Perspectives

Living with Hydrocephalus Pt. 2

MNU-ICONS-SHARE

 

  Hello friends.  Here’s the second entry from our newest contributor (and youngest!), Emily.  She is bravely sharing a lifelong struggle with all of you in the hopes of creating awareness and understanding of this serious issue. Let’s all be supportive of this amazing young woman.

 

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Living with Hydrocephalus – Jumping Hurdles

In today’s post, I am going to be talking about the wonderful years of middle school (wonderful being sarcasm, haha). I will share how my condition changed over the years and what all I experienced as I entered into my teenage years.

When I first got to middle school, one of the big things that we had to do in my Physical Education class was the Presidential Fitness Test. It involved various fitness and training exercises that we were required to do in a certain time limit in order to pass the test. The tests overall were harder for me, but the one that was the hardest was jumping hurdles. As I got older, my cerebral palsy made it more difficult for me to do certain things, especially jumping hurdles. Kids would always ask me, “Why can’t you jump?” I used to just shrug it off and ignore their questions, but now I think I would have wanted them to know why.

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Also around that time, many of my symptoms changed. Some went away, some new ones appeared. As I said before, my cerebral palsy was a lot more hard to deal with at this age.  This was mainly because I was a lot more physically active, which put more strain on my muscles. And if that wasn’t enough, I also had scoliosis, which meant that for a while I had to sleep in a very uncomfortable plastic tie-dye back brace. I also had surgery on my eyes twice while I was in middle school. That surgery was for a condition called strabismus, which I mentioned in my last post. It basically means that I had two lazy eyes that needed to be fixed every few years. I had to explain to all of my teachers why I would be out for a week and had to ask for all of my assignments. It was very hard for me to have to explain in detail why I would not be in class. My friends were also concerned, but I didn’t want to worry them, so I usually just kept it to the adults in my life. When I had the surgery in seventh grade, it was right around the time of final exam review. My entire seventh grade class made me a giant card and everyone signed it. I’m pretty sure I still have it somewhere. 

I had a lot to overcome with my condition as I got older. I still got headaches, but they were now more due to stress than not eating. Middle school was tough for me academically, which is what caused the stress headaches. I wasn’t having them every day, but they were still pretty frequent.

I learned a lot about my condition during those years. I also learned a lot about myself. Sure, kids would sometimes tease me about not being able to jump hurdles, but I didn’t care. I was proud to be different. I was proud of the person I was becoming, and without my condition, I would not be who I am today. There are always going to be hurdles to jump over in life, difficult or not. What matters is that no matter how high, you jump them because you want to find out what happens when you get to the other side.

Stay tuned for my next post— I’ll give you a hint: Vikings always fight

XOXO,

Emily