Sick (9 page)

Around one in the afternoon, the chalky aftertaste of codeine erupts in my mouth…except there's no pill in sight. My body still craves it fifteen years later.

Every downpour is a reminder of my past. “It's just the aches that come along with getting older, Tessa,” my parents said.

“I've been old since I was eight years old,” I respond.

Silence.

Most kids who are eight years old are learning their times tables, having their first slumber parties and playing flashlight tag until late hours of the night. I wasn't like most kids.

I started out just like them. I joined a soccer team, which quickly became my entire reason for being. I had an entire neighborhood of friends and even had boys who liked me.

Then it happened.

During a particularly exciting soccer game the summer going into third grade, we were tied with the undefeated team. I had the ball at my feet, quickly approaching the goal, when all of a sudden I felt a pop. I fell to my knees in agony. I don't think I stopped crying until my parents rolled me out of the hospital after my surgery a few days before Christmas.

I was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease known as Legg-Calvé-Perthes where the hip joint suffers a loss of bone mass that leads to the collapse of the joint itself. In my case, the femoral artery in my hip had stopped delivering blood to the ball of my femur and caused it to shatter.

I was given two options: to operate on the hip joint, which would entail reconstructing the hip, placing it for 8-to-10 months using metal rods and later on removing said rods, or to wear a semi-permanent leg brace for two years.

The leg brace meant transferring to a school for kids with special needs, and I didn't want that, so I told them to cut me open.

I told my mom I wanted her there with me in the operating room, should anything happen to me. Even at such a young age, I knew there were always complications with surgeries, and tearfully, she agreed.

As I was going under anesthesia, my mom's hand in one of my hands and a white, stuffed cat, named Harley after my real cat, in the other, I suddenly became fearful of what was going to happen. The coming months hit me all at once and the fact I was medically delirious didn't help matters. For all I knew, my last moments on Earth would be filled with fearful tears. I clutched onto my mom's hand for dear life and as I passed out, prayed she'd be there when I woke up.
If
I woke up.

But I did wake up, and she was there alongside my dad. At that moment, I knew what unconditional love truly felt like and it hasn't left since.

Like most people who go through massive reconstructive surgery, I gained weight. It's human nature to have it get to you after a while, feeling hopeless and helpless, but when you have hundreds of students reminding you on a daily basis on just how big you've gotten by means of names like “Tessa Monster” or “Pink Flamingo,” it's harder than most. I tried to remain strong and not let it get to me, though.

Several months after my second surgery, this time to take the metal pins out of my hip, I had begun growing. I was excited. Growing meant I was normal again.

By the time I reached thirteen, I was 5-feet, 6-inches, had more curves than most 13 year old girls should and started dealing with typical body issues. The fact that I had a 9-inch scar on my hip with another 3-inch one above it stopped me from showing any sort of skin, especially in the summer. As far as I was concerned, bathing suits were an abomination.

That year brought on another sore subject for me…literally. The leg in which I had surgery on was starting to pose a new problem: back pain. Because the leg's growth is stunted during the healing process and my body continued to grow anyway, I had a leg shortening of about ½-inch difference in my right leg (my surgery leg).

I tried orthopedic shoes at first, but the kids at school were relentless. They made me feel like a bigger freak than I already felt I was (although I'm sure the baggy, weird clothes and dark makeup didn't help either). Finally, I decided to go with a discreet, small insole lift that went inside my shoe, the closest thing I could have to just wearing shoes normally.

Sometimes I joked about it. Sometimes I
had
to joke about it. I'd call myself
Granny or Gimp on a weekly basis. My friends called it my “pimp walk.” I'd even contemplated getting a tattoo when I turned eighteen that said, “Limpin' ain't easy,” in hopes to make it easier to deal with.

Every morning when I put my shoes on, however, I'd see it and it would remind me it's not easy to deal with.

Within the next couple years, I had seen my orthopedic doctor a handful of times with concerns about my joint pain.

The first appointment, shortly after I turned eighteen, started out routine. Essentially, since he's a pediatric orthopedist, I had one last hurrah appointment, giving me the clear to lead a normal life.

However, things quickly went from “normal checkup” to “here's how your life is going to pan out.” He told me that unlike the other patients in his case study, I was one of few who didn't heal as desired. My hip joint was permanently misshapen which would cause pain throughout my life more so than his other Legg-Calvé-Perthes cases. Regardless of what I did, I would need a hip replacement by mid-life.

To be entirely honest, I saw that coming. What I didn't see coming was that he said any sort of job I wanted to do involving being on my feet would be out of the question unless I wanted to bump my replacement surgery up 10-20 years.

I wanted to be a filmmaker. So, instead of being on my feet and behind the camera like I had originally planned, I took a different route and studied to be a screenwriter or video editor instead. That way, I could do what I wanted and extend the life of my natural hip.

Of course, I hadn't been that calm at first. No one ever takes bad news lightly. I thought it was the end of my reason for being at that point. But, as life goes, you learn to adapt and figure out ways to do what you need and/or want to do.

With a massive weight gain and increase of joint pain under my belt, at age twenty I went to see Georgie (the nickname I gave my doctor as a kid) again.

This time, I was a little more rocked. Now standing at 5-feet, 9-inches (or 5-feet, 8 ½-inches depending on which leg I'm standing on) and weighing 265 pounds, he told me that if I didn't drop weight, I'd need a hip replacement by 30. Essentially, since my hip joint is two times as sensitive as a normal hip, with every step I take, two times my weight is stressed on my hip. That was over 400 pounds of pressure on my hip several hundred times a day. I was really starting to understand just how serious this disease was years after being “cured.”

I dropped 85 pounds within the next year.

Now, at twenty-three, I wish I could say, “Oh, I dropped all this weight and I feel amazing and life is perfect!” That's not true, of course. With every disease and every illness comes struggle, even years after the initial symptoms have been treated. There's a reason why remission exists.

I could have chosen to let the disease take me over. I could have taken a job that would later cost me months of surgery and physical therapy. I could have become an automated medication machine, thinking the future of my pain lies within a pill. I could have stayed at 265 and had the replacement done by 30, but chances were I'd gain even more weight after the surgery and end up bed-ridden by middle age.

Life, as I knew it, could have ceased to exist.

So, instead of letting the disease beat me, I've decided to beat it. It's a day-by-day process and some days are naturally better than others. I still ache when it rains, I still get pops and cracks (especially when going up stairs), I still have days where looking at my scar in the mirror causes more pain than the joint itself, but in the end…I'm living life how I want to.

This is my one shot, and it lies in my hands…or in my case, my hip.

How I have long conceptualized my migraines has perhaps the greatest impact on how I experience them.