Life Experience In My Life

Someone who has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy has weak muscles, but that also means they have slow reflexes and brittle bones. When my brother was about 16, he slipped in some water and didn’t catch himself and fell. The next morning, my parents took him to the ER to find out he had broken both of his legs and would have to undergo surgery. After his surgery, he was in a wheelchair for a few months so his legs would heal. That summer, my family took a trip to Huntington Beach and my brother could almost completely walk without the wheelchair by this time. The first day, my brother, my dad, and I were walking down the hall to our room and my dad was pushing the chair behind my brother so when his legs got tired he could sit. About ten steps down the hall, my brother fell and my dad rushed around to help him up. My

Doctors said that I would never walk. I when was four year old I got my first electric wheelchair. If I remember concert I was in Scott Rite Hospital for very intent therapy. My Doctor called Mr. Larry Ezzard and told him that I was going to need I needed an electric wheelchair and at the time Larry own a wheelchair company In Alt. The first time that I remember meeting Larry I was in a big therapy room when I was put into my wheelchair. Their was a water fountain in the room and I remember it because that was the first thing I run into!

The idea of flying has terrified me since a youthful age. Being in a metal bird, thousands of feet above the ground, that consumes me from one location to the next safely, doesn’t sound appealing. A pilot, who I could only hope knows exactly what he is doing, has my life in his hands. When I found out that I would be taking a helicopter to prom instead of a nice car, I honestly believed I was having a nightmare. The one entity in the entire world that scares me the most will be my transportation of choice for the ultimate night of my adolescent years.

“It’s Monday night, still haven’t come up with anything yet?” my daughter asks me as she comes into my bedroom. She finds me at my desk staring at my computer in a daze yet again. She knows I have been here for quite a while again today. The shreds of loose leaf paper on the floor that the dog has had a field day with are a dead giveaway. “Drink enough coke, mama?” she says laughing under her breath as she walks out of the room. I look over to see the three diet Dr. Pepper cans lined up in a row on my desk next to a plate that still has bits of the homemade fudge cake on it. “It’s true.” I think to myself. “Here it is last minute!”

The searing, stabbing feeling, vibrating through your skull that renders you completely to where you cannot move, talk, or even eat is what hit me on August 11, 2013. The day and night before my 15th birthday was spent in the ER with a crippling migraine. The feeling of being treated like there was nothing wrong with you, and you were just faking it must be the worst feeling I have ever felt in my life. Chronic migraines affect people differently and can cause so many different problems. This is when it all started, when it got better, and when it began to go downhill all over again.

My childhood is filled with memories of my sister being my rock. We were best friends and she mothered me when our own mother couldn’t. We were both dealing with the same troubles and nice to share the experience with someone who understood the situation we were put in. She was also the ONLY one who was positive at the beginning of my pregnancy. I am sure she was also disappointed but she knew I wasn’t ruining my life. She didn’t make me feel like a complete failure. My mom told oldest sister and she led me away to speak alone. She told me how I disappointed her and she was excited to see me go off to college. It became the therapy everyone needed to tell me how much of a disappointment I was to them. However, they never took the time before to encourage me to make a future. After few days, my entire family knew because of a cousin who was untrustworthy. I went from feeling free to dreading family interactions.

Well, where do i start? The environment i grew up in was not a fun one. I was born in San Antonio and lived in Boerne until i was about 7-8 months old. My grandparents then bought a 15 acre property in Harper. We then lived there, and still live there today. I started school in Harper Elementary. Mrs. Payne was my Pre-k teacher. She helped me alot in that year. She sent me home with books because i was already reading. Throughout my elementary years i was a good smart kid. I had a few bad times but i was a good kid. I played baseball with a lot of kids that still go to this school. Baseball was my life. I loves playing it. I still do. Around my 1st grade year is when my parents started having problems. When i was 8 years old, the summer before my 2nd grade year, my parents got divorced. Elizabeth, my mother, took me and my sister chloe and we lived in Heritage Oaks in Ingram. Elizabeth met a man named Daniel Franz. Daniel moved in with us and married Elizabeth. Daniel was a good guy. He loved Chloe and me a lot. The summer before my 4th grade year we moved to Helotes. I attended Kuentz Elementary for two years. My best friend there was Jeremy Leal. He lived down the street and we played basketball everyday after school. I attended Garcia Middle school for my 6th grade year. I was in percussion and most of my friends were too so i always had fun. I was usually 2nd or 3rd chair after Preston and Alana. Elizabeth and Daniel wanted to buy a house so we moved to Laurel Canyon.

Knowing who you are is an important step in life. Knowing your identity is something that is expected of you before you even graduate highschool. When students are being surveyed for acceptance, they are being chosen for what they have done rather than what they can do. Granted, what you have done is a good reflector of what you can do, but what you can do isn’t what you have done. I come from a family that values hard work and character. No one in the entirety of my family has any special diploma or fancy piece of paper that tells everyone what they are good at. No one in my family has any clue what I am writing about right now.

