The change

On the outside I’m just a normal twenty-one year old girl; brown hair, green eyes and just over five feet tall. I belong to the average Canadian family with a mother, a father and a sister. I live at home with my parents in a house on a lake. We’ve got three dogs that all come from different places and entered our lives at different times for different reasons.

When you get inside things start to get interesting. Everything is mixed up together into one big pot and when that’s all put together you get to see who I really am. This concoction has created someone who is still learning to understanding what is going on around her, someone who relies heavily on her family for strength, and someone who tries to see life for what it really is.

The most recent event in my life that completely altered me happened around a year ago. It created a deep rooted anger and frustration that I am still trying to cope with. My view on the world completely changed, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I’m exhausted most of the time; I’m a home-body and I barely have the energy to deal with the normal dramatic episodes of a twenty-one year old.
You hear stories about people who’ve gotten sick and feel bad for them. It’s near impossible to predict what it’s like until you or someone you love has gone through it. I was told it is like when an emergency happens and the people directly affected don’t react the way that people outside the danger-zone do. This is exactly how I seem to feel most of the time. My strength has allowed me to return to school and strive for normality. This god-awful experience has been horrendous for my family and close friends. They keep telling me to take things slowly and that if I need to take more time to finish my degree then that’s fine. But honestly it’s not. When I was told about having a brain tumor I decided I was going to continue living a normal life. I don’t know what I was thinking to make myself such an outrageous promise. My life has changed so much in the past year that it’s difficult for me to even connect the dots between the two. I look at people and think about what their honest priorities are in their life and I tend to like them less. I am constantly searching for comfort from my family when I have my regular melt-downs from the magnitude of my situation. My family has turned into my rock throughout my illness. Friends have withered and become unreliable but I always know that my family will be there for me when I’m in the hospital and when I’m home and healthy again.

Those days of the narcissism and complete ignorance seem well in my past and I look forward to the day when I can honestly say that I’m healthy again. I know that no matter what my future holds my family will be there to hold my hand and bring me home.