Thanks, Mommy Dearest.

My mother is concerned that I'm not getting laid. If that didn't surprise you, just you wait and read the stories I am about to tell you.

When I was fifteen, I tore my MCL during a basketball game. I was a point guard (I mean, does it surprise you that I needed to be in control of the ball? Didn't think so) and I stupidly got caught in a trap along the sideline. Unfortunately, none of my teammates came to the ball to help, so I tried to maneuver my way out of it by doing a crossover dribble. I tried to slide around the defender, and it almost worked, except my right foot was caught with her left foot, causing my knee to move, but not my foot, resulting in the worst physical pain that I've ever felt.

I received an immobilizer at the emergency room and made an appointment with an Orthopedic surgeon. The day of my appointment, I was sitting in the wheelchair when I started to get clammy, a cold sweat was washing over me. I knew I was going to black out. "Mom, I'm going to pass out," I said nonchalantly. She did what any mother would do; screamed for help. It was too late, I passed out and awakened relatively quickly. This wasn't the first time I had passed out, so I knew the signs of it and knew I woke awaken to everyone around me panicking.

When I was 13, I went through an episode of passing out for about 3-4 days. My pediatrician chalked it up to some kind of weird virus and me not getting enough nutrients. I couldn't get out of bed for those few days, and when I did, I would black out. It scared the shit out of my parents, but when it seemed to go away, they quit worrying, as did I. So, when I started to pass out again after tearing my MCL, the doctors told me it was because I was in too much pain. This seemed odd to me because I wasn't in an excruciating amount of pain at the moment. When it happened, I could see myself passing out, but I hadn't, so why would I pass out now?

Fast forward to three weeks later. I was about to finish my first semester of high school. I was in physics class, taking the final, and thinking about how much time I would waste during Christmas Break because of my knee injury. I finished my test, straightened up in the stool, and felt the cold, clammy sweat that I knew meant I was going to pass out. Oh fuckkkkk, why here?! "Mr. K, Mr. K. I...I'm going to pass out," I said breathlessly as I tried to stay conscious. I never saw a man react quicker than he did. He kind of did a deer in the headlights oh shit what do I do look, but he ran to get the nurse quickly enough. My classmates looked at me oddly, but I wasn't concerned about that. I knew I couldn't move without passing out, but I didn't want to fall and crack my head open, so I leaned my head on the table.

The nurse and my teacher came running in. The nurse rolled a computer chair to me and I transferred into it. She rolled me to the back room and I laid on the floor. I was relieved because sometimes when I lay down, if I did it fast enough, it could prevent me from going unconscious. The nurse knew my mom was home because she had known my older sister for four years and knew that my mom had quit her job to stay with my youngest sister. The nurse took my blood pressure. Her eyes worried me as she read out, "84/56, pulse is...18." What the fuck!! I had been to enough doctor's appointments and listened to my dad talk about various patients he had taken care of on calls (he's a firefighter/paramedic) to know that those numbers were not good.

The nurse called the ambulance as I started to panic. I felt like I couldn't breathe, not because of a pressure or anything, but like I didn't have enough energy to fill my lungs with air. Since my family only lives a few minutes from the high school, my mom was there almost instantaneously. She took one look at me and I could see the concern in her face. I didn't know what I looked like, but I knew it wasn't good.

The paramedics came in and carted me off. I tried to persuade them to wait a few minutes because passing period had just ended and I knew there would be some lurkers still in the hallways. "Sorry, we need to go now, honey," the lady paramedic replied. As I was wheeled out, several people saw me. Two of my teammates saw me and asked what happened, but they wouldn't stop to let me answer. As I exited the school on a stretcher, my fifteen year old self-conscience idiot self was mortified. Even more so as I glanced up to the second story and saw a boy who was a senior who had been in my spanish class. I didn't know it at the time, but he was on his way to the bathroom when he saw the flashing lights of the ambulance. He was in art class with my older sister at the time and forgot about the bathroom as he ran back to the class to tell my sister that I was being taken away on a stretcher. My sister, in turn, looked at her teacher, who told her to find the principal and ask what happened. The nurse informed my sister of what happened, and since my sister was a senior and had a car on campus, they allowed her to leave school.

