♿How my Disability affects my body♿ Part2

 

Please navigate to the first part of this blog post before continuing to this one.

I am not really sure how my mom found out about the nurse I just know that her mistake caused my brain injury.

After months in hospital, my mom was finally able to bring me home, but I was still very tiny, so tiny in fact that my mom had to go to a toy store to buy me clothing and I needed oxygen,

When I was about one year old, my mom started to notice that I couldn't sit up or crawl or walk on my own at first. She didn't think that much of it because she just taught me I was slow in development, but as time went on, my mom started to go back to my doctors about her concerns for me.

At first, do doctors tell my mom I had epilepsy, and I was heavily medicated for about five months, but my mom had her doubts, so she wasn't satisfied with the diagnosis, so she went back for a second opinion.

After countless hours of hospital appointments for cat scans and whatever else you can think of, they finally concluded that I had cerebral palsy And that it was most likely caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.

As you can imagine, this came as a total shock to my mom. She has explained to me that it felt like the “ice bucket challenge.”

my mom Did the next logical step and asked the doctor how is severe my disability would be; she wishes that he never asked that question today.

What the doctor told my mom was a complete nightmare. she told her that I will most likely be a vegetable for the rest of my life and I would not be able to eat, talk or breathe on my own.

Here I am, 31 years later, talking, breathing, and eating.

This is why my mom regrets asking the doctor that question because she realizes now that the doctors can see into the future. They can't predict anything because everybody is different.

there are five different types of cerebral palsy

spastic
ataxic
athetoid
hypotonic
and mixed type cerebral palsy.

What I have is called spastic diplegia CP. (CP = cerebral palsy)

Affects the legs and arms, making them stiff and contracted (spastic). The legs are generally more affected than the arms.

As I have said earlier in this post, everybody is different so my legs are not contracted and stiff.

The way I like to describe my condition to other people is:

The signals that go from your brain to your legs telling them to move those signals don't work for me. Therefore, I can't walk, but I can feel everything, and I can move my legs to a certain extent.

My speech works fine, My hands are a little bent, but the main thing Is my legs.

I could actually walk until I was seven years old. I walked with aid, and I was walking like a ballerina on my tippy toes. One doctor decided that that would be bad for me in the long run, so I underwent an operation to extend my Achilles tendons to use my whole foot instead of my toes.

That operation went horribly wrong because, after the operation, he told my mom that he “forgot to.”

pull my left leg out to the same length as my right leg. From that moment on, I never walked again.

To be continued...

/Tessa Blackwood