“We met it seems, such a short time ago. You looked at me, needing me so. And yet from your sadness, our happiness grew. And I found out, I needed you too! I remember, how we used to play! I recall, those rainy days. The fire’s glow that kept us warm, And now I find we’re both alone. Goodbye may seem forever, Farewell is like the end, But in my heart’s a memory, And there you’ll always be.” -Disney’s The Fox and the Hound Now, if you know me personally, you know that it takes very little to get me to cry at a Disney movie. While I’ve never struggled with the death of my imaginary friend named Bing Bong, finding my long-lost parents, or saying farewell to my robot healthcare companion, these cinematic moments have left me in a heap of tears, usually in the middle of public movie theaters. However, this stanza from The Fox and the Hound turns my heart heavy every single time it passes through my mind. I’ve clung to this mantra every time tragedy has struck my family. The first tragedy was when I was fourteen years old. Tragedy comes in all shapes and sizes, and everyone has a different definition of what “tragedy” actually is. An event that leaves someone completely torn may only take me a week to get over. Likewise, an event that may take someone a few days or weeks to recoup from may leave an impression on me for a long, long time. The first introduction to tragedy I encountered was when I, like many others, had to face the death of a loved one. This loved one meant a lot to me. I knew her since I was five, and we were raised together. She was always by my side regardless of what I was doing. I planned her birthday parties, meticulously purchased countless Christmas gifts for her, and I even got to be by her side as she passed from this world. She was beautiful, she was regal, she was majestic, and she was a dog. Her name was Sandy. I never could have figured that the death of a dog would leave myself and my family so heartbroken and torn. She went from healthy to dead in the span of two weeks, and we will never know what happened to her. She left what seemed like a black hole in our home; there wasn’t just an immense emptiness, her absence seemed to suck all the light and happiness away, never to be seen again. And, because we were heartbroken, and because we were stupid, and because we were convinced it was fate, three weeks later… We got Lily. And it was hard. So, so hard. From the beginning, in what we know now was true Lily fashion, she put up a fight, and she was stubborn as all hell. The hours of seven to nine at night were what we dubbed “The Witching Hour” where she would bark relentlessly, not wanting to eat, go out, or play. Just wanting to bark. Frequent consultations with our puppy owner manual, and the attempts to ignore her or spray her with a water bottle, proved fruitless. Whenever she would go into one of her “episodes,” she would peer at us out of the corners of her eyes, revealing the white amidst the luscious golden brown, as though we was saying “Try me, bitches.” She had little curls in her hair on either side of her face that looked like devil horns. As adorable and fun as she was during her manageable hours, we were convinced she was a reincarnation of Satan himself. And then, as though all at once, everything stopped. To this day, I’m still not sure whether she wore us down and conditioned us to put up with her, or whether she came to an internal compromise with herself and toned down her efforts of relentless torture. She kept up her spunk. She stayed stubborn as all hell. She had these squeaky balls that she LOVED like nobody’s business. Often, we would hide them to give our ears a break. No matter how creatively we hid them, she would find them and bark and whine until she wore us down. And, she was insanely intelligent. Sometimes, smarter than us. We would often forget we hid a ball where we did, and Lily would return to the spot day after day after day barking and whining until we finally investigated enough to find it and give it over to her. She was expressive. I never knew a dog was capable of such human facial expressions, nor the amount of different vocals that Lily possessed. As ridiculous as it sounds, we could have conversations with her. We could figure out that she not only wanted to go out, she had to go out because she had to pee, and then she would like a cookie and fresh water once the deed was done. And she loved us all so much, and so intelligently, that she formed a different relationship with each member of the family. The love and the relationship that she formed with me is something she did not share with my mother or my father. And then after an emergency trip to the vet, several tests, medications, and an extra month of time with her family, she died at the age of six from an inoperable and cancerous tumor that had ruptured and caused internal bleeding.
A majority of our stories have happy endings. As humans, we need the closure, the satisfaction, the positivity. We try to ignore that negativity happens and that everything’s swell and wonderful and peachy. Sometimes, it’s not. Not for a long time. And that’s alright. That’s life.
