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Friday, August 24, 2012

♫happy birthday to meeee...♫

Today the sister and I turn 36! I so do not feel like a 36 year old. Well, mentally. Physically I'm a little old lady. :)

19 years ago (give or take a few weeks) I was diagnosed with NF2 (neurofibromatosis type 2). I've talked about it a lot on here and there are resources on the web where you can find more information. But in 1993 the innerwebs was not a household object because computers weren't household objects. We had to rely on the little information a doctor who had never treated an NF2 patient was able to give us. And, boy, was it scary. So scary that at 17 it totally changed my view of the world and the place I had in it. I no longer felt able to plan for my future because I no longer thought I had a future. At 17 I wasn't thinking about living until I was a little old lady, sitting in my rocker on the porch, gossiping with the sister (that's my dream now, though); I was thinking about college and careers and family. The scary things the doctor told us caused me to reevaluate not only my career dreams but even the college choices I would make that year. (With all the doctor visits I had to stay close to home and Stanford was just a little far from Missouri.)

But I'm veering off course... what this post was supposed to be about is this: when I was 17 I thought I would only get maybe 10 more years to live, that NF2 or the tumors or the surgeries to control those tumors would take my life from me before I really had a chance to live it. But here I am now, NINETEEN YEARS later, still going strong. I had my career (not the one I would have chosen but I was damn good at it.), I have a family (maybe my kids are not my blood but they are MY kids.), and I have faith that in 25-30 years my sister and I will be sitting on the porch in our rockers, gossiping about the neighbors.

1 comment:

  1. Happy birthday ! I'm always a day late and dollar short, yo have twin sister?

    ReplyDelete