The scolding hot summer was my last bit of relief before an unwarranted sickness came about me this January. My definition of being healthy left me weary, lethargic and dull coming into my first semester of college. That summer I was thriving. Going to the gym 6 times a week, maintaining a strict diet and getting my 8 hours of sleep each night. I put on 10 pounds of lean muscle that summer! This past January I was struck with an enigma that still to this day I can’t explain.
At a young age I was told that I had a small miniscule hole in my heart which I would recently be told was called congenital heart disease. My doctor and even a cardiologist I attended told me that this hole was nothing jeopardizing and that I can carry on with any physical activity without any sort of restriction. A few years after that I had another heath scare, but this time it was a serious operation where I needed to have my appendix removed. The appendix is one of those intestines in your body that nobody really cares about but if the operation goes bad or if the appendix is inflamed enough without notice it will KILL you. With the appendix removed I lost an essential part of my already faulty body of mine, one that kept healthy gut bacteria in check. This was 2014. The years ongoing would be a relief with my middle school and high school years being a breeze for me health-wise. My health slowly became background noise that should not interfere with my everyday life. My ignorance to how sensitive the human body really is once again came to bite me in the ass.
I brought up how much I was thriving this summer in order to make a juxtaposition to how I am doing at this moment of time because after this summer things would change. One of those things to change was the weather. My body normally reacts terribly to the change of weather from the end of summer to the fall/winter and once again one of those expected bursts of sickness had hit me. A cold that kept me at home for 2-3 days that would go away and would leave me to commence my days of school/work. Walking into November I once again began to feel sick but this time in the form of fevers, chills and headaches. This new wave of sickness would fluctuate where one day I was sweating in bed in the morning and shivering at night to another day feeling perfectly fine. This sickness would span until the beginning of January where I had finally decided to go to a doctor to explain what was going on. After a few blood tests I was told my defenses were low and that my white blood cell count was high and my red blood cells low leaving the doctors no other choice but to prescribe me daily antibiotic pills. Things would get worse as my lungs and rib area began to feel inflamed making it hard to breathe. This was the breaking point of this sickness. I went to the ER. I was told that I had developed Pneumonia, an infection in the lungs which I didn’t know was rapidly moving closer to my heart. Remember that hole in my heart which I brought up earlier…well, it landed there. The odds of this happening was unexplainable and the reasoning in which my heart had become compromised by this infection was a mystery. This infection reached that opening and needed to be removed as soon as possible with open heart surgery.
Coming home was a big moment of reflection for me because I was stuck with an IV on my arm with a line attached to a 5 pound device of antibiotics pumping for 24 hours. I lost 30 pounds from summer and had 4 weeks ahead of me isolated from the outside world. It was January 20th 2024 when I was able to come home from the hospital and I felt defeated and ultimately humbled. It’s easy for us humans to ignore our health and the scars we are left with from this infinite stack of cards which we can be dealt. Within this dreadful couple of weeks I made the realization that us humans are genuinely nothing without stable health. We would not be stressing about school or work or expectations we place on ourselves if we did not have the functionality to carry out these kinds of things. That thriving summer I had no thought to the millions of people in the hospital for health issues who needed to be working, who needed to be in school for reasons of their own need. I would now be able to utilize such a philosophy in order to act more cautious throughout my daily life and to even sympathize with a larger crowd of people with even greater sicknesses in their daily life, physical or mental.