he sees himself so righteously
a diamond in an emerald sea
but while he's playing power chords
true love will pass him by.
he knows exactly what he wants
his charm deceives and taunts
but while he whispers in your ear
true love will pass him by.
he has the gifts and talents
but uses them for accomplishments
while he twists and manipulates
true love will pass him by.
he weakens for the pretty girls
and plays with their fancy curls
while darkness pulls his desire
true love will pass him by.
he takes everything that they had
enjoying them just like a fad
while he feeds upon her innocence
true love will pass him by.
he knows just what you want to hear
he knows how you want him to appear
and while he lies and smiles
true love will pass him by.
how many times do you have to slam
straight into a brick wall
over and over and over again
before you make a change.....
Showing posts with label the past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the past. Show all posts
Friday, July 25, 2008
Friday, April 04, 2008
threeweeksandoneday
I usually remember dreams and nightmares in vivid detail, ever since I was just a wee little Emily. I wouldn't say any of my nightmares were "night terrors" or anything of that sort. I know I went through a phase growing up in which I was deathly afraid of our basement downstairs (in our old house) and I thought there were monsters whenever the lights were turned off in my room. However, I would conquer those fears by changing which bunk I slept on. Yeah. I had a sweet red bunk bed when I was little. And I geniously thought, that if I slept on the top bunk the monsters wouldn't be able to reach me- so I was in the clear and could sleep soundly. When I got a little older, I reasoned that monsters are actually very tall creatures and therefore would not see me if I were to sleep on the BOTTOM bunk, so I switched and eventually got over the fear of the dark and pretend monsters.
I've never really had that dream where you're falling. I've never had the dream when all your family members die. I've never had violent, bloody nightmares really.
But the past two nights, I have experienced the most terrifying nightmares I've ever had. Wednesday night, I actually woke up several times from the nightmares- one time I had tears flowing down my face. Another time I actually YELLED "no!!!!!!" really loud and then quickly realized it wasn't just in my sleep, but I had actually yelled out loud in terror, then I tried to fall back asleep. Then another time I awoke in a cold sweat. Over and over again, I dreamt of my car accident that occurred on January 16th this year.
Starting with the initial realization and feelings of your motor vehicle sliding out of control and fishtailing back and forth on a snowy interstate going 55 m.p.h. Then the wave of momentum that spun my car in a 360 degree turn, staring out my windshield at the semi-truck coming straight at me. 2 seconds later, the crunch, the deafening sound of metal on metal and seeing car parts flying off the front of my car. My car sliding to a hault right before smashing into the concrete guardrail in the middle of the interstate. Not being able to move for a minute, because I thought I had died. Then screaming and crying at the same time, becoming totally aware I was all alone. Somebody running over to my car. Not being able to open my driver's side door more than an inch because of the damage. This guy asking me over and over again if I was ok. Me looking at him and not really being aware that I kept saying, yeah, yeah i'm fine, i'm ok. Looking at this person and realizing he was not my sister or a friend or my mom and then immediately reaching for my cell phone to call them. My heat didnt work. The snow was falling outside and I began to shiver and didn't have anything for extra heat. I saw the semi-truck about a fourth of a mile down the interstate on the shoulder. I thought, did that thing just hit me? Traffic had slowed and cars were moving past me on the interstate, staring in at me as they passed, and I thought back to all the times I've driven by a car wreck and been the slowly moving car peering at the car wreck victims wondering what happened and if they were going to be ok.
The semi-truck moving fast. Trying to slow down. the hit. the sound. the silence and blur of what happened exactly after the collision. I have no idea what my body did or any memory whatsoever of the moment after it happened. I don't remember how my car slid from point A in the far left lane to point B on the median shoulder 30 feet ahead. Somewhere in there, my muscles tightened and didnt release until 1 month of physical therapy went by.
The past two nights I've been suffering in my sleep from these visions of terror. I woke up last night actually gasping out of fear of thinking a truck was actually going to smash into me in my sleep. I've been having pounding, migraine-like headaches and neckaches that might make me have to get more physical therapy. I guess trauma can come back to the body after it's "gone away" for a while.
I want my nightmares to stop. :(
I've never really had that dream where you're falling. I've never had the dream when all your family members die. I've never had violent, bloody nightmares really.
But the past two nights, I have experienced the most terrifying nightmares I've ever had. Wednesday night, I actually woke up several times from the nightmares- one time I had tears flowing down my face. Another time I actually YELLED "no!!!!!!" really loud and then quickly realized it wasn't just in my sleep, but I had actually yelled out loud in terror, then I tried to fall back asleep. Then another time I awoke in a cold sweat. Over and over again, I dreamt of my car accident that occurred on January 16th this year.
Starting with the initial realization and feelings of your motor vehicle sliding out of control and fishtailing back and forth on a snowy interstate going 55 m.p.h. Then the wave of momentum that spun my car in a 360 degree turn, staring out my windshield at the semi-truck coming straight at me. 2 seconds later, the crunch, the deafening sound of metal on metal and seeing car parts flying off the front of my car. My car sliding to a hault right before smashing into the concrete guardrail in the middle of the interstate. Not being able to move for a minute, because I thought I had died. Then screaming and crying at the same time, becoming totally aware I was all alone. Somebody running over to my car. Not being able to open my driver's side door more than an inch because of the damage. This guy asking me over and over again if I was ok. Me looking at him and not really being aware that I kept saying, yeah, yeah i'm fine, i'm ok. Looking at this person and realizing he was not my sister or a friend or my mom and then immediately reaching for my cell phone to call them. My heat didnt work. The snow was falling outside and I began to shiver and didn't have anything for extra heat. I saw the semi-truck about a fourth of a mile down the interstate on the shoulder. I thought, did that thing just hit me? Traffic had slowed and cars were moving past me on the interstate, staring in at me as they passed, and I thought back to all the times I've driven by a car wreck and been the slowly moving car peering at the car wreck victims wondering what happened and if they were going to be ok.
The semi-truck moving fast. Trying to slow down. the hit. the sound. the silence and blur of what happened exactly after the collision. I have no idea what my body did or any memory whatsoever of the moment after it happened. I don't remember how my car slid from point A in the far left lane to point B on the median shoulder 30 feet ahead. Somewhere in there, my muscles tightened and didnt release until 1 month of physical therapy went by.
The past two nights I've been suffering in my sleep from these visions of terror. I woke up last night actually gasping out of fear of thinking a truck was actually going to smash into me in my sleep. I've been having pounding, migraine-like headaches and neckaches that might make me have to get more physical therapy. I guess trauma can come back to the body after it's "gone away" for a while.
I want my nightmares to stop. :(
Saturday, March 22, 2008
"With my wide eyes, I've seen worlds that don't belong... Tell me why we live like this."
So Jenny helped me figure out a really big part of who I am. First off, I fall perfectly into a category that is very common to youngest children who have or have had an alcoholic parent while growing up- always feeling like I have to help, always feeling like everyone else’s burdens are MY burdens. This is held ever so true for me, all my life. I never thought about how having an alcoholic parent when I was so young actually affected who I am to this day. It’s amazing how the way I am fits EXACTLY the characteristics that studies have found to be true over and over again with kids like me.
Then we talked about molds. Jenny told me that just by hearing me speak and talk to her, she can tell I’m an intelligent person (phew! good to know), she said that’s very evident. But she then said that whenever I’ve been talking about school things, it seemed very, very… forced. And she asked me why and what I thought about that. In my head at first I was like, pshh.. forced? whatever i'm a total school nerd... and then I realized that was totally false. I answered, “because I want to please other people.” She said, “it seems you try to fit into this certain mold that you really don’t fit into at all.” I’ve always thought that I had to be the A and B college student that breezes through school and excels in mostly everything and stays on track the whole time, stays clean and organized and always has an ambitious direction in mind. But you know what? That isn’t me at all. This whole time I’ve been disappointed in myself for failing a test or having a hard time in classes, and it’s because I was trying to be somebody I’m actually not. My whole life I have tried to fit into my sister’s mold, the way she’s always been with her place in our family- she, being the oldest, was thrust into the successful, achieving, independent, moving on with her own life type of mold. While I, as the youngest, am really not like that at all, but thought I had to be like that too… I thought I SHOULD be, and if I’m not like that I’m just a disappointment and have no worth.
