• I’m sure everyone has a few runs of bad luck, but do their runs last weeks, months… even years? I guess there are people who have had it worse then me… and perhaps the reason I’m so ****ed up has to do with my defiance to God. Sure, I was born Christian… I even went to church and Sunday school for awhile. Eventually, I saw that my life wasn’t getting any better, but I didn’t think I did anything wrong. Well, maybe I did, but I couldn’t remember what it was if it actually happened.

    The start of my bad luck happened when I was very young… maybe a year old. I guess it was my own stupidity though.
    -I wonder what this strange shaped thing is… - My under developed mind must have thought when I saw the strange looking wasp nest standing before me. I wonder what was going through my mind when I stuck my hand into it, I wonder what I was thought I was going to find. Well, I found something all right. And all the medicine in the world would never make that pain die down. Every inch of my body was a throbbing red, and I couldn’t stop crying. The pain I felt is faded in my memories, but if I think back hard enough, I can still remember it, and the itch.

    That one bad event was a small one, but then bad events began to branch off of it, destroying any hope I might have had when I was younger. I had smaller mishaps, like wetting myself and being bit by an animal, but so did almost everyone, not counting those that live in bubbles. Though I guess even the bubble boy must have wet his pants as a child. I was different from the others though, and my pain had just begun. I would experience broken bones and a broken heart, along with disorders after disorders.
    I’m not too sure how young I was… maybe three or four, when my family and I went down to visit my grandparents at their house by the lake. I loved that house, and I still remember the smell of the rotting fish-flies filling my nostrils. As sick as it may sound, I miss the sweet smell of decomp, the fishy smell of flesh being slowly rotted off of those small little insects. Not that I didn’t love those insects, I’d play with them until they died in my hand, and then I wouldn’t cry, not knowing what death even was. Inside of the house was always warm, cozy, and sweet smelling, a contradiction to outside. I remember a rocking horse that I would always play on, the spring squeaking with every single ‘Giddy-up!’. And I vaguely remember that day, and the thoughts that filled my head. I remember seeing Aubrey grab a pillow from the guest bed, the one that sat in the middle to separate us. She dragged it over to the stairs and threw it, giggling as we watched it tumble down. A few more times she did so, until our mother came around the corner. Then our mother told us,
    “Stop playing on the stairs, someone is going to get hurt!”
    Hurt? I didn’t know the meaning of it! But she had told us to stop, because it was bad. As a little child, that was a total invitation for me. I took the pillow at the bottom of the stairs, and dragged it up. I went to throw, when suddenly I thought:
    -How do you throw again?-
    That’s right, I didn’t remember how to throw, so, obviously, I didn’t let go. I tried to stop myself, but for some strange reason, the pillow weighed more then I thought. It dragged me down with it, and I went tumbling down the stairs. I can’t remember anything passed when I started to fall; the fear and pain made me un-able to remember a thing. I’m quite thankful for that… it’s one less memory that can make me sting.
    Thankfully, I didn’t die; I only broke my collar bone. At the time I bet I would have liked to die a little bit more.
    After that incident, I suddenly became obsessed with the thought of death. Every night I thought I was going to die, and even if I did fall asleep, I had nothing but nightmares. I seriously don’t remember having one good dream in my young childhood. I’d have night terrors, waking up sweating or crying, then rushing to my parent’s rooms in fear. I seemed to have a lot of dreams of being stabbed in my stomach, and it didn’t really help that when woke up, my stomach hurt very much. It was horrible pain, and it felt like my stomach was trying to find it’s way out of my body, pushing against the walls…

    Shortly after the stair accident, I ended up sick with a bad cold and whooping cough. I felt like I was going to cough up a lung or two, it was so dry and itchy. Later we would find out that the whooping cough caused me to have asthma. My first known disease. They had also figured out that I had a skin disease called eczema. It wasn’t too un-common, thankfully, but as a child, I felt like a freak. Only four, and I already broke a bone, and was diagnosed with two diseases.

    Finally though, I thought my life was going to turn right around. I was going to go to school! I was so excited, though a little afraid, and unlike high school, I didn’t stay lonely for long. It seemed like only seconds of being in the class I had found two of my lifelong friends, Laura and Brittany King. They were cousins, and my best friends. I also had two…hm…very young crushes, one of them being a young Trevor Fryer. Although, it might have been because he invited me to his fifth birthday… I had never been to a birthday party before! Kindergarten seemed like it would be a great start… though ‘seemed’ was the a good word for it. At Trevor’s birthday party, I would receive my second broken bone, one the bones in my lower arm. I won’t go into much detail with this, but basically, I was trying to copy the older kids, who were jumping into the ball pit by standing on the side. Being as un-balanced as I was, I fell, holding out my arm to stop myself. I still remember every moment… the sound of my crunching bones…
    Anyways, while my friends were eating cake and playing games, I was getting a cast. Whoope.
    At least we got the place shut-down.

    School wasn’t all it was cracked out to be, though I was naïve to this at first. I mean, I had best friends, I loved to learn, and there was even a music class! It looked great… but I was still in the primary grades… just wait until I grow up.
    Anyways, my life was rather calm until I turned seven. The pain in my stomach and the nightmares seemed to get worse and worse. Every night I expected to wake up in heaven or in hell, so every night I prayed. Prayed for my family to live on, prayed for god to take me away, so the pain would stop. Eventually I figured out the problem.
    It seemed that my stomach only hurt when I ate. Well, that’s great, but at least I knew the cause of it. My mother didn’t believe that I was in pain anymore, since I complained so often she thought I was lying to get out of school. I had to stop the pain so I didn’t have to deal with the depression any longer. I started to hide my food, or just eat very little. I gave my lunch to my friends every day, and since it was food, they didn’t question it. The pain slowly stopped, but I got skinnier and skinnier. Soon, the pain was from lack of nutrients and food. I still couldn’t sleep at night, because I could feel my ribs digging into the mattress. My mother knew there was something defiantly wrong, so she took me to the doctors many times, and they all thought it was mono. Mono? MONO? I thought they were supposed to be professionals! Finally, it got so bad, that I went to the hospital, on the brink of death. It was February, just before Valentines Day, and I was eight. They said they were going to do a ‘colonoscopy’, whatever that was. Well, now I know. Basically, they stick a camera up your a**s into your digestive tract, and try to see the problem.
    So, I had to drink this concoction to clean out my system, Go-Litely, or something in that matter. I drank so much… and it tasted like chalk. In the hospital, I made a friend. Her name was Robyn. She had anorexia, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. We played Mario Kart on the Nintendo system every day, having fun together, joking around. She was an angel. I’ve only seen her once since I was out of the hospital, working at a movie theater. She looked so healthy, so beautiful. The weight she put on made me smile, she looked great. I still wish to this day that I could see her again, and maybe one day I will. I still have hope that she will get over the battle.
    Anyways, back to the story. I had drunk nine cups when I finally quit, it was about eleven pm, and I was so tired. They told me I still needed to clean out my system, so they gave me the choice of having a tube put down my nose, down into my stomach. I agreed. As soon as the started sticking it in, I had second thoughts. My mother had to hold me down, telling me how brave I was. I was pretty brave, I barely cried, though I still was depressed, wanting to die. On Valentines Day, I had the Colonoscopy. They determined that I had Ulcerative Colitis, a disease where you get ulcers in your stomach when the lining of mucus is too thin. Score at eight years old: Broken bones: 2, Physical diseases known: 3.