Story Time

Some of you know my story from the very beginning and some of you don’t, so here it is. My story doesn’t just start ten years ago with an accident; it starts way earlier than that. It’s just been added to as time has gone by.

Two years old.

My story starts at two years old. I was diagnosed with epilepsy and would sporadically have seizures up until age sixteen. I haven’t had a seizure in over five years and plan to continue on with not having them, but you never know. You might be wondering what happens when you have a seizure; well, it’s a neurological disorder where I’d have sudden recurrent episodes of sensory disturbance. With that, I’d lose consciousness and have convulsions due to the abnormal electrical activity in my brain. There are different types of seizures, and I would have grand mal seizures that typically lasted a couple of minutes to sometimes longer than five minutes. Most the time, there’s something that causes you to start having a seizure but we didn’t know what caused mine until I was closer to 16. For me when I wouldn’t get much sleep and my brain would be overstimulated, I would have a seizure. I took medication daily in the morning for my seizures.  As I got older, the medication upgraded and I was able to take it at night. To bring me out of a seizure, was a shot and that lovely shot went up my bum and a few minutes after having it injected, I’d come out of the seizure.

Thirteen years old.

I thought my metabolism was just the bomb at thirteen, I could eat whatever I wanted and somehow, I lost weight. I couldn’t get enough food in me to feel satisfied and I was just shredding the pounds, a pretty ideal situation. I was thirsty all the time and peed about every 15 minutes give or take a couple minutes. It was just more than the normal amount to pee. My dentist was the one who brought up getting checked out for diabetes. I didn’t have a clue the dentist suggested it, she mentioned it to my mom when she was getting her teeth done, and she looked into it. I remember the day pretty clearly, went in to the doctor, did some blood work, came home and after a couple hours, received a phone call that I needed to be down at Texas Children Hospital next morning. Here we are in the office, not knowing what’s happening, and the doctor tells me I have Type 1 diabetes and my A1C number was over 16, which is very high. Of course, the first question that popped into my head to ask was, “Am I going to die?” Looking back, that was a bit extreme. I spent the entire day in classes for diabetes and learning what it is, how to control it, how to calculate how much insulin to give myself, and how to check my numbers.

Sixteen years old.

As you probably know by now, I was in a plane crash. I had the opportunity to babysit for some family friends for the summer in Anchorage Alaska so that was the plan. It ended with me spending the summer in the hospital.

This is a very brief overview of my story. If I went in depth on it all, this post would be very long. I plan on getting into more detail on each thing and some, as posts go on. It’s a very intricate story, in that everything plays off of each other, and I want to be able to discuss it all with you in depth and not just quickly write something up or forget something. It’s the little things in these stories that count.