I often look at things that I have done in the past. More specifically, I look at things I have lived through. In my mere 26 years of life, I have lived through 2 heart surgeries, getting rabies shots, slowly becoming allergic to everything I used to not be allergic to, piercing my finger with a scalpel, “falling off a roof”, too many broken hearts to count, and being one of the “weird” people that everyone knew by name but couldn’t be accepted into any particular crowd.
I have learned to accept some things, like the fact that I will never be “normal”, finding ways to get around my allergies, and remembering that injured mend (even metaphoric broken hearts heal. When my boss told my supervisor that I “march to the beat of my own drum”, I actually felt a little pride in the fact that I’m not like everybody else, and even though I will be remembered as being odd, I will at least be remembered. The people that don’t remember me from high school aren’t worth my time, and I really don’t need to fret over it, because the people I really enjoyed being in high school with, won’t let me forget that I am cared about. (That’s the important part of having friends anyways, right?)
As for the heart surgeries, my first one I was only 4 months old. They told my parents not to expect me to live past the age of 2. When I was 2, they told my mom that I would be on heart medication for the rest of my life. When I was 5, they told my mom I was just fine, and I didn’t need to be seen in their office again. When I was 16, they told me that the chest pains I had been getting since I was 12, was actually my heart beating up over 300 beats per minute, and I would need surgery. After surgery, they recommended 2 check ups a year. When I got pregnant, they put me in a high rick pregnancy clinic, and I had a healthy baby girl with zero negative impact on my heart. Unfortunately, I am back on heart medication, that I will have to take for the rest of my life, but I feel like a little pill a day is a small price to pay for a healthy heart.
I have already ordered enough red dress pins for every guest at my wedding. I try very hard to educate the people around me and all the women in my life the importance of heart health. Someone told me on “Go Red for Women” day, that if I asked them to wear pink for breast cancer they would, but that heart health just wasn’t as important. I vented on facebook about the comment, and got back the best response ever over it: “Unless they’re into necrophilia, once the heart goes, so do the breasts.” I feel like, in this day and age, with all our positive research on breast cancer, most women can actually survive being diagnosed with it. Heart disease is still the number one killer of women. I feel like at this point, it is a little more important to emphasize it! Let the women in your lives know you care, remind them to stay aware of their heart health! After all, you’ve only got the one heart.
Internal (I'm lumping mental in here, too) health problems never get the same level of public attention or recognition that external ones do. I'm counting breast cancer among those, even though it's internal, because of the strong external emphasis imparted to it through the mighty boob.
ReplyDeleteGoodness knows the crap I've had to deal with over the years thanks to my spine. Just because people can't see it, they forget it or disregard it. A lot of my friends have the same sort of problems getting people to understand the severity and importance of their issues (OCD, chronic headaches, severe anxiety, seizures, and so on). It sucks. And I consider that most of those aren't (usually) fatal! You'd think heart disease would get more attention than it does.
Well, we all know that boobs get attention consistently, so I guess that's just what you have to do.. We should make posters for spine problems and heart problems and even mental problems with pictures of cleavage on them. Maybe then they'd get the attention they so rightly deserve. ;)
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