let me tell you something
when I was 10, my doctor grandmother told my parents I needed to be checked out. she thought my neck looked too big for my age. a ‘goitre’, she called it. I tried not to be offended.
she saved my life once, when I was a baby. “grey and grunting”, is how my mother described me, her firstborn child, when talking about my first hours. fluid on my lungs; I breathed in too early, too eager to get here. I spent some time in the NICU.
when I was 10, my mother dragged me down a hallway and held me down as a phlebotomist jammed a butterfly needle into my tiny veins. it’s a bit blurry, actually, when I try to remember it now.
when I was 10, my grandmother was right. it runs in the family, her blood in me, her disease eating away at my flesh, my body turning on itself. my antibodies are through the roof, I was told. it will happen soon.
when I was twelve, I passed out in front of my whole grade. I was in the back row of the choir, the tallest girl in the grade, and I grazed both of my elbows on the concrete. a teacher carried me out as everyone stared. the nurse said it was the heat.
when I was thirteen I couldn’t breathe. I raised my hand and collapsed on the bench of the netball court and my coach told me I needed to run more. I was unfit. I told my mother in the car and she agreed. I’ve been staying up too late on my phone. it’s been getting hard to sleep. I said it feels like something is pressing on my throat and she looked, frowning at the lump that wasn’t there before.
when I was thirteen I put on my headphones and let them plunge a butterfly needle through my see through skin and milk the vein pumping there, because I’m scared of what will happen if I don’t. I wiggle my toes and turn up the volume and remember it’s no different to when I drew my own blood just like my friend taught me to.
when I was thirteen I was called out of spanish class half an hour after my mother dropped me off at school, fifteen hours after they patched up the puncture wound in my elbow that blossomed bright purple by the morning. she said I needed to go to the doctor. my mother explained in the car, in words small enough for me to digest:
you have graves’ disease. it’s an autoimmune condition. it means your immune system is attacking an organ in your neck called your thyroid, which produces important hormones that regulate your metabolism. your hormones are way out of the normal levels, which is why you’ve been feeling so sick.
when I was thirteen, my mother took me to ultrasounds and blood tests and appointments and scans and I slept and didn’t sleep and cried and didn’t cry and everything turned to shit around me, burning in steaming plumes as I watched, careless to how it all ended.
when I was thirteen, they decided to cut the disease out of me. a five inch incision between my collarbones was all it took to rid me of the growth that was eating away at my life. I closed my eyes in my favourite shirt and woke up bare with an oxygen mask around my face. they fed me a pineapple flavoured zooper dooper, and I posed for the pictures for my mother’s warrior post on facebook.
when I was thirteen they let me go home and I got flowers and cards and for the first time ever, it might have looked as serious as it felt, or at least they way they looked at me felt serious. I shrunk to the size of pea in the starchy hospital sheets and they sent me home the next day, one organ down and wobbling over unsteady feet.
when the nurse asked if I needed a wheelchair to get back to the car, my mother said I could walk. and so I walked.
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