~Une Réflection Banale~ Hi, I'm Jean. This is going to be one hell of a random post. Completely off-topic... but I've got a lot on my mind, and the best way for me to work through these sorts of things is by writing about them. This is going to be a pretty personal post, but I'm an open book, so I really don't mind sharing such information with strangers. (Besides, Mizaharians are the most epic of people on the Net!) So basically, no one should even bother reading this. I just need to work through some things. Also this is tl;dr material. ~
I was born on the nineteenth of September, 1989 C.E. at a lovely hospital called Hotel-Dieu de Lévis, 143 rue Wolfe, Québec, Québec G6V 3Z1. I came into this world kicking and screaming at 2:42am, having put my mother through 73 hours of labour. I was apparently quite against the idea of coming out for another go at life on this plane; my Auntie jokes that I was probably a degenerate slob in my most recent incarnation, and wasn't looking forward to the rigours of living in the soon-to-be-twenty-first century. Four or five minutes after I was born, I had a short clonic seizure. (Clonus is a term referencing involuntary "twitches" on a regular, and possibly larger, scale, as opposed to simple involuntary twitches that may present as irregular and spastic, or otherwise just random.) Everything below my neck seized up. Obviously this was not the preferable way to start off on one's journey down the road of Life. See, my immortal soul knew it was a bad time to be coming into the world.
I was put in the NICU for a few days, and a diagnosis was confirmed. I was born with Arnold-Chiari Malformation, a condition wherein the cerebellar tonsils (very back, bottom bits of the brain) push down through the foramen magnum (the opening of the skull where it meets the cervical spine, through which the brain stem travels to become the spinal cord). Basically, a bit of the brain is technically outside the skull. Chilling down in the spinal column. Like a boss. This changes the natural pressure gradient at the foramen mangum, and usually messes up the natural flow of CSF (cerebrospinal fluid). People born with Arnold-Chiari Malformation are typically asymptomatic throughout childhood, but I just had to be different. The complications of my delivery (which included forceps and some injury to my poor mother) caused mild inflammation of my cervical spine, which wouldn't necessarily have been a big deal... but there was already too much pressure back there. The resultant sum of these pressures being the seizure I had, due to nerves kind of freaking out for a moment. They couldn't take the heat (they should have just gone and got out of the kitchen when they still could... ah, well.), and reacted thus. A few days passed and I was otherwise healthy.
My mother blames her drug usage during her first trimester for all my issues. She wasn't aware that she was pregnant around New Year's, '89, when she was out in San Francisco with her eldest brother, partying like there was no tomorrow. But that's neither really here nor there.
I didn't have any further complications from the malformation throughout childhood - at least, none that I could be bothered to worry about. I was a happy enough kid. I didn't realize that I was a bit clumsy on my feet, and the occasional jerks and spasms of my neck and shoulder muscles never bothered me all that much. General childhood shenanigans, yay. Fast-forward to 2006, wherein my mother decided we were moving south of the border. I found myself in the Windy City and experienced the most epic and amazing culture shock ever.
I didn't have many friends growing up in Sainte-Foy, but landing in the middle of my secondary school career with a funny accent and no idea how the American High School system worked somehow blew the proverbial gates wide open. I guess it was the "new kid" appeal, or some such; I found myself surrounded by the most wonderful people. In the year and a half I lived there, finishing High School technically a year late by American standards (though it worked for me because Canadian schools sometimes offer a "thirteenth grade" sort of thing), I discovered many things about myself. I found I had talent with music. I found I loved writing, and picked up on the grammar and syntax of the English language much more quickly than I had when my mother was just teaching me herself. Immersion, I will always swear, is the best way to truly learn a language. I also came to finally accept something that had been troubling me at my secondary school back home: I was fabulously, incorrigibly, fiercely, FLAMINGLY homosexual. Embracing this helped me to finally come out of my shell completely, and it was then that I began developing my current mindset on such things as gender roles, socio-psychological effects of nature, nurture, culture, and heritage, and even religion. (My mother was a French Catholic who shed her faith for Gardnerian Wicca while living in Scotland, long before I was ever even thought of, but she didn't raise me to have any one belief or another. I came into it on my own, and am a rather proud Pagan Witch myself.) Chicago is where I was truly born.
And then we moved. Again, in 2009. To South Freaking Carolina. I currently hate it here. I got myself into university as a Music Composition major at the University of South Carolina (Columbia), and then, my life really fell apart.
In the Autumn of 2009, I started having complications from the Chiari Malformation. I noticed nonspecific neurologic discomfort in my legs - usually burning and tingling pains, coupled with spastic weakness from time to time. I mostly ignored it for a few months. Then, one night, my roommate at the dorm accidentally uncovered another symptom. I was being a twit and pretending to ignore him, so he pinched my upper arm on the inner side (the really soft sensitive area between bicep and triceps). When I didn't respond he pinched harder and harder, until he drew blood. I didn't feel a bit of it. That kind of alarmed me, so I experimented. The skin on the inside of both arms, from my armpit down to about halfway down my forearms, are completely immune to pain and temperature. Further research showed that most of my upper back is immune to temperature, and can only feel really, really sharp pain. Decidedly perturbed, I decided to go to the doctor.