That ties into the biggest thing I discovered. I have certain patterns in my life that have to do with disappointment. In my relationships with people especially, but also with all other aspects of my life. When I feel someone is disappointed in me, I take it in such a way that makes me get upset and overwhelmed, maybe angry, and ultimately I take ACTION and DO something as a result of feeling the weight of that disappointment. The same goes when I am disappointed in myself. I feel like I let people down and so I have to take the responsibility of punishing myself- that’s where my extreme behavior from the past 6 months came in and took over. I also have patterns of taking ownership of things I am not meant to own. When I know that somebody is upset or angry with me, or if something is wrong between us, I completely take it as my own failure, and it’s all my fault, it’s something I did and that’s all. I take full ownership of those problems ALL on my own shoulders. But the truth is, it’s not all my fault. Relationships are two-way streets and there is never an instance where I’m supposed to own everything that’s wrong and take it in and fix it myself.
This is the most interesting part.
Jenny asked me what do I value, and she was going to write down and just make a list of what I said. So, I told her these exact things- trust, honesty, love, faithfulness, joy, laughter, truth, kindness, loyalty, humility, hope, generosity. Then she asked me to think of instances in my life where I feel that heavy disappointment, things other than just in my relationships with people. So I used an example of getting a bad grade on a test or in a class, or even… having to drop out of college for this semester. (Months ago when problems first began, Jenny asked me what would be the worst thing that would happen. I said, "having to quit school." Look what happened.) I feel like I disappointed my parents, and myself. Like… I’m such a failure. And after listing off my values, she then asked me, “ok now where in your values does a bad grade or not being in school fit in?” And I thought for a moment…. Then it hit me, and I said, “it doesn’t.” So every time I hit a speed bump in life, particularly when I go through times of being physically sick and unwell, and I am lying in bed thinking, “I can’t get out of bed today,” or when I feel depression consuming who I am- I have to remind myself what my values are. Hope. Trust. Love. And then turn them into sentences-- I’m going to LOVE myself by getting up and making breakfast. I’m going to HOPE that if I just keep going things will get better. I’m going to TRUST myself that I AM capable of taking care of myself, I’m NOT helpless and powerless and going to let other people dictate my life for me... like I have for mostly all of my teenage and young adult years so far. Get it????
Another huge part of who I am. Because of these patterns I have, this makes me prefer the “beginnings” of things in my life, not necessarily the middles or ends. Because there’s no disappointment at the start of something new for me- I feed off of the challenge and the risk and the high energy and excitement that exist in the beginnings of things in my life. That is why all my life I jump from thing to thing, whether it be a job or where I live or what I do, or whatever. When I no longer have what I had in the beginning, especially when disappointment and those associated feelings enter in, I either quit and say no I’m done with this, or I go and withdrawal and isolate myself to kind of get me prepared to go back into it, but eventually…… I will change things… eventually it makes me ACT… and this makes me constantly want to be in another place in my life, so that I can have those “starts”, those “beginnings”, the freshness that comes along with it.
With my relationships though, those are very different. Because of what I value most about myself (trust, honesty, love, joy, laughter, loyalty, etc), this makes my interactions and relationships with people around me the most prominent part of what makes me who I am. Nowhere in what I listed as my values does it say “success” or “achievements” or “money” or “career” or “education” or anything like that. But in the ways that I love, share laughter, show loyalty to friends, am honest and trustworthy with people, that’s where I find value and worth in myself and my life. I think that’s why I will pretty much do anything to stay committed to people whether a boyfriend or a friendship or whatever…. And that holds true even if they don’t deserve my commitment. Does that make sense? I’m saying, sometimes I do it at the cost of… myself. Like if I’m in a bad relationship, I will hold onto it even when it’s destructive to my own life. I was explaining to Jenny how I just hate having tension between people, like it seriously makes me physically cringe knowing that someone might be angry or upset with me. And she let me say that and then quietly stopped me and said, “Emily. Sometimes people don’t deserve you to fix the relationship.” And I didn’t get it at first. I was like, no, I want to try my hardest to make sure things are good and sustained. And she was like, “ok. But, sometimes it’s best to just cut something off for good- because that person does not deserve you.” That was eye-opening for me. I will do anything to keep the peace and harmony in my relationships with people, anything to NOT disappoint, anything to help (characteristics of children with alcoholic parent). I will do anything to keep it together (so I do not get abandoned, my biggest fear, and so I do not lose value and worth in myself from not being loving, not being loyal, not being joyful, not being faithful in my relationships).
It’s crazy to me how this is all coming together in my mind, and my heart. I thought I had myself figured out so many times prior to this, and here I am still learning so much more than I ever imagined. There will be so many times in the future I will learn more about myself too, I’m finally letting that sink in. It’s great to know yourself the way you were made to be. It isn't pretty all the time and a lot of the times it's pretty messy, but hey at least i'm not boring. To keep increasing in knowledge of who you are, it brings great peace to one’s soul.
Then we talked about molds. Jenny told me that just by hearing me speak and talk to her, she can tell I’m an intelligent person (phew! good to know), she said that’s very evident. But she then said that whenever I’ve been talking about school things, it seemed very, very… forced. And she asked me why and what I thought about that. In my head at first I was like, pshh.. forced? whatever i'm a total school nerd... and then I realized that was totally false. I answered, “because I want to please other people.” She said, “it seems you try to fit into this certain mold that you really don’t fit into at all.” I’ve always thought that I had to be the A and B college student that breezes through school and excels in mostly everything and stays on track the whole time, stays clean and organized and always has an ambitious direction in mind. But you know what? That isn’t me at all. This whole time I’ve been disappointed in myself for failing a test or having a hard time in classes, and it’s because I was trying to be somebody I’m actually not. My whole life I have tried to fit into my sister’s mold, the way she’s always been with her place in our family- she, being the oldest, was thrust into the successful, achieving, independent, moving on with her own life type of mold. While I, as the youngest, am really not like that at all, but thought I had to be like that too… I thought I SHOULD be, and if I’m not like that I’m just a disappointment and have no worth.
That ties into the biggest thing I discovered. I have certain patterns in my life that have to do with disappointment. In my relationships with people especially, but also with all other aspects of my life. When I feel someone is disappointed in me, I take it in such a way that makes me get upset and overwhelmed, maybe angry, and ultimately I take ACTION and DO something as a result of feeling the weight of that disappointment. The same goes when I am disappointed in myself. I feel like I let people down and so I have to take the responsibility of punishing myself- that’s where my extreme behavior from the past 6 months came in and took over. I also have patterns of taking ownership of things I am not meant to own. When I know that somebody is upset or angry with me, or if something is wrong between us, I completely take it as my own failure, and it’s all my fault, it’s something I did and that’s all. I take full ownership of those problems ALL on my own shoulders. But the truth is, it’s not all my fault. Relationships are two-way streets and there is never an instance where I’m supposed to own everything that’s wrong and take it in and fix it myself.
This is the most interesting part.
Jenny asked me what do I value, and she was going to write down and just make a list of what I said. So, I told her these exact things- trust, honesty, love, faithfulness, joy, laughter, truth, kindness, loyalty, humility, hope, generosity. Then she asked me to think of instances in my life where I feel that heavy disappointment, things other than just in my relationships with people. So I used an example of getting a bad grade on a test or in a class, or even… having to drop out of college for this semester. (Months ago when problems first began, Jenny asked me what would be the worst thing that would happen. I said, "having to quit school." Look what happened.) I feel like I disappointed my parents, and myself. Like… I’m such a failure. And after listing off my values, she then asked me, “ok now where in your values does a bad grade or not being in school fit in?” And I thought for a moment…. Then it hit me, and I said, “it doesn’t.” So every time I hit a speed bump in life, particularly when I go through times of being physically sick and unwell, and I am lying in bed thinking, “I can’t get out of bed today,” or when I feel depression consuming who I am- I have to remind myself what my values are. Hope. Trust. Love. And then turn them into sentences-- I’m going to LOVE myself by getting up and making breakfast. I’m going to HOPE that if I just keep going things will get better. I’m going to TRUST myself that I AM capable of taking care of myself, I’m NOT helpless and powerless and going to let other people dictate my life for me... like I have for mostly all of my teenage and young adult years so far. Get it????
Another huge part of who I am. Because of these patterns I have, this makes me prefer the “beginnings” of things in my life, not necessarily the middles or ends. Because there’s no disappointment at the start of something new for me- I feed off of the challenge and the risk and the high energy and excitement that exist in the beginnings of things in my life. That is why all my life I jump from thing to thing, whether it be a job or where I live or what I do, or whatever. When I no longer have what I had in the beginning, especially when disappointment and those associated feelings enter in, I either quit and say no I’m done with this, or I go and withdrawal and isolate myself to kind of get me prepared to go back into it, but eventually…… I will change things… eventually it makes me ACT… and this makes me constantly want to be in another place in my life, so that I can have those “starts”, those “beginnings”, the freshness that comes along with it.