Anyway, I felt strange in the ambulance. I had been in them several times before when my family would visit my dad at the firehouse, but I had never been in one where I was the patient. The lady paramedic talked to me as she started an IV and affixed the nasal pillows in my nostrils for the oxygen. I was scared shitless. My mom was following us in our van because she had my four year old sister with her. Shit, what am I going to do about my other finals? I seriously was worried about my grades. I needed to keep good grades if I wanted to get an athletic scholarship. My pitching coach for softball had told me that the better your academics are, the more attractive you are to universities.

As the paramedics wheeled me into the hospital, I saw the familiar face of a nurse, who asked what I was doing here...again. As the paramedics read off terms I didn't understand, her face changed and I was getting pissed at these people. Was something so seriously wrong that I could see it in their facial expressions?

My mom ran in a few minutes later, and after her, my dad came rushing in. By this time, I was hooked up to several moniters and I could hear my heart beat on a monitor. My dad listened to it as he looked at the monitor and glanced at his watch. This wasn't good. My dad would usually be joking around. He put his index finger and middle finger on the inside of my wrist and pushed, trying to feel for a pulse. I started crying because I was scared. The woman on the other side of the curtain farted and I smiled through my tears as my dad told me everything would be okay. I nodded and asked when a doctor would come see me. My dad tapped on the electrodes attached to my chest and said, "That'll bring them in."

Sure enough, a doctor came in soon after. The doctor pulled my parents outside as a nurse checked my vitals. I couldn't hear what he was saying to them, but my parents came back in, looking more worried than before. "Ok," the doctor began, "I know you're wondering what's going on and everything. I'll tell you, and your dad can explain some of the more difficult words to understand when I'm done. What's going on is that you're having irregular heartbeats. Sometimes it's normal to have these, but you're having them too often and too close together. Your heart isn't working properly. Unfortunately, we aren't specialized enough here at this hospital to take care of you, so you'll be transferred right away."

My eyes were wide open as I tried to catch my breath. An alarm went off on the monitor, signaling a period of trigeminal preventricular contractions (PVCs). My mom and dad told me they would be with me at the new hospital and that everything would be okay. During the forty minute drive to the other hospital, I didn't think about the magnitude of the situation. I only thought about my knee hurting because it was something I could concentrate on.

At the new hospital, I was wheeled into the PICU because I wasn't old enough to go to the regular Intensive Care Unit. Several nurses hooked me up to new monitors and took my vitals and asked how I was feeling as they jotted down notes. It was a whirlwind of activity that I can distinctly remember. It was a huge clusterfuck and I wanted out. My mom and dad came in and my mom was crying. I hate to see my mom cry, it's like watching puppies being kicked. Doctors came in to see me and to talk to my parents. While they were outside a nurse came in and asked if I needed anything. "Umm...I'm kind of hungry. I missed lunch, could I get something to eat?" She smiled and brought me in a bologna sandwich, my favorite. For that moment, everything was right, I had the comfort of bologna sandwiches filling my stomach.

Lunch got cut short when a woman wheeled in an electrocardiogram machine to take a type of ultrasound of my heart. She splooged a bunch of lube on it and opened up my new uniform for the next week: a pretty, open-in-the-front, hospital gown. My boob popped out and I tried to cover it up, but it didn't matter. By the end of my first hospital stay, I didn't care who saw my tits anymore if it meant I could get the fuck out of there.