Insert lots of typical doctoral mumbo jumbo, and I found myself having an MRI. I'd had one or two as a child, but I didn't really remember them, and they were pretty much nonconclusive (just showing the malformation we already knew about). This one, however, was different. First of all, I remember it as clearly as the day it happened. Being inside that chamber with all the bangs and whistles and just... it was awesome. It was exciting. The neurologist showed me the images, and was so fascinated with the fact that I was looking inside my own skull and neck that I hardly heard him give me a diagnosis. But he made sure I wrapped my mind around it eventually: I had developed an oblong syrinx in the central sulcus of my spinal cord spanning from C3 to C5 with a radius of 4mm at apex girth. In laymen's terms, a space opened up in the middle of my spinal cord and filled with the fluid that naturally flows through the column (which was, in my case, messed up by the Chiari Malformation). This syrinx had swollen enough to put pressure in all directions on the nerve fibres surrounding it, hence my worsened condition.
This run-in with the neurologist revealed another thing about myself I had never guessed: I was absolutely, unequivocally fascinated by Medicine. This led to me throwing myself into various and sundry topics of private study, mostly related to neurology. But, I never pursued anything beyond curious shenanigans and spending outrageous amounts of money on such things as The Merck Manual, Gray's Anatomy, and an online practice MCAT that cost me eighty bucks, and which I proceeded to fail miserably. (I got lazy in my science courses in school, and have never been good at math.) This kind of derailed me, and I ran into some personal issues at the time (read: I discovered drugs and became the degenerate slob my Auntie jokingly alluded to earlier in my life). I ended up falling out of University because my GPA dropped just under what was necessary to maintain a scholarship. This plunged me into a cycle of self-pity and depression that lasted up until... well, let's just say pretty damn recently.
Shortly before my arrival here at Mizahar, I'd begun piecing myself back together on the psychological front. I've been in the "working world" ever since falling out of Uni, so all my scholastic endeavours are pretty much dried up, for lack of a better term. But, Life decided to deal me a heavy hand recently. My grandmother was admitted to the hospital last Thursday, two days after her 77th birthday, after her legs gave out on her. CT scan found a massive clot at the iliac arch of her aorta (where the massive artery branches to go down and become the femoral arteries). She was rushed to emergency surgery, and placed in the Cardiovascular ICU afterwards. She's been there since, in critical condition, with a weighty diagnosis. Mitral Stenosis (narrowing of the mitral valve, which brings blood into the heart from the lungs) of a very severe degree, causing blood to "back up," so to speak, in her pulmonic vein. She's been on a respirator, with blood pressure issues that catapult from one end of the spectrum to the other. They couldn't find a balance between Heparin (an anticoagulant routinely administered to people after an infarction as severe as hers) and her natural bloodwork, and she has had several instances of internal bleeding that hindered what little steps of progress she made here and there. I've spent large quantities of every day since at the hospital, and all obvious things aside, it's had an incredible effect on me.
The whole time, I've been step-for-step with the doctors and nurses, keeping up a report with them on her vitals, prognosis, and phrophylaxis to get her stable enough to undergo Mitral Valve Replacement surgery (an open heart surgery). Several physicians and nurses have, at various points, stopped mid-sentence and asked me if I have medical background, or if I was an intern. One of the main ICU doc's asked point-blank if I'd started Clinical Rotations (a branch of study often found as the third-year curriculum in Med School), and what field I was going to specialize in. This question threw me for a bit of a loop, and when I admitted that I wasn't even in college, and had given up my sporadic dreams of becoming a physician, she quite literally boggled at me.
So, I have arrived at a momentous psychological crossroads. Obviously, I'm a bit beside myself with anxiety for my grandmother, whose condition is simply not good at the moment. But at the same time, my sudden immersion in the hospital environment has opened the proverbial floodgates that have been holding back my (mildly obsessive) passion for Medicine. I feel it greater than ever before. I yearn for it. I'm so sick of my day-to-day, pointless life, with no contribution to society or my fellow man. I want to help people. I want to figure things out that no one before me has been able to. I want to design prophylaxis for Multiple Sclerosis that opens the doors to the possibility of permanent remission, or even cure. I want to dissect Alzheimer's Syndrome and significantly reduce its impact on the elderly. I want to save lives. And I want to make my gran proud.
She's not been coherent most of her stay, but during one of her most lucid moments, she looked right at me and said, clear as she could around the mask (she wasn't on the respirator at one point, for a breathing trial which she failed): "pourquoi t'es pas docteur?"
"Why aren't you a doctor?"
I almost cried when she said that. And then I came home and applied to USC Upstate's Pre-Med program. This was all earlier today. I've spent the evening studying my copy of Gray's Anatomy, digging up all my old notes on neurologic deficits, and watching video footage of open heart surgeries. I have absolutely no idea where my life is going right now... but I'm going to make damn sure that it goes SOMEWHERE. Maybe I'm not too old to dream, yet. Maybe I can still put on that white coat someday, and take the Hippocratic Oath. Maybe I can still save a life.
Maybe.
It's all open road from here. |