With my relationships though, those are very different. Because of what I value most about myself (trust, honesty, love, joy, laughter, loyalty, etc), this makes my interactions and relationships with people around me the most prominent part of what makes me who I am. Nowhere in what I listed as my values does it say “success” or “achievements” or “money” or “career” or “education” or anything like that. But in the ways that I love, share laughter, show loyalty to friends, am honest and trustworthy with people, that’s where I find value and worth in myself and my life. I think that’s why I will pretty much do anything to stay committed to people whether a boyfriend or a friendship or whatever…. And that holds true even if they don’t deserve my commitment. Does that make sense? I’m saying, sometimes I do it at the cost of… myself. Like if I’m in a bad relationship, I will hold onto it even when it’s destructive to my own life. I was explaining to Jenny how I just hate having tension between people, like it seriously makes me physically cringe knowing that someone might be angry or upset with me. And she let me say that and then quietly stopped me and said, “Emily. Sometimes people don’t deserve you to fix the relationship.” And I didn’t get it at first. I was like, no, I want to try my hardest to make sure things are good and sustained. And she was like, “ok. But, sometimes it’s best to just cut something off for good- because that person does not deserve you.” That was eye-opening for me. I will do anything to keep the peace and harmony in my relationships with people, anything to NOT disappoint, anything to help (characteristics of children with alcoholic parent). I will do anything to keep it together (so I do not get abandoned, my biggest fear, and so I do not lose value and worth in myself from not being loving, not being loyal, not being joyful, not being faithful in my relationships).
It’s crazy to me how this is all coming together in my mind, and my heart. I thought I had myself figured out so many times prior to this, and here I am still learning so much more than I ever imagined. There will be so many times in the future I will learn more about myself too, I’m finally letting that sink in. It’s great to know yourself the way you were made to be. It isn't pretty all the time and a lot of the times it's pretty messy, but hey at least i'm not boring. To keep increasing in knowledge of who you are, it brings great peace to one’s soul.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Darling, it's you I'm without
Change is your best and worst friend all at once. If you find a balance, things are ok.
I showered for the first time in my new shower today. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover a daddy-long-leg spider hanging out on the ceiling, far too close to where I was showering. I decided to be-friend him instead of be scared of him though, and named him Tyrone. He stayed in his place and I stayed in mine- the world was at peace. I hope I see Tyrone tomorrow. Otherwise, I might miss him a little.
I found out something last night. First off, three weeks or more worth of laundry takes FOREVER to dry. That's not the something I was going to share but it was worthy of mention and I'm a spaz. Anyway, the thing I found out last night besides the annoying side of laundry. Talking to my far-away friend on the phone, I found out the condition of a beautiful painting I painted and sent him for his 18th birthday (2 years ago). We had been dating for a long time, but broke up because the long-distance thing wasn't working. He then started dating another girl and had some rough times with her, resulting in the complete destruction of their relationship because this girl turned out to be a total psycho b-word... seriously. psycho. According to my old boyfriend and dear friend, she saw my painting in his room and went ape-mad and PUNCHED the canvas so that it was ripped from the staples holding it to the wooden frame, but thankfully the canvas was tough so it didn't rip where she punched it in. She did also throw it and it hit something sharp, so there is a small tear on the right upper side. Adam and his dad reconstructed it so it looks almost good as new, and he sent me a picture of what it looks like now.. and I must say, it looks just the way I sent it to him except for the tear in the canvas. :(
I was kind of shocked and frightened by the story, and I felt bad because I worked so hard on that painting and to find out someone had so much disrespect for a gift I made... it kind of hurts! but at least it looks pretty much the same. and at least I'm not the psycho girl. Mmhmm.
I have a nasty cold and it is beating me up :( I'm going to finish my tea and facebook some more.............
I showered for the first time in my new shower today. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover a daddy-long-leg spider hanging out on the ceiling, far too close to where I was showering. I decided to be-friend him instead of be scared of him though, and named him Tyrone. He stayed in his place and I stayed in mine- the world was at peace. I hope I see Tyrone tomorrow. Otherwise, I might miss him a little.
I found out something last night. First off, three weeks or more worth of laundry takes FOREVER to dry. That's not the something I was going to share but it was worthy of mention and I'm a spaz. Anyway, the thing I found out last night besides the annoying side of laundry. Talking to my far-away friend on the phone, I found out the condition of a beautiful painting I painted and sent him for his 18th birthday (2 years ago). We had been dating for a long time, but broke up because the long-distance thing wasn't working. He then started dating another girl and had some rough times with her, resulting in the complete destruction of their relationship because this girl turned out to be a total psycho b-word... seriously. psycho. According to my old boyfriend and dear friend, she saw my painting in his room and went ape-mad and PUNCHED the canvas so that it was ripped from the staples holding it to the wooden frame, but thankfully the canvas was tough so it didn't rip where she punched it in. She did also throw it and it hit something sharp, so there is a small tear on the right upper side. Adam and his dad reconstructed it so it looks almost good as new, and he sent me a picture of what it looks like now.. and I must say, it looks just the way I sent it to him except for the tear in the canvas. :(
I was kind of shocked and frightened by the story, and I felt bad because I worked so hard on that painting and to find out someone had so much disrespect for a gift I made... it kind of hurts! but at least it looks pretty much the same. and at least I'm not the psycho girl. Mmhmm.
I have a nasty cold and it is beating me up :( I'm going to finish my tea and facebook some more.............
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
my memoir:
Emily Sexton
Engl. 305
10/22/07
Word count: 3,732
Looking Good, Feeling Pain
It’s a lot like knives. It’s like a bunch of knives piercing your most delicate skin. It’s like the stabbing of a wound over and over again in the same spot. These knives move as one element, like a wave of sea water crashing upon edgy rocks. But it’s all going on inside of you, in the tiniest parts of you. You wonder how such a small thing could cause such devastating consequences. But there was no questioning once it hit. Once it hit, I was down for the count. Once it hit, I was uncomfortably aware that my body was under attack, and like a best friend I would do anything to fight for and protect, I would do anything I could to get rid of the pain, to rid my poor, defenseless body of such horrible affliction. My body became so much more precious to me than ever before. So I wiggled and twisted and inhaled and exhaled and squeezed and yelled. Still losing the fight. Pain still unbearable. And so I took my first trip to the emergency room, and so I began walking the path to discovering the cause of all this sudden pain… I was diagnosed with Renal Stone Disease. I was in the 8th grade.
It’s not fair, really. “Isn’t this an old-person’s disease, mom?” I was only thirteen. I started going to see a kidney specialist to figure out the course of action we were going to take to deal with my disorder. There are pills. There are surgeries. There are metal objects that poke and prod and go places I would never say out loud. There are lasers. There are shock waves. There are special diets. There are more tests, more ultrasounds, more x-rays, more radiation. A few days before Christmas, I had another stone episode and ended up in the emergency room for the third time in two weeks. My mom carried me down the three flights of snowy stairs from our apartment to get to the car. “How bad is it, honey?” “Oh Mom… please, make it stop, mom! Just let me die.” Christmas goodies didn’t seem so great, they began to lose their glitter when my immature mind was cluttered with fear and paranoia of the next kidney stone attack.
“A kidney stone is a hard mass that occurs when calcium oxalate or other chemicals in the urine form crystals that stick together. These crystals may grow into stones ranging in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball… Some one million Americans--the majority between the ages of 20 and 40--are treated each year for kidney stones. Kidney stones are more common in men, who account for about four out of five cases.” –The National Kidney Foundation
Over the winter months and into spring, the paranoia consumed me completely. I was always wondering if I would feel that first little pang… if I got a hunger pain or a cramp or anything that might turn into the hours of excruciating kidney stone pain, I was always conscious. Always aware. It might happen at ANY TIME… and there’s nothing I could do to know when. I get dropped off at soccer practice and hear, “drink, drink, drink, Em! Gotta flood out those kidneys!” None of the other kids are thinking about their kidneys as they get out of the car to go play soccer. I end up crying and writhing around in the nurse’s office at school one afternoon. It was the big mile-run day at Indian Hills Jr. High School. The intense heat dehydrated me, as I’m sure it did my classmates also, but my body reacts a little differently than most. I have been a runner all my life, an excellent sprinter. My long legs give me an advantage, and I always ran a successful mile time just a little above average compared to my classmates… until this. I couldn’t finish the mile-run. The knives were back and worse than ever… and I had to explain to the nurse that I had kidney stones. “Really, now that’s interesting… kidney stones in a young thing like you? That’s almost unheard of, isn’t it?” None of the other kids were unable to finish the mile-run in gym that day due to their kidneys. So I spent the rest of the day knocked out from pain medication.
