Personal Narrative: Poland Syndrome

My little sister Anita was born at the time and having a baby sibling around made me feel like a big kid or a parent. I loved holding her and feeding her with a bottle my mom taught me to do while she worked at a night shift (maturation). My fourth grade year is probably the time I went through the most out of my elementary school years. I found out things were getting hectic between my parents. I would see them fight almost every day about money, cheating, and where did they go in their free time. One night when my mom came home from grocery shopping they were verbally fighting and yelling at each other. I heard it from the living room and I went into the kitchen to see them. All of a sudden, I just saw my dad pushed her into the ground and started beating her. She eventually escaped from his grip and ran into my sister’s room. She called the police and they came and arrested him for assault. I couldn’t do much because I just stood there witnessing in shock. They divorced in October while it was the beginning of my fifth grade year. I started to go through depression since the whole thing happened. I grew bitter, unmotivated for school, and even crueler towards my family and animals. I had terrible grades in my report card and I tend to get embarrassed with my teacher yelling at me. I cried over the smallest things that would happen in class. People started giving me sympathy but then got tired of it because it happened often. Around the winter time my mom started to

There is one loss in my life that affected many aspects of my life for many years, the divorce of my parents. I was in barley entering the first grade and the tender age of five, soon to turn six, when my parents spent their last night as a married couple. I do not have many memories of my parents as a couple but I do remember the day my Daddy left. He was a policeman and I watched as his cruiser drove away from our family home. I remember my mom crying and not being willing to console me or explain to me what was happening. All I knew is there was a fight, my dad left, it seemed different than other times when he left, and my mom was crying. Everything about my life changed in the blink of a five year old’s eyes which is what makes this loss so significant in my life.

I walked away feeling like I was a complete failure and that I didn’t deserve to go on. On the way home my mother tried to talk to me, but, I put on my headphones and cried silently. Once we were home my father asked how it went. The tears that were in my eyes and they became more evident as my shoulders and chest were shaking and trembling. The only sound in the room was the sound of me crying and wailing. I started crumbling and falling to the ground and my mother and father rushed to my side. They held me until the tears came to a stop and a little bit afterwards

In 2003 during the last semester of nursing school, my life was devastated as my ex-husband was arrested as a serial rapist. This was overbearing and I thought this as being impossible to recover from. A breaking point came as I approached a red light deciding whether to deliberately run my minivan into oncoming traffic with my two young children to end our lives. Only days later, I once again felt that I was at the lowest point in my life as the reality of this event truly hit during a medical-surgical examination.

My grandmother, who is the mother of my mom, passed away due to heart failure at the age of 87. Since I was 6 or 7 she had been living in our house. The reason for that was, my grandfather, that I was named after passed away a year before I was born, so she was alone, and she was starting to get old. Since she lived with us for so many years, she had been a very important figure in my life. I can honestly say that she was like a 3rd parent for me, and losing her, made me fell horrible and helpless. I witnessed how real death is because of her passing. Combined with puberty, my grief caused me to become depressed for a long time. As I’m looking back it sounds really extreme, but there were some days that I did not even leave the bed thinking that there was no point to our existence. Thanks to some psychological counselling however, I was able to overcome that mental

Although I had an older brother and sister, I felt alone a great deal of the time I was growing up. I never "acted out" my need for attention. I did not get bad grades in school. On the contrary, I was a quiet child who made the honor roll. I was always given my sisters hand-me-downs which I resented. My grandmother was very strict and often cold. There were never hugs or kisses and not once do I remember an I love you. My father still came to visit, but remarried when I was eight. His new wife was like something out of a horror novel. The mental torture that I endured was a million times worse than what Cinderella went through. My grandmother along with my brother and sister came up with a nickname for me. They called me dog and taunted me every time we passed the pet supplies in the grocery store. At the age of ten my beloved paternal grandmother Memo, the only light in my otherwise dark world, died in her sleep while I was in the next room. I sat and watched as the paramedics tried to revive her with no success. On the car ride back home, my stepmother screamed at my father to "shut me up and stop my crying," as if what I had just been through should not have affected me at all. She left my father a few years later. At fifteen I ran away from my grandmothers house and went to live with my dad. I was receiving survivors support which I never saw once I moved in with my father. Although I did not know it

My dad cheated on my mom when I was five years old my youngest sister was only four months old. At the time I obviously did not understand what was really happening. My grandmother told me a few years back about the day my dad sat down with me and told me that he was leaving our house. She said I called her and cried and said that I didn’t have a family anymore. She said that broke her heart and knowing how I felt about this at only age five breaks my heart today. Although my parents did split up my dad went to live back with his mother. We were able to see him every Tuesday, Wednesday and every other weekend. He actually used to be my hero. When I was in third grade both my parents found new people to be with. My dad actually was dating the women he cheated on my mom with. My mom was dating some guy she met online who became my step father. This affected my life greatly. I hated moving back and forth from house to house, I have been afraid of my dad my whole life I could say he had this tone of voice and everything he did was yell and scream. He used to hit