A few hours later, a cardiologist came in to talk to me and my family. "What's going on is a type of cardiomyopathy, basically a disease of the heart. Your daughter is having too many PVCs, which is making the heart work extremely hard. Because of this, her heart has weakened significantly as well as grown. Right now, her heart should be about the size of my fist, but it's probably around the size of a large cantaloupe. We're going to monitor her and medicate her and run some more tests." I looked at my parents because I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. Heart problem? I knew it couldn't be because of high blood pressure or high cholesterol...so how did this happen? My dad asked what my EF was. I had no idea what this meant. "Well, we haven't measured her ejection fraction yet, but her heart is functioning around 9-12%." Fuckkkkkk. I didn't know then that normal hearts don't function at 100%, but normally at around 55-60%. Still bad, but not as bad as what I was thinking.

My mom cried harder and I zoned out. During the next week, I would sleep about 20-21 hours of the day. My heart couldn't take care of my body, so I slept. I would wake up to eat and when the doctors came in, but other than that, I was out of it. I'd periodically hear my mom sobbing while talking to the nurses and doctors and I could feel my dad squeeze my fingers or push my shins to see how long it took for the blood to pool back.

By now it was Christmas time and I wanted to be at home. Because of medication, my arrythmia was relatively stable. I had met with an electrophysiologist to discuss the electrial misfirings of my heart, which causes the arrythmias. I performed a tilt-table test, which did not make me pass out, so the problem was internal, not external, which I thought we had already cleared up, but you know how doctors are.

I was released, but the doctors knew I would be back because the problem was not fixed. We had Christmas "day" the day I returned home because we wanted to make sure it was done as a family and not with me in the hospital. Soon enough, the doctors called. "We'd like to make an appointment with your daughter to schedule an implantation of a AICD." A what? An Automatic Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator. The doctors told me that the medication was helping me, but I was still at risk for sudden death due to the arrythmias. I didn't know this at the time, but I was later informed that if I had passed out that day in physics, I would not have woken up. It was my body's last straw, and once I would have gone unconcious, there was slight chance to regain it.

I panicked. I never had a surgery where doctors would need to cut me up really. My boyfriend at the time, whose mother was a nurse, tried to assure me that it was no big deal, this happens everyday. Yeah, but not to fifteen year old girls...why can't you just say, 'you're right, baby. It's scary.' This would eventually lead to our breakup, his denying that I was "sick". Anyways, the day of my surgery came. The stupid bitch nurse couldn't find a vein in my hand, which was weird because they never had trouble before. She fished around, trying to catch one, when I asked her to stop and find someone else. When she left the room, my dad slid the needle in effortlessly and painlessly. I said bye to parents and kissed them as I was wheeled into the scariest fucking room I've ever seen. It was all white with a giant bright light in the center and smelled of sterilization chemicals. I tried to be brave as they got everything ready, but I really wanted to puke when I saw the scalpel that would be slicing me open. Soon enough, I was passed out under anesthia and waking up in recovery, feeling like I was choking because there was an incubation tube down my throat. I thought I was dying, but lucky me, I wasn't.

After the time in recovery, I went through a weird phase. I pushed around at the incision, feeling the cookie-sized impant in my chest. I looked at the stitches and thought about the other scars on my body and how this one would be the longest story to tell.

I went back to school and hated walking into a room where everyone would stare at me. "Oh look, there's the girl that almost died from a cocaine OD," "Oh, that chick had a heart attack!" or my personal favorite, "Dude, I totally thought you were dead!" Well, thanks for the concern, fucktard, but I'm not.

One day in March, I came home feeling like my legs were itchy. I rolled up my jeans to look at calves the size of watermelons. God dammit. Off to the ER I go. This time, I was informed that I had pericarditis. The pericardium is a teensy tiny little son of a gun that lines the heart. Mine became inflammed because of the foreign object in my body. Understandable. Once again, I would be going under for surgery, this time to remove the excess fluid around my heart that the diuretics couldn't take care of.