“Stones form twice as often in men as women. The peak age in men is 30 years; women have a bimodal age distribution, with peaks at 35 and 55 years. Once a kidney stone forms, the probability that a second stone will form within five to seven years is approximately 50%.” -Parmar
I entered high school like any other 14-year-old girl. I didn’t know who I was, but I was excited to start a new chapter in my youth. I had a new best friend every month, crushes on all the popular boys, I found out I thrived in my English class and dived in my algebra class. I was a healthy, skinny, athletic blonde with a new haircut and a summer tan. Things change fast though, and they appear differently than they really are. It was a Sunday night in early October, and I fell asleep at 11 o’clock, thinking the next thing I was going to be doing was getting up to go to school. That’s not what happened at all. An hour after falling asleep, I felt my world crash down around me as I realized the pain in my lower-abdomen was not going away and only getting stronger. More knives piercing me over and over again. More waves crushing me. Bricks were piling on top of the knives pushing them harder and harder into my little body. It’s hard to even put the pain into words. After lying in my bed trying to suppress my screams for half an hour, I crawled on my hands and knees in the dark up the stairs to get to my parents’ bedroom. My tears were enough to clue them in on what was going on, so they pulled me into bed with them and tried everything in their power to make me feel better, even though nothing could. I vomited my pain medication back up not even five minutes after I swallowed it, I couldn’t stand nor sit up, I was crying, and all my mom could do was lay next to me and let me squeeze her hand. It was now 4 a.m. and I had had no relief. I had never been in that much pain for that long EVER… I had never imagined it either. It was completely surreal.
“…Usually, the symptom of a kidney stone is extreme pain that has been described as being worse than child labor pains. The pain often begins suddenly as the stone moves in the urinary tract, causing irritation and blockage. Typically, a person feels a sharp, cramping pain in the back and in the side of the area of the kidney or in the lower abdomen, which may spread to the groin.” –The Urology Center of Florida
I had also never been on morphine before. But then again, you would assume most 14-year-olds hadn’t experienced a major narcotic like that. It’s too bad my experience with it almost killed me. I think if I ever did drugs, the way I felt as the nurse stabbed the I.V. into my hand would probably have the same effect. That’s because they mistakenly overdosed me, a lot. We’re talking three milligrams they were supposed to inject versus the ten milligrams they actually gave me. On the bright side, the six hours of straight pain I had gone through by the time I was lying in the emergency room, completely subsided in a matter of seconds. In fact, I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. People were swooping in and out of and around the room in blurs, my mom’s words of worry were muffled and slurred, everyone was on edge and their faces were tense, but I was in another world in my mind. I closed my eyes and thought opening them again might be a little too hard to manage. My body tingled slightly and then it was like a soft darkness veiled over it, like I was covered in a black shroud floating in the sky in some far-off galaxy.
After that, I don’t remember much. I awoke in another room, a real hospital room, the room I would remain for the next three days. I didn’t know why I was awake, it was still very early in the morning… then I found my answer. This is when the vomiting began. If anyone gives you morphine, just remember that it takes away the pain, but it will make your stomach very upset. Don’t ask me why, but I counted… and the official count stopped at twenty-five. Once you vomit twenty-five times, there is obviously no food left in your stomach, so you start to throw up a disgusting substance I learned was called “bile”, a bitter alkaline fluid that comes from your gallbladder. If the hours of leaning over bedpans weren’t bad enough… I got no sleep, I was lonely, I hated the cheery nurses that came in to take my blood pressure and check my I.V., the stench I associate with hospitals made me feel sicker than I already was, I couldn’t hold my head up longer than two seconds, and every now and then I felt waves of kidney pain start and stop like a big tease.
Serious side effects of morphine:
• shallow breathing, slow heartbeat;
• seizure (convulsions);
• cold, clammy skin;
• confusion;
• severe weakness or dizziness; or
• feeling light-headed, fainting.
Less serious side effects are more likely to occur, such as:
• constipation;
• warmth, tingling, or redness under your skin;
• nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, diarrhea, loss of appetite;
• dizziness, headache, anxiety;
• memory problems; or
• sleep problems (insomnia).
It was the longest and cruelest day of my life. I felt like I had the body of an 80-year-old. And when I was finally freed from the cage that hospital had become to me, I NEVER wanted to smell that hospital stench EVER again. Back at home, all I did was lay around. That’s all I really could do. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or walk further than the bathroom without needing someone to help me. My body was going to take a while to adjust back to normal after such a painful experience… and especially because of the heavy use of narcotics I had been exposed to. “Give it a couple weeks, Em… you’ll gain your strength back, just give it time.” But it was too much. I was too young to feel like this, too weak to want to try to get better, and I slipped into a three-fold state of depression: physically, psychologically, and spiritually. I couldn’t look at my dad because I was mad at him for giving me bad genes and looking at him made me want to yell and punch him for the pain he caused me. I couldn’t walk up the stairs without a wave of exhaustion washing over my body, forcing me to grasp the railing like a feeble, old grandmother. I hated God and turned away from Him because He let it happen to me. I stopped praying, I stopped reading my Bible, I stopped going to youth group and church, I stopped everything. I hated anyone I passed by that wasn’t breathing heavily from just walking and moving around. Anyone who was happy and healthy. I looked at them and thought how I used to be just like them before December of my 8th grade year.
The worst was people’s reactions when they found out why I hadn’t been in school for a week. They couldn’t believe I was ailed by such a serious thing. They had no idea what the pain was like. And you could see it on their faces, like when you reveal something really significant to someone and they just sort of take it like they would the weekend gossip. And then after about a week, everyone around you starts to treat you like you’re just fine. Because you’re walking, you’re sitting in class, you’re talking by the lockers with your friends. But inside… inside you’re weak and dead. You have so much healing left to do. So much strength left to gain back. But to the human eye, you look completely normal. I wanted people to understand, I wanted them to know. And I also didn’t want them to know… I wanted to hide it. I struggled with that for a very long time, long after I had gained back most of my physical strength… which took a good two months. When the spring soccer season rolled around, it was time for me to try out for our high school’s team… my first real tryout for a competitive high school sport. After my hospital stay, my visits with my kidney specialist left me with an order to try to “treat” my kidney problems by making sure I was always staying hydrated. Once soccer season arrived, this got much harder. Every time I had to stop and grab an extra drink, I wished I could go back to the careless days at soccer practice when I didn’t once think about preventing such a thing as kidney stones. I performed to my best ability, but sometimes my best wasn’t as good as everyone else because of kidney stones. Sometimes I had to sit on the side lines. Sometimes I had to leave early. Sometimes I couldn’t finish the drills. All because of something inside of me that no one could see. Soccer coaches are accustomed to seeing twisted ankles and torn ACL’s, not kidney stones. They only knew by my facial expression that I was in pain.
“A number of risk factors play major roles in stone formation. The first is loss of body fluids (dehydration). When one does not consume enough fluids during the day, the urine often becomes quite concentrated and darker. This increases the chance that crystals can form from materials within the urine, because there is less fluid available to dissolve them.”
On a steaming day later in the summer, I found myself sitting in the familiar small office of my kidney specialist. I walked through the familiar hospital filled with familiar faces all from sad, tired, weak, old men and women hobbling into the elevators and sitting in their wheelchairs in the waiting rooms. Their silver hair and wrinkled hands looked nothing like my long, blonde hair pulled back in a sporty pony-tail and my athletic little legs in my white soccer shorts, no wrinkles to date. Test results had revealed my fatal flaw. I cocked my head and narrowed my eyes at this peculiar discovery. My body doesn’t produce as much citrate as it should be producing. Therefore, I have the tendency to form kidney stones from the lack of kidney stone inhibitors, which comes from citrate. I have a “metabolic abnormality”.
