Surviving
... do to me for the rest of my life. A Duty, who heard by word of mouth, found me and took me to the office to call my mom so that she could bring me an Advil. No one took the situation seriously and when my mom showed up, my eyes were extremely dilated and I was sitting alone in the nurse’s office. I was taken to the doctor, who felt the hand sized bump on my head and told me that I had a concussion. The next day at school, I was called to the principal’s office with the boy. He decided to sit there and lie, saying that he didn’t do it on purpose with the principal’s son to back it up. They made him say sorry, saying that he could have really hurt me, and then gave him one day of lunch detention. Soon, after x-rays, MRIs, Cat Scans and Bone Scans, they determined that my L-5 vertebrae, the one right above my tailbone, was fractured and broken on each side respectively. I had to quit the A Team basketball, and realize the fact that I wouldn’t make Varsity my freshman year for softball, and Junior Varity for basketball and volleyball, and that I might not ever get to play again. It was a total lifestyle change. I had to go to a prosthetics place to get fitted for a hard plastic brace that went from the bottom of my sternum to below my waist, in which I would wear for a year. As I wore this brace my back muscles started to weaken making my posture terrible. My freshman year in high school, after living a year in immense pain, I went to Spokane to have back surgery. We decided that it would be best to have surgery during Christmas Break so that I wouldn’t miss much school. My grades were extremely important to me and this seemed logical, even though everyone else would spend their break playing in the snow and hanging out with friends. During the procedure, they took a bone graft off the back of my right pelvis and used it in my fusion, as well as with some cadaver bone. I spent Christmas Break on an old-lady walker, at age 15, and hoped that I would get better so that I could play sports again. About a year after the surgery the pain started to come back, but this time it felt somewhat different than before. I decided to try out for softball to see if I could do it again and ended up making the Varsity team after two years of being out of the game. It caused me a great deal of pain to play but I didn’t care because softball was my life and I was back with my teammates from years of summer league and… I was happy. As the season went on the pain got worse. It was so strange because the pain I felt was on the back of my hip instead of on my spine. I got a cat scan and it revealed a one inch, finger-like projection protruding out of the back of my hip bone into all of my muscles and tissues- a bone callus. When they took the graft from before, the bone cells grew over the graft area to heal it, but they didn’t stop like nature intended. My junior year, during Spring Break, I had surgery in Richland to have the callus removed. When I came back to school I had to carry around a pillow around to sit on because of the uncomfortable hard plastic desks. I hated this because I didn’t want ...