I woke up from a nap, which was all I did at the hospital, to the doctors talking to my mom about steriods. Steroids? I never took steroids. The docs put me on massive amounts of prednisone for about three months. I don't remember a lot that happened during this time because they made me bat-shit crazy. I'm not even sure how I managed not to kill myself during that time, and I'm being completely honest when I say that. When I was on steriods I was a different person. Not only physically because of the weight gain and acne, but mentally. I wanted to kill myself constantly. I was angry most of the time and if I wasn't angry then I was crying and pitying myself. I was a bitch to everyone and I felt ostracized by all my peers, which wasn't much of a hallucination, but it only added to my depression. Late at night, I would sneak down into the kitchen and grab our biggest butcher knife and hold the cold steel against my wrists, thinking that it was completely logical to do this if I didn't actually cut into the skin deep enough.

Needless to say, I was fucked up. About a month after I got off the steriods, fragments of me returned, but I was still different. I didn't go out. I didn't talk to anyone. I tried desparetly to win my ex-boyfriend back. I thought my little sister was my only friend. Every now and then I would get strange pains in my body, all over, not just in my chest. My nurse practioner told me that I just had to deal with it, this was my life now and I had to learn how to live it with the "pings and pangs." I wanted to kill that cunt.

A few months later, I went to my doctor with my mom. I told him if I didn't get some anti-depressants soon or something, I'm not sure what would happen. I wasn't myself and I wasn't someone who I felt comfortable being. Since then, I've been on Zoloft. I'm happy to say that I hardly ever fall into depression, and when I do it's the normal kind of everyday blues that I can handle.

When I was 17, I was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis. Say that five times fast. It's a type of arthritis that can basically inflame any part of the human body. I've had pink eye several times because of an inflammed tear duct, and I've also been diagnosed with Inflammable Bowel Disease, which is not the same as IBS. AS and IBD are linked due to the inflammation that causes flare-ups, which is double fun! However, I try to control these two as much as possible through diet, meaning no seeds, and trying to stay away from salad, which is super hard for me. I take a total of 22 pills a day currently, some for my heart disease, one for depression, one for allergies, one is birth control, two for gastrointestinal problems.

So, you ask what does this have to do with my mother? Well, when I was fifteen, I was a virgin and my mom thought I was on my deathbed. One of her biggest concerns was that I was going to die without knowing what sex felt like. The woman was actually going to "hire" one of my friends to come and do the deed, but then I was released from the hospital.

When I was sixteen, she asked me if I knew how to masturbate and told me that it was normal and that she had caught my older sister doing it one day. Great! She does it, so I'll do it...we can have a whole party!

When I came to college, I was on the phone with my mom who had to go and she asked me to call her later. "Well, I might have a guy spend the night, so I'll call you in the morning." We have a pretty cool relationship, and she usually knows some basic details of my love life. Her response to that? "Okay, well if it's your first time, just know that you'll probably bleed a little bit, but have fun! It's okay to have sex with him because you've known him forevvvvvver, so call me later! Bye!"

She really said that. I'm not even lying. This past summer, my mom bought me a vibrator. It's a little purple metallic one that has three settings: Little Buzz, Medium Buzz, and HOLY FUCK MY CLIT'S GONNA GET WORN OFF Buzz. It has since run out of batteries, and I cannot find the little batteries to replace them anywhere, so if you have some....mail them my way, huh?

See, the reason I'm telling this story is so that people can see the silver lining in every situation. Yeah, getting sick sucked. It sucked losing my pretty much full ride to a Division I school for softball and gaining weight from steroids. But I love who I am now. I know myself, inside and out, and I wouldn't trade that knowledge for anything. It has made me realize the important things in my life and it has given me an amazing relationship with my mother. Oh, yeah. That reminds me. I asked her to bring me some leftovers from home when she came to drop off some medicine. The woman packed me a ginormous cucumber from our garden and some potatoes to bake. I knew she knew the phallic symbols of her little goody bag and I wouldn't doubt it if she thought I'd use the cucumber to ummm...you know.