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My life started relatively uncomplicated. I mean, I was born three and a half weeks premature and I required a nine day long hospital stay after I began hyperventilating upon entry into our confusing world (and now that I’m slowly but surely becoming an adult, I can’t say that I blame my newborn self). Nonetheless, as complicated and intense as our debuts into life can be, I escaped relatively unscathed. However, my life would prove tumultuous at a very early age, and this was simply foreshadowing. My earliest years were relatively uncomplicated as well. I mean, I suffered from chronic ear infections at the age of two, and the only medication that provided me relief caused me to have an allergic reaction, resulting in a minor procedure that would place tubes in my ears to drain fluid. Come to think of it, maybe my life wasn’t so uncomplicated after all. However, things really took a turn shortly after I turned four. My birthday is in the beginning of September, and about a month later, I had come down with a pretty run-of-the-mill chest cold. My mother, being, well, a mother, decided that I needed to see a doctor for a pretty run-of-the-mill chest cold. To this day, no one knows what possessed her to make a trip all the way to the pediatrician for a run-of-the-mill chest cold that could have been treated with Tylenol and some extra naps, but make a trip to the pediatrician she did. And I’m very glad she did. During that pediatrician visit, my doctor found a heart murmur that she never heard in me before. A heart murmur, for those who don’t know, is an extra sound added to the heartbeat, usually due to excess blood pushing up against the lungs and walls of the heart. My pediatrician consoled my mom and informed her that murmurs in young children are common and usually (keyword: usually) not a reason for concern, and that a concerning heart murmur would have been heard throughout my entire life, not just all of a sudden. Plus, the fact that the murmur was so soft and teeny-tiny meant that there was probably nothing wrong, and a cautionary visit to a cardiologist would prove that statement correct. Or very, very wrong. I would just like to pause for a second and point out the fact that additional and abnormal sounds in the heartbeat are common for young children. I’m not a parent, but I’ve been a little kid and I work with little kids, and I can’t understand that taking the human body and placing it on a smaller and younger scale suddenly makes everything fucked up and weird for no good reason. I once worked with toddlers (big mistake) and one of them needed to constantly wear a bib or his own drool would cause him to break out into a rash. His body was basically allergic to his own bodily fluids! He was literally allergic to his own body! To me, there is no larger enigma in our world than children’s bodies. But anyway, I digress. An ultrasound had determined that, in fact, the murmur was indeed a reason for concern. As it turned out, I was diagnosed with a heart defect called Atrial Septal Defect, or ASD. Long story short, ASD, otherwise known as “a hole in the heart,” is a hole in one of the interior walls of the heart that allows extra blood to pass between the chambers, placing stress on the heart and lungs. I simply cannot imagine the thoughts and emotions that my parents had to grapple with as they prepared their four-year-old daughter for open heart surgery a mere month later. A child that, other than being born nearly a month premature, hyperventilating upon entry, and having consistently itchy and sore ears during her toddler years, had nothing go wrong in her life before. Now, if you think that this series of events couldn’t be full of anymore surprises, you’d be wrong. As the surgical team at NYU’s Langone Medical Center entered the interior of my heart, they were hit with another shock. Instead of having one large hole, like how literally all ASDs are formed, I had a series of several tiny holes all throughout the interior wall of my heart. Luckily, the team—led by the late and extremely gifted Dr. Stephen B. Colvin—were able to patch up a majority of the holes and call my operation a success and I’d be able to live out my life with very little struggles or setbacks. On a bad day, I’d tell you that last part is utter bullshit. Thankfully, 99% of my days are good days, but over the years, my physical condition has deteriorated a bit, which sounds ridiculous for a twenty-one-year-old active college student to say. But, nonetheless, it is true. As I’ve grown, I’ve run into a barrage of symptoms—chest pains, frequent head rushes, near fainting attacks—that impact my life on a daily basis. Now, before I go on, I just want to stick a disclaimer in here. I am thankful and lucky beyond words that I have always had access to what I have needed to stay alive and keep me healthy. I’ve been blessed to have some of the most talented, kind, and compassionate people work on my heart, including Dr. Stephen B. Colvin, the staff of NYU Langone Medical Center, my wonderful cardiologist Dr. Robert Tozzi, and all of the staff at the Pediatric Center for Heart Disease in Hackensack, NJ. Compared to other situations out there, I have lived my life relatively pain and worry free. But, this blog is a place that welcomes embracing the not-so-wonderful parts of life, and even though I live a great life, I still went through misfortune that the majority of the population doesn’t get to experience. I was born with a messed up heart that required me to undergo open heart surgery as a four year old. And sometimes, my life sucks. It sucks getting close to new friends and having to warn them to not panic and call the ambulance if you go into one of your attacks. It sucks trying to feign off unwanted attention as you clutch your chest and go into shallow breathing because every breath results in searing pain. It sucks having to raise your hand in the middle of class as an eleven year old and mutter the words “I feel like I’m going to pass out” in front of all your peers. It sucks sitting in high school biology class being unable to see or hear whilst on the verge of losing consciousness. It sucks having to sit on the floor of public bathroom stalls because that’s the only safe and private place you can find until you regain the strength to stand. But—I have been taught a lot. I have been taught quick thinking in the midst of panic. I have been taught how to get back up on my feet (sometimes literally) after the unimaginable has happened. I’ve been taught resourcefulness. I’ve been taught resilience. And most importantly, I’ve been taught pride. |
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