I glanced back and forth between my doctor and my mom for answers to questions I haven’t formed just yet. I figured out that what he was saying was that this isn’t just a momentary problem. My doctor looked at me when he spoke to me, which was weird because I usually had very little understanding of anything he said… I was just a kid; I kind of wished he would just look at my mom instead. This was all very foreign to me. My mind was probably distracted thinking about when my next soccer game was. But when the words ‘citrate’ and ‘metabolic abnormality’ kept flying out of his mouth, I was hooked. Then I looked to my mom for some kind of assurance that everything was going to be ok no matter what words were coming out of his mouth. “There is a medication we could put you on. It has a good success rate. I hesitate though… you’re extremely young to be worrying about taking a pill twice a day for the rest of your life. Discuss it with your mom, don’t feel rushed, we’ve got plenty of time. I’ll see you guys in a few months.” I listened to my mom tell me she agrees that I am too young to start taking such a long-lasting medication. She didn’t promise a solution, because there really isn’t one. But she always hugged me the right way that told me, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, sweetie, but I’m always going to be right here with you to help you through it.”
“…Potassium citrate attaches to calcium in the urine, preventing the formation of mineral crystals that can develop into kidney stones.”
“…About half of children with stones have an identifiable metabolic disorder, which increases their risk of stone recurrence five-fold.”
When the one-year anniversary for my hospitalization came around, I cheered a little inside. I got on with my sophomore year of high school, feeling older, cooler, and healthy again. And I wish with all of my heart I could end the story here and conclude that I lived happily ever after, but I went down the other path, the path to inexplicable pain. I began making weekly trips to the nurse’s office. They saw me so much that year they told me I was kind of like a daughter to them. They got used to my half-bent over posture walking weakly through the wooden door, continuing on to the back room where the lights remain off and I can lie down for one class period or however long it took. They provided me with a heating pad to hold on my back to help with the frequent muscle spasms I was now getting from my disorder… they didn’t hurt as bad as kidney stones themselves, but felt very similar.
One night in February, I awoke to a horrifying sense of deja-vu. “No, no, no… this cannot be happening again. No, please, not again.” I started begging and pleading with God. I wanted Him to reach out and just suck the stone or stones right out of my body with His own two hands. When I made it upstairs and woke my mom up, it was like I was experiencing the October stone attack all over again, but somehow it was worse, somehow it was even more painful. My mom was so cautious to drive me to the hospital. But I knew what was going on inside of me. I knew it wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. And it didn’t. It went on for three more hours… and I threatened to drive myself to the hospital if she wouldn’t do it, I was so desperate for pain relief, I felt like I could just die from the pressure of the knives. I lay crumpled in the passenger seat as my mom drove at the speed of light to get me to that emergency room. I was wailing and screaming my head off. When they got me into a bed, my body started to convulse uncontrollably from all the pain. They rolled me into the x-ray room as fast as they could, promising pain relief in just a couple more minutes… those minutes felt like hours. At last, they covered me with a heated blanket to help with my convulsions, and they gave me an I.V., carefully checking my wristband the emergency room attendant had attached specifically warning NO MORPHINE, so I didn’t find out until later what narcotic they put me on that time. When I was roused sometime in the afternoon from my sleep, my mom mentioned it was some narcotic called Newbane that doctors said they give to women who are in labor. I was just glad it didn’t make me throw up twenty-five times. I lied in that hospital bed for three days, barely moving, speaking, or existing really. It was depressing.
“Some people are more susceptible to forming kidney stones, and heredity certainly plays a role. The majority of kidney stones are made of calcium, and hypercalciuria (high levels of calcium in the urine), is a risk factor. The predisposition to high levels of calcium in the urine may be passed on from generation to generation. Some rare hereditary diseases also predispose some people to form kidney stones. Examples include people with renal tubular acidosis and people with problems metabolizing a variety of chemicals including cystine (an amino acid), oxalate, (a type of salt), and uric acid (as in gout).”
--eMedicineHealth
One year following my February hospitalization, my mom and sister presented me with a single yellow rose. That rose represented so much to me. In its petals, I saw the pain of my past woven into the pain of my present, and inevitably the pain of my future. But it was yellow, like the sunshine. It was hope. Smelling its sweet fragrance made me calm. I think with every long-lasting problem you are forced to deal with in your life, you have to accept it as being a part of who you are. I don’t like having a kidney stone disease. I don’t wish it upon anyone else. I don’t like that it stained all four years of my high school career with tears and sweat and anger. But it also made me stronger, and without that strength, I wouldn’t be the girl I am today. My friends look at me and envy my slender body and my toned stomach. But there’s so much more to me than that. And people recognize that too, which is all that really matters. They recognize my strength and perseverance that comes from my struggle with renal stone disease. They witness my exuberant joy that results from taking full advantage of healthy, happy times after years of suffering and pain. I may appear to have a great body, but my confidence comes more from overcoming time after time after time of painful kidney stone episodes than people complimenting how good I look in my skinny jeans and fitted t-shirt. I live a life of pain, and out of it I am blessed. I will continue a life of pain until the day I die, and I will still try to wiggle and twist and inhale and exhale and squeeze and yell… but I will also smile, because I will overcome.
Engl. 305
10/22/07
Word count: 3,732
Looking Good, Feeling Pain
It’s a lot like knives. It’s like a bunch of knives piercing your most delicate skin. It’s like the stabbing of a wound over and over again in the same spot. These knives move as one element, like a wave of sea water crashing upon edgy rocks. But it’s all going on inside of you, in the tiniest parts of you. You wonder how such a small thing could cause such devastating consequences. But there was no questioning once it hit. Once it hit, I was down for the count. Once it hit, I was uncomfortably aware that my body was under attack, and like a best friend I would do anything to fight for and protect, I would do anything I could to get rid of the pain, to rid my poor, defenseless body of such horrible affliction. My body became so much more precious to me than ever before. So I wiggled and twisted and inhaled and exhaled and squeezed and yelled. Still losing the fight. Pain still unbearable. And so I took my first trip to the emergency room, and so I began walking the path to discovering the cause of all this sudden pain… I was diagnosed with Renal Stone Disease. I was in the 8th grade.
It’s not fair, really. “Isn’t this an old-person’s disease, mom?” I was only thirteen. I started going to see a kidney specialist to figure out the course of action we were going to take to deal with my disorder. There are pills. There are surgeries. There are metal objects that poke and prod and go places I would never say out loud. There are lasers. There are shock waves. There are special diets. There are more tests, more ultrasounds, more x-rays, more radiation. A few days before Christmas, I had another stone episode and ended up in the emergency room for the third time in two weeks. My mom carried me down the three flights of snowy stairs from our apartment to get to the car. “How bad is it, honey?” “Oh Mom… please, make it stop, mom! Just let me die.” Christmas goodies didn’t seem so great, they began to lose their glitter when my immature mind was cluttered with fear and paranoia of the next kidney stone attack.
“A kidney stone is a hard mass that occurs when calcium oxalate or other chemicals in the urine form crystals that stick together. These crystals may grow into stones ranging in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball… Some one million Americans--the majority between the ages of 20 and 40--are treated each year for kidney stones. Kidney stones are more common in men, who account for about four out of five cases.” –The National Kidney Foundation
Over the winter months and into spring, the paranoia consumed me completely. I was always wondering if I would feel that first little pang… if I got a hunger pain or a cramp or anything that might turn into the hours of excruciating kidney stone pain, I was always conscious. Always aware. It might happen at ANY TIME… and there’s nothing I could do to know when. I get dropped off at soccer practice and hear, “drink, drink, drink, Em! Gotta flood out those kidneys!” None of the other kids are thinking about their kidneys as they get out of the car to go play soccer. I end up crying and writhing around in the nurse’s office at school one afternoon. It was the big mile-run day at Indian Hills Jr. High School. The intense heat dehydrated me, as I’m sure it did my classmates also, but my body reacts a little differently than most. I have been a runner all my life, an excellent sprinter. My long legs give me an advantage, and I always ran a successful mile time just a little above average compared to my classmates… until this. I couldn’t finish the mile-run. The knives were back and worse than ever… and I had to explain to the nurse that I had kidney stones. “Really, now that’s interesting… kidney stones in a young thing like you? That’s almost unheard of, isn’t it?” None of the other kids were unable to finish the mile-run in gym that day due to their kidneys. So I spent the rest of the day knocked out from pain medication.