On a Sunday morning of March 15 1998, we woke up super early to the phone ringing on the other side was my dad. My grandmother answered the phone her face paled as she heard the words “mom I shot myself.” After talking to him for a bit my grandmother rushed out of her room to get my uncle up and they rushed to the house to see him up walking around with a hole in his stomach. Ambulance came to get him then rushed him to meet life force. He flat lined once on the helicopter. They were able to bring him back and stabilized him, and kept him stabled till they got to the hospital. They rushed him immediately into the OR, it was around 15 to 20 minutes into surgery that he had passed away, they were unable to bring him back due to the major loss of blood. My mom soon remarried and I gained two annoying step brothers and a step dad. One step brother didn’t bother me to bad, the other one poked and picked on me trying to pick fights. My step dad had episodes where he was violent and threw things at me and my mom. I withdrew more and more until a few of my friends literally grabbed me by my arm and told me to wake up that they were not going to let me push them away

When I was around 8 years old my mom got pregnant with a baby boy, and it excited everyone, especially me. Almost 5 months into her pregnancy my parents began to argue a lot, and my mom thought my dad cheated. She decided to have an abortion without letting anyone in our family know. She just pretended she lost the baby, until several months later when the truth eventually came out. My mom’s decision affected our whole family leaving everyone with unanswered questions, hurt, and heartache. Even my mom too this day experiences challenges living with the fact that she took another life, which led to many months of depression, hurt, and

When they finally got a good job, my mom would have to miss work because of my doctor's appointments and surgeries. My very first surgery was really scary for me because I didn’t know if I was going to wake up. I always hated surgeries, I can’t remember how many surgeries I had but there were a lot. Some didn’t even work. All the test they would also do on me was horrible as well. The one I remember was when they had to put me on a wooden board with string holding me to it, I can’t really explain the feeling of it. But it was just horrible. Everything they did never did

When I was nine years old, my dad had an accident that caused him to become paraplegic. As years passed, my father’s physical state went from paraplegic to quadriplegic. I felt alone and fell into depression as each year passed because there was never a sign of hope. I didn’t want to upset my mother by telling her that I might be depressed. So I took on myself to find a way. Since I was young and stupid, the only way I found was religion. So, I became religious hoping that my dad would become better if I prayed. However, my mother took this the wrong way, assuming I wanted to get married. In one week my parents found a guy in Pakistan. My parents took advantage of my religious phase by knowing that in our religion girls have to obey their

I was upon my Mother’s shoulder when the door busted and our neighbor came in screaming his lungs out “Jewish families must report to the train assigned to us by tomorrow afternoon! Were going to be transported to the Warsaw Ghetto!” Everyone in the household froze like statues. I turned and stared to my father as if he would have something to say according to this devastating news. Nothing came out of his mouth until everyone’s face turned to him. He choked on his words as he said “I… don’t know what to do at this point. If we decide to hide the Germans will arrest us and directly send us to concentration camps… so it’s best that we report and live under those conditions than being directly sent to camps.” My father had a point. Our neighbor

The most traumatic event in my life was when my father passed away in 2005, when I was only seven. At first, I hadn’t understood his death. I knew what death was, and that it was permanent, but I hadn’t accepted the fact that he was gone until long after his death. My mother was a mess, and I was a confused second grader who could do nothing to help her. We began to go to counselors and psychologists, who all made me feel very uncomfortable. All they wanted was to talk about what had happened to my dad, when it was the last thing I wanted to say anything about. I laid in bed crying for a few weeks, knowing it was because of his death, but I felt emptiness rather than sadness or anger. My mother began to take medication for depression, and still continues to do so. At only seven, I believed her sadness was my fault. To be honest, I still feel hurt when I see her taking the depression medication. I know that I had nothing to do with his death, but it granted me with an unwelcoming sense of guilt. I had just been with him the night before his death, and now he had been cremated into a bag of ashes. All of my teachers were very precautious about mentioning him, and I didn’t know how to process all the new attention I had received at school. I was definitely depressed, but I found a way out of my slump. I distracted myself from his death and did all of my school work from my absences as quickly as I could, and

Due to economic circumstances and my father's alcohol abuse, my family suffered from family problems and emotional pain. My father would come home drunk and argue with my mother about our economic circumstances. I was too young to understand what was occurring between my parents and I grew up believing that this was the typical family. I remember a specific occasion when my dad came home and he said that he was tired of us. He left my mom with my three siblings and I without money and anywhere to go. This situation terrified me and caused me to focus in school to forget about my personal problems. I could not understand how my father could leave us and not care for us. We then lived in someone's garage because we could not afford a home. Throughout

However, I do know from then on I had no belief in him as my father or in the goodness of grown men. Because of my family dynamics I didn’t tell anyone, but I remember being so angry and telling myself I would never let that happen again and if he ever touched me I would tell my mom. I went through life seemingly fine on the outside and was known by all to be a good girl. What people did not realize is that I was emotionally dead in my soul. I trusted no one and especially not myself. I never told another person until I was 26 and did not go into therapy until I was 33.