). After many hours, the nurse's had a diagnosis...

Growing pains.

I was prescribed a hardcore pain medication and I was sent home at 6 am. The next day I went back to school and I continued to live my life. Now would be my chance to live a normal life.

But it turns out my normalcy only lasted as long as the pain medication did; the very day that I ran out of my prescription, the pain was back and it was worse than ever. In a sense I knew something was wrong. At the time I was a 5'8" 13 year old girl, growing pains were not uncommon to me. In reality, I knew that this was a real and dangerous pain, but I didn't trust my instincts.

What exactly did this pain feel like? It felt like my legs were on fire with shattered glass poking out of them, to put it mildly. It was a pain that I would never wish on anyone. It was a pain where a tiny muscle spasm was another shard of glass digging into me.

At first, it was just this pain and I really thought that I could live this. And I was. Now it was December 2007 and I was ready for 2008 to be my year.

Until I noticed now an intense pain in my ear.

What was different though was this was a pain I knew, it was a pain that I had dealt with an and off since approximately the age of six, I had an ear infection.

I'm not a doctor or a top notch researcher so I will tell you what an ear infection is like (if you've been so lucky to never have one). It's an infection where your ear starts to feel what I can only describe as heavy, and with this heaviness is hearing loss, and as I have mentioned, pain. The only way to get rid of an ear infection is to take medication to kill the bacteria. As a child I was prescribed what I call "Banana Medicine."This medicine tasted like fake bananas and I had to take it every night until I finished the bottle which is when the pain would be gone and I would go back to normal.

I really, really thought that this would be the same.

What actually happened was the scariest and some of the most physically traumatic moments of my life.

Because this wasn't a normal ear infection. Because the pain didn't go away and it got to the point where I would be crying myself to sleep. Because of this pain, I had tubes put in my ears. Because the tubes did very little, I had to constantly have my ears suctioned from a machine and see the blood and pus that was sticking to my ear drums coarse through it (to this day, the sound of suctioning sends my ears tingling back to that intense pain). Because of (some) of the blood and pus in my ear drums, the hearing loss was getting worse and I was half deaf for a few months. Because of all of these problems, the nerve that connects a person's ear to facial muscle (again not a doctor or researcher) caused me to develop Bell's Palsy and I was constantly called "Two Face" since The Dark Knight was just released and people are ignorant.

And because of all of this, I had to have surgery to fix my ear. Because I found out that the pain and hearing loss were due to the fact that the mastoid on the back of my left ear was rotting away and this was definitely not a normal ear infection.

But because of all of the pain, I found my answer, the reason why I was in pain and my body was betraying me. On February 5 2008, I was diagnosed with Wegener's Granulomatosis. There was a lot of relief because we had a concrete answer to every one of my ailments. It was finally, after four grueling months, over.

But unbeknownst to me and everyone involved in my life at the time and presently that the causalities were only beginning.