“Stones form twice as often in men as women. The peak age in men is 30 years; women have a bimodal age distribution, with peaks at 35 and 55 years. Once a kidney stone forms, the probability that a second stone will form within five to seven years is approximately 50%.” -Parmar
I entered high school like any other 14-year-old girl. I didn’t know who I was, but I was excited to start a new chapter in my youth. I had a new best friend every month, crushes on all the popular boys, I found out I thrived in my English class and dived in my algebra class. I was a healthy, skinny, athletic blonde with a new haircut and a summer tan. Things change fast though, and they appear differently than they really are. It was a Sunday night in early October, and I fell asleep at 11 o’clock, thinking the next thing I was going to be doing was getting up to go to school. That’s not what happened at all. An hour after falling asleep, I felt my world crash down around me as I realized the pain in my lower-abdomen was not going away and only getting stronger. More knives piercing me over and over again. More waves crushing me. Bricks were piling on top of the knives pushing them harder and harder into my little body. It’s hard to even put the pain into words. After lying in my bed trying to suppress my screams for half an hour, I crawled on my hands and knees in the dark up the stairs to get to my parents’ bedroom. My tears were enough to clue them in on what was going on, so they pulled me into bed with them and tried everything in their power to make me feel better, even though nothing could. I vomited my pain medication back up not even five minutes after I swallowed it, I couldn’t stand nor sit up, I was crying, and all my mom could do was lay next to me and let me squeeze her hand. It was now 4 a.m. and I had had no relief. I had never been in that much pain for that long EVER… I had never imagined it either. It was completely surreal.
“…Usually, the symptom of a kidney stone is extreme pain that has been described as being worse than child labor pains. The pain often begins suddenly as the stone moves in the urinary tract, causing irritation and blockage. Typically, a person feels a sharp, cramping pain in the back and in the side of the area of the kidney or in the lower abdomen, which may spread to the groin.” –The Urology Center of Florida
I had also never been on morphine before. But then again, you would assume most 14-year-olds hadn’t experienced a major narcotic like that. It’s too bad my experience with it almost killed me. I think if I ever did drugs, the way I felt as the nurse stabbed the I.V. into my hand would probably have the same effect. That’s because they mistakenly overdosed me, a lot. We’re talking three milligrams they were supposed to inject versus the ten milligrams they actually gave me. On the bright side, the six hours of straight pain I had gone through by the time I was lying in the emergency room, completely subsided in a matter of seconds. In fact, I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. People were swooping in and out of and around the room in blurs, my mom’s words of worry were muffled and slurred, everyone was on edge and their faces were tense, but I was in another world in my mind. I closed my eyes and thought opening them again might be a little too hard to manage. My body tingled slightly and then it was like a soft darkness veiled over it, like I was covered in a black shroud floating in the sky in some far-off galaxy.
After that, I don’t remember much. I awoke in another room, a real hospital room, the room I would remain for the next three days. I didn’t know why I was awake, it was still very early in the morning… then I found my answer. This is when the vomiting began. If anyone gives you morphine, just remember that it takes away the pain, but it will make your stomach very upset. Don’t ask me why, but I counted… and the official count stopped at twenty-five. Once you vomit twenty-five times, there is obviously no food left in your stomach, so you start to throw up a disgusting substance I learned was called “bile”, a bitter alkaline fluid that comes from your gallbladder. If the hours of leaning over bedpans weren’t bad enough… I got no sleep, I was lonely, I hated the cheery nurses that came in to take my blood pressure and check my I.V., the stench I associate with hospitals made me feel sicker than I already was, I couldn’t hold my head up longer than two seconds, and every now and then I felt waves of kidney pain start and stop like a big tease.
Serious side effects of morphine:
• shallow breathing, slow heartbeat;
• seizure (convulsions);
• cold, clammy skin;
• confusion;
• severe weakness or dizziness; or
• feeling light-headed, fainting.
Less serious side effects are more likely to occur, such as:
• constipation;
• warmth, tingling, or redness under your skin;
• nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, diarrhea, loss of appetite;
• dizziness, headache, anxiety;
• memory problems; or
• sleep problems (insomnia).
It was the longest and cruelest day of my life. I felt like I had the body of an 80-year-old. And when I was finally freed from the cage that hospital had become to me, I NEVER wanted to smell that hospital stench EVER again. Back at home, all I did was lay around. That’s all I really could do. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or walk further than the bathroom without needing someone to help me. My body was going to take a while to adjust back to normal after such a painful experience… and especially because of the heavy use of narcotics I had been exposed to. “Give it a couple weeks, Em… you’ll gain your strength back, just give it time.” But it was too much. I was too young to feel like this, too weak to want to try to get better, and I slipped into a three-fold state of depression: physically, psychologically, and spiritually. I couldn’t look at my dad because I was mad at him for giving me bad genes and looking at him made me want to yell and punch him for the pain he caused me. I couldn’t walk up the stairs without a wave of exhaustion washing over my body, forcing me to grasp the railing like a feeble, old grandmother. I hated God and turned away from Him because He let it happen to me. I stopped praying, I stopped reading my Bible, I stopped going to youth group and church, I stopped everything. I hated anyone I passed by that wasn’t breathing heavily from just walking and moving around. Anyone who was happy and healthy. I looked at them and thought how I used to be just like them before December of my 8th grade year.
The worst was people’s reactions when they found out why I hadn’t been in school for a week. They couldn’t believe I was ailed by such a serious thing. They had no idea what the pain was like. And you could see it on their faces, like when you reveal something really significant to someone and they just sort of take it like they would the weekend gossip. And then after about a week, everyone around you starts to treat you like you’re just fine. Because you’re walking, you’re sitting in class, you’re talking by the lockers with your friends. But inside… inside you’re weak and dead. You have so much healing left to do. So much strength left to gain back. But to the human eye, you look completely normal. I wanted people to understand, I wanted them to know. And I also didn’t want them to know… I wanted to hide it. I struggled with that for a very long time, long after I had gained back most of my physical strength… which took a good two months. When the spring soccer season rolled around, it was time for me to try out for our high school’s team… my first real tryout for a competitive high school sport. After my hospital stay, my visits with my kidney specialist left me with an order to try to “treat” my kidney problems by making sure I was always staying hydrated. Once soccer season arrived, this got much harder. Every time I had to stop and grab an extra drink, I wished I could go back to the careless days at soccer practice when I didn’t once think about preventing such a thing as kidney stones. I performed to my best ability, but sometimes my best wasn’t as good as everyone else because of kidney stones. Sometimes I had to sit on the side lines. Sometimes I had to leave early. Sometimes I couldn’t finish the drills. All because of something inside of me that no one could see. Soccer coaches are accustomed to seeing twisted ankles and torn ACL’s, not kidney stones. They only knew by my facial expression that I was in pain.
“A number of risk factors play major roles in stone formation. The first is loss of body fluids (dehydration). When one does not consume enough fluids during the day, the urine often becomes quite concentrated and darker. This increases the chance that crystals can form from materials within the urine, because there is less fluid available to dissolve them.”
On a steaming day later in the summer, I found myself sitting in the familiar small office of my kidney specialist. I walked through the familiar hospital filled with familiar faces all from sad, tired, weak, old men and women hobbling into the elevators and sitting in their wheelchairs in the waiting rooms. Their silver hair and wrinkled hands looked nothing like my long, blonde hair pulled back in a sporty pony-tail and my athletic little legs in my white soccer shorts, no wrinkles to date. Test results had revealed my fatal flaw. I cocked my head and narrowed my eyes at this peculiar discovery. My body doesn’t produce as much citrate as it should be producing. Therefore, I have the tendency to form kidney stones from the lack of kidney stone inhibitors, which comes from citrate. I have a “metabolic abnormality”.
I glanced back and forth between my doctor and my mom for answers to questions I haven’t formed just yet. I figured out that what he was saying was that this isn’t just a momentary problem. My doctor looked at me when he spoke to me, which was weird because I usually had very little understanding of anything he said… I was just a kid; I kind of wished he would just look at my mom instead. This was all very foreign to me. My mind was probably distracted thinking about when my next soccer game was. But when the words ‘citrate’ and ‘metabolic abnormality’ kept flying out of his mouth, I was hooked. Then I looked to my mom for some kind of assurance that everything was going to be ok no matter what words were coming out of his mouth. “There is a medication we could put you on. It has a good success rate. I hesitate though… you’re extremely young to be worrying about taking a pill twice a day for the rest of your life. Discuss it with your mom, don’t feel rushed, we’ve got plenty of time. I’ll see you guys in a few months.” I listened to my mom tell me she agrees that I am too young to start taking such a long-lasting medication. She didn’t promise a solution, because there really isn’t one. But she always hugged me the right way that told me, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, sweetie, but I’m always going to be right here with you to help you through it.”
“…Potassium citrate attaches to calcium in the urine, preventing the formation of mineral crystals that can develop into kidney stones.”
“…About half of children with stones have an identifiable metabolic disorder, which increases their risk of stone recurrence five-fold.”