Growing up with a single mother was a struggle. My mother had to work long nights, weekends, and holidays to provide a home, food, and clothing. In addition, my mother provided a safe atmosphere for me. My mother made it her mission to prepare me for the world, and she did an incredible job. I could not have asked for a better mother. Everything changed when one day while she was in the shower, my mother first felt a lump in her left breast. Cancer was something new to my family, so my mother was scared and unsure of what to do next. When she decided to get a breast exam, I tagged along. I was unaware of how dire the situation was. I went with my mother to a number of hospitals, including Howard University Hospital, to receive additional observations and later treatments. My mom was finally done with chemotherapy and the doctor told us she had little to no cancer cells left. My family was happy again, but this was short lived because of a couple of months later, my mother became very ill. She was then placed in a hospice, a place for the terminally ill. At this point my family knew the outcome; yet, I was not ready for her to leave. Losing my mother was the saddest period of my life because I had to struggle with loneliness, I was traumatized by the experience, and I had to adjust to a new living environment.

When I was only seven years old, I had decided that I was going to be a professional ballerina. My parents had enrolled me in the local dance lessons since I started walking and I fell in love with ballet right away. My friends and I would attend a dance group everyday after school and would travel to places on the weekends for competitions. Living in the suburbs, mommy, daddy, dance lessons, and me, I thought I had a perfect life and wouldn't have traded it for anything in the world. We would enjoy the summer breezes, and the Long Island Beaches; it was a true American dream until all good things come to an end.

On June 10, 2006, I woke up like any other Saturday, expecting it to be a good day of baseball. Little did I know, how much my life was about to be turned upside down. Getting the news that my father had passed away from a heart attack, at the age of 30, really took a toll on my family and I. I couldn’t let that stop me from having a successful life because he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. That meant it was time for me to step up to the plate and be a man, be a role model for my little brother, and also be the shoulder that my mom could lean on. Even though I was only 10 years old and in the fifth grade, I really grew up and matured since that day.

I once stumbled across an anonymous quote that said, “Never forget where you come from, but strive for a place you have never been.” As I contemplated the statement’s significance, I was struck by the realization that I cannot point to one place or time in my life to find where I’m from. In the last twenty years of my life, I have lived on both the east and west coast of the United States, and shifted between all sorts of communities across the socio-economic and cultural spectrum. It is through my experiences in these places that I have learned to find strength in my loved ones, have confidence in myself, and look towards the future with anticipation.

It’s hard to imagine what your life will be like, where it’ll take you, or what the future holds for you. If you told 13-year-old me that I was going to be on the path of 8 more years of schooling after high school, working towards a medical degree, I probably would have laughed and repeated the line that I have said so many times: “I’ll never become a doctor...that’s so gross”. At that age, my dream was to become a pastry-chef in a patisserie somewhere in the south of France, living life peacefully. I thought that I could never follow in my parents’ footsteps, sacrificing the best years of my life for the all-consuming difficulty and intensity of the pre-med track. And it is very intense. If you ever come across a pre-med student, they’re likely stumbling over the clutter of their biology textbooks and boundless research papers, frantically searching for the cure for some disease that no one can actually pronounce, all the while cramming for the MCAT that’s in 912 days because they have not yet memorized every bone in the human body. I’d like to dissociate myself from that stereotype. While most aspiring pre-med students were worrying about medical school acceptance rates, I was dreading my dad’s weekly case-study reading that he absolutely had to have my opinion on. Not to mention the countless visits I made to my mother’s work Christmas parties, where the nurses were constantly dressed in their scrubs, and I mean constantly, and the food unmistakably came straight from

It has been an eventful four years here at Christopher Dock. I went through a lot and I am proud of who I am becoming. I am not the shy, quiet and awkward kid that I was coming here but instead, I grew into a kind, confident and selfless individual ready to take on the world. Thanks to the adversity that I went through, I was rewarded with what I desire the most in this life: God, Friends and Family. The adversity that I had go through was letting go of my past, restoring my lost faith to God and stop being dependent onto my brother Tyler. Without doing those three things, I would not be where I am today. Now I would like to reflect on my growth throughout all of these four years.

I moved around quite a bit as a child and one move my family and I made was to Federalsburg, Maryland. We lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere and there wasn’t much for me to do. I joined the towns swim team to keep myself entertained and while there, I met a lady and her husband, both of whom are neurologists. I sat and talked with them every chance I could get; I was utterly intrigued by how fascinating the kind of work they did was. The lady, Gina, explained to me that being a neurologist isn’t easy, but satisfaction fills the soul when helping treat a patient. Moreover, she explained how interesting the brain is, “It’s a puzzle waiting to be put together.” I knew then that I wanted to be a neurologist and help put the puzzle pieces together.