When the one-year anniversary for my hospitalization came around, I cheered a little inside. I got on with my sophomore year of high school, feeling older, cooler, and healthy again. And I wish with all of my heart I could end the story here and conclude that I lived happily ever after, but I went down the other path, the path to inexplicable pain. I began making weekly trips to the nurse’s office. They saw me so much that year they told me I was kind of like a daughter to them. They got used to my half-bent over posture walking weakly through the wooden door, continuing on to the back room where the lights remain off and I can lie down for one class period or however long it took. They provided me with a heating pad to hold on my back to help with the frequent muscle spasms I was now getting from my disorder… they didn’t hurt as bad as kidney stones themselves, but felt very similar.
One night in February, I awoke to a horrifying sense of deja-vu. “No, no, no… this cannot be happening again. No, please, not again.” I started begging and pleading with God. I wanted Him to reach out and just suck the stone or stones right out of my body with His own two hands. When I made it upstairs and woke my mom up, it was like I was experiencing the October stone attack all over again, but somehow it was worse, somehow it was even more painful. My mom was so cautious to drive me to the hospital. But I knew what was going on inside of me. I knew it wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. And it didn’t. It went on for three more hours… and I threatened to drive myself to the hospital if she wouldn’t do it, I was so desperate for pain relief, I felt like I could just die from the pressure of the knives. I lay crumpled in the passenger seat as my mom drove at the speed of light to get me to that emergency room. I was wailing and screaming my head off. When they got me into a bed, my body started to convulse uncontrollably from all the pain. They rolled me into the x-ray room as fast as they could, promising pain relief in just a couple more minutes… those minutes felt like hours. At last, they covered me with a heated blanket to help with my convulsions, and they gave me an I.V., carefully checking my wristband the emergency room attendant had attached specifically warning NO MORPHINE, so I didn’t find out until later what narcotic they put me on that time. When I was roused sometime in the afternoon from my sleep, my mom mentioned it was some narcotic called Newbane that doctors said they give to women who are in labor. I was just glad it didn’t make me throw up twenty-five times. I lied in that hospital bed for three days, barely moving, speaking, or existing really. It was depressing.
“Some people are more susceptible to forming kidney stones, and heredity certainly plays a role. The majority of kidney stones are made of calcium, and hypercalciuria (high levels of calcium in the urine), is a risk factor. The predisposition to high levels of calcium in the urine may be passed on from generation to generation. Some rare hereditary diseases also predispose some people to form kidney stones. Examples include people with renal tubular acidosis and people with problems metabolizing a variety of chemicals including cystine (an amino acid), oxalate, (a type of salt), and uric acid (as in gout).”
--eMedicineHealth
One year following my February hospitalization, my mom and sister presented me with a single yellow rose. That rose represented so much to me. In its petals, I saw the pain of my past woven into the pain of my present, and inevitably the pain of my future. But it was yellow, like the sunshine. It was hope. Smelling its sweet fragrance made me calm. I think with every long-lasting problem you are forced to deal with in your life, you have to accept it as being a part of who you are. I don’t like having a kidney stone disease. I don’t wish it upon anyone else. I don’t like that it stained all four years of my high school career with tears and sweat and anger. But it also made me stronger, and without that strength, I wouldn’t be the girl I am today. My friends look at me and envy my slender body and my toned stomach. But there’s so much more to me than that. And people recognize that too, which is all that really matters. They recognize my strength and perseverance that comes from my struggle with renal stone disease. They witness my exuberant joy that results from taking full advantage of healthy, happy times after years of suffering and pain. I may appear to have a great body, but my confidence comes more from overcoming time after time after time of painful kidney stone episodes than people complimenting how good I look in my skinny jeans and fitted t-shirt. I live a life of pain, and out of it I am blessed. I will continue a life of pain until the day I die, and I will still try to wiggle and twist and inhale and exhale and squeeze and yell… but I will also smile, because I will overcome.
Friday, July 27, 2007
2 old poems
I wrote this in early 2006, and it became the inspiration for one of my favorite paintings from my AP Studio Art collection my senior year of high school. Lately I've been trying to take my inspiration and this whirlwind of thoughts and emotions, and put them into poetry.. but I've been having trouble getting a good rhythm, so I've been looking back at old poetry to maybe stir up something.
I'm the queen of fixing grammar errors
but I cannot speak these words
I listen with my heart
but cannot submit to the truth
I'm amazing at smiling through pain
but cannot laugh away your face
I'm great at writing out my feelings
but cannot feel great after I write them
I'm so strong when I'm around you
but cannot hide my weakness when I am not
I'm good at crying out to my Father
but cannot hear what He says back
I'm able to withstand the hard times
but cannot see light at the end of this
I'm joyful whenever you see me
but cannot be happy in my isolation
I'm alright with admitting that I've fallen
but cannot figure out how to rise up
I'm ok with change and adapting
but cannot accept that I'm losing you
I'm the biggest optimist you've ever known
but cannot convince myself you'll ever hug me again
I'm a vigorous fighter in most cases
but cannot fight off the inevitable
I'm skilled in bouncing back
but cannot go anywhere but down
I'm a lover, I'm a dreamer, I'm an artist
but I cannot find the love in this pain
I cannot dream away this nightmare
I cannot paint this hole in my heart.
-----
And this is a poem I wrote actually a little over 2 years ago, in April of 2005.... it inspired my absolute FAVORITE painting, because it made me feel so much as I wrote it, and every time I read over it again... it was easy to represent the tone in beautiful colors. There is nothing I love more than using color to demonstrate how I feel.
All the voices fade away
the colors around me turn to gray
background noises gradually drop out
no more whispers, no murmurs of doubt
Alone I lay, broken on the floor
ever-hopeful heart like an open door
lingering scent upon my soul, I pray:
please stay, oh I pray that you stay
With time on my side I am so high
above mountains of worry and rivers run dry
high I sigh while I glide along a cloud
breaking the silence I SCREAM OUT LOUD
ALIVE I scream and ALIVE I bleed
escape the cage and be free, resist the feed
take heed: the others oppose your heart
their words will wound like a poison dart
Tonight my light guides me down my path
I know not when I will next face your wrath
but somehow dark edges remain on the outside
all I see: a sunset offshore of the restless tide
With water rising ever-presently all around me
fears of drowning swim into view constantly
like millions of grains of sand in my hand
these thoughts will slip through the cracks; I will stand!
-tall! amongst the angry and ignorant crowd
with voices that pierce, I still remain proud
if fight you I must, then FIGHT YOU I WILL
I will protect my heart, MY LOVE YOU CANNOT KILL.
---
<3 the end.
I'm the queen of fixing grammar errors
but I cannot speak these words
I listen with my heart
but cannot submit to the truth
I'm amazing at smiling through pain
but cannot laugh away your face
I'm great at writing out my feelings
but cannot feel great after I write them
I'm so strong when I'm around you
but cannot hide my weakness when I am not
I'm good at crying out to my Father
but cannot hear what He says back
I'm able to withstand the hard times
but cannot see light at the end of this
I'm joyful whenever you see me
but cannot be happy in my isolation
I'm alright with admitting that I've fallen
but cannot figure out how to rise up
I'm ok with change and adapting
but cannot accept that I'm losing you
I'm the biggest optimist you've ever known
but cannot convince myself you'll ever hug me again
I'm a vigorous fighter in most cases
but cannot fight off the inevitable
I'm skilled in bouncing back
but cannot go anywhere but down
I'm a lover, I'm a dreamer, I'm an artist
but I cannot find the love in this pain
I cannot dream away this nightmare
I cannot paint this hole in my heart.
-----
And this is a poem I wrote actually a little over 2 years ago, in April of 2005.... it inspired my absolute FAVORITE painting, because it made me feel so much as I wrote it, and every time I read over it again... it was easy to represent the tone in beautiful colors. There is nothing I love more than using color to demonstrate how I feel.
All the voices fade away
the colors around me turn to gray
background noises gradually drop out
no more whispers, no murmurs of doubt
Alone I lay, broken on the floor
ever-hopeful heart like an open door
lingering scent upon my soul, I pray:
please stay, oh I pray that you stay
With time on my side I am so high
above mountains of worry and rivers run dry
high I sigh while I glide along a cloud
breaking the silence I SCREAM OUT LOUD
ALIVE I scream and ALIVE I bleed
escape the cage and be free, resist the feed
take heed: the others oppose your heart
their words will wound like a poison dart
Tonight my light guides me down my path
I know not when I will next face your wrath
but somehow dark edges remain on the outside
all I see: a sunset offshore of the restless tide
With water rising ever-presently all around me
fears of drowning swim into view constantly
like millions of grains of sand in my hand
these thoughts will slip through the cracks; I will stand!
-tall! amongst the angry and ignorant crowd
with voices that pierce, I still remain proud
if fight you I must, then FIGHT YOU I WILL
I will protect my heart, MY LOVE YOU CANNOT KILL.
---
<3 the end.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
a bad way to start the morning off.
and she takes it all in
one breath, one heart
in that moment
she feels stripped
all at once
and it makes her sick
as she feels everything
rushing through her veins
draining her of hope
of all goodness
how can it all be felt at once
without breaking down?
she's sickened at the thought
as she relives every second
that left her empty
as she feels
the abandonment, the rejection
the shock of not mattering
the disbelief of not being enough
the lack of kindness...
after everything she's been through!
the betrayal of a friend
the bitterness, the disloyalty
the anger swelling up inside
the pain of her past
the pain of her present
and the pain that will
remain forever.
no one deserves to be treated like that
when treatment is your job
and you do nothing
you refuse care
to the ones who need care the most
to the ones who cry out for help
no one deserves that.
----------------------------------------------
Today, life slapped me in the face. Today, my distrust of the medical professionals who claim to want to help, was confirmed and enhanced. I have always been cautious around doctors, skeptical... and now right when I think I'm actually beginning to trust, I get thrown out like I'm just some joe-schmo who doesn't matter, because I'm just another patient, I'm just another number... my life, health and well-being doesn't REALLY matter after all, I can be handed off from doctor to doctor, never getting the right treatment, always having to start over and explain the same painful story over and over and OVER again to some doctor who looks me in the eye and pretends to be all concerned and trying to help, when really, they're just going to end up like all the others who have abandoned me and given up on me. Don't you dare refuse to see me, after everything I've been through, don't you begin to "phase-out" seeing your patients without telling my family what the hell is going on, while I go weeks of feeling pain that doubles me over and leaves me depressed and exhausted.......
I feel so unimportant, and worthless. The sick shouldn't be treated like that, the sick should be encouraged and loved and feel like they're worth any kind of treatment or care that will help them have a better life, like they're valuable.
It isn't fair, it isn't right.
the end.
one breath, one heart
in that moment
she feels stripped
all at once
and it makes her sick
as she feels everything
rushing through her veins
draining her of hope
of all goodness
how can it all be felt at once
without breaking down?
she's sickened at the thought
as she relives every second
that left her empty
as she feels
the abandonment, the rejection
the shock of not mattering
the disbelief of not being enough
the lack of kindness...
after everything she's been through!
the betrayal of a friend
the bitterness, the disloyalty
the anger swelling up inside
the pain of her past
the pain of her present
and the pain that will
remain forever.
no one deserves to be treated like that
when treatment is your job
and you do nothing
you refuse care
to the ones who need care the most
to the ones who cry out for help
no one deserves that.
----------------------------------------------
Today, life slapped me in the face. Today, my distrust of the medical professionals who claim to want to help, was confirmed and enhanced. I have always been cautious around doctors, skeptical... and now right when I think I'm actually beginning to trust, I get thrown out like I'm just some joe-schmo who doesn't matter, because I'm just another patient, I'm just another number... my life, health and well-being doesn't REALLY matter after all, I can be handed off from doctor to doctor, never getting the right treatment, always having to start over and explain the same painful story over and over and OVER again to some doctor who looks me in the eye and pretends to be all concerned and trying to help, when really, they're just going to end up like all the others who have abandoned me and given up on me. Don't you dare refuse to see me, after everything I've been through, don't you begin to "phase-out" seeing your patients without telling my family what the hell is going on, while I go weeks of feeling pain that doubles me over and leaves me depressed and exhausted.......
I feel so unimportant, and worthless. The sick shouldn't be treated like that, the sick should be encouraged and loved and feel like they're worth any kind of treatment or care that will help them have a better life, like they're valuable.
It isn't fair, it isn't right.
the end.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
"pull it together boy- you don't look so well..."
"i close my eyes and pretend you're sitting here with me
while i try to put my finger on exactly what it was that made you leave
and it took some time to walk away from that
and it took some time to walk away from that
and time is all that i have." -the wedding
I don't think there is anything worse than a writer who cannot seem to come up with anything great to write. Especially when they're thirsting for something great, not just something ok, not just something to fill up space, not just something good... something great. Whenever I post lyrics and nothing but lyrics, it means that I essentially could not come up with anything of my own creation to write. I have to turn to the inspirations of others. Others far more creative, far more successful, far more talented, far more anything that I would hope to be.
But that is an interesting verse up above.
I just watched Nacho Libre with James and Aubrey, and I thought it was hilarious.
I'm going to 8:30 church in the morning and I'm going to make Aubrey poop her pants probably for doing so. If that really happened, I don't know what I'd do. But wow that would be a funny sight..... for sure.
<3
while i try to put my finger on exactly what it was that made you leave
and it took some time to walk away from that
and it took some time to walk away from that
and time is all that i have." -the wedding
I don't think there is anything worse than a writer who cannot seem to come up with anything great to write. Especially when they're thirsting for something great, not just something ok, not just something to fill up space, not just something good... something great. Whenever I post lyrics and nothing but lyrics, it means that I essentially could not come up with anything of my own creation to write. I have to turn to the inspirations of others. Others far more creative, far more successful, far more talented, far more anything that I would hope to be.
But that is an interesting verse up above.
I just watched Nacho Libre with James and Aubrey, and I thought it was hilarious.
I'm going to 8:30 church in the morning and I'm going to make Aubrey poop her pants probably for doing so. If that really happened, I don't know what I'd do. But wow that would be a funny sight..... for sure.
<3
Thursday, June 07, 2007
"We should get jerseys 'cause we make a great team, but yours would look better than mine 'cause you're out of my league"
I took a college creative writing class my senior year of high school, and one of our assignments was to write ourselves a letter of encouragement to keep writing. My teacher said she would send them to us at a random time after we graduated. I had totally forgotten about the whole thing! But yesterday, I got a letter in the mail, and it was in my handwriting..... and it was that letter! I read it and it seriously almost made me cry. Actually, I couldn't even believe I had written those words. But... obviously, I did. Soooo... I thought if there were any other writers out there (which, I know there are), I would show you what my letter said... it actually was a HUGE encouragement about writing, so, here it is if you want to read it:
Dearest Emily (or, insert your name here),
You're still writing poetry, right? You're still keeping notebooks and notebooks and notebooks full of your thoughts, memories, and feelings on your daily life? Don't ever forget how much you LOVE doing that, and how much JOY it brings to your heart. Keep writing! Remember this quote from the sweet movie Finding Forrester: "The first key to writing... is to write. Not think." Sit down at your computer and just start typing! You don't need to think about what you're going to type- just do it. No matter where you are in your life right now, take a moment and remember how passionately you feel about writing. Just because you read over what you've written and you realize that it is possibly the worst thing you've ever written... no worries! "You write the first draft with your heart. You rewrite it with your head." Your heart is sometimes going to produce one big mess of stuff on the paper or on the screen because at times your heart will feel like one big mess, but don't fret about it- because that's natural and it doesn't mean you're a bad writer. You can always go back and polish something off and make it better. You learn as you go what worked great and what did not work at all. You make mistakes as a writer, but just like anything else in your life- you learn from them and move on. The world is not always going to praise you for what you write- no matter if it's your best friend, or a complete stranger, or some prestigious professor critiquing your pieces, never forget: "What we write for ourselves is always better than what we write for others." Ultimately, you write for yourself, Em. You write because you love writing, and strangely you somehow understand your life better when you put things down on paper or on a screen. It is a special thing that makes you the person that you are and the person that you always will be. Remember that you can write about ANYTHING! Write letters to God, write your prayers and your worries and your fears to Him. THe possibilities are endless. You can write about hysterical things that happened during your day, you can writer about your crazy antics with your friends, love, and music. You can evenwrite about a bad time you hadt that you now understand had to happen in order to bring you to where you are right this second. All of these things (and SO much more) are significant in your life and deserve to be documented because you have a gift, Em- a gift of writing! Not only are you good at it, but you enjoy finishing a poem and looking back at it years later and remembering how you felt when you wrote it. Don't even try to deny it! Don't lose that joy. If you have been neglecting to write lately, don't even worry- start again today! The important thing... is just to WRITE. And remember... Jesus loves you no matter HOW crappy your first draft is. :-)
Love, yourself :-)
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