♿How my Disability affects my body♿ Part3

 If you have not read Part one or part two, please go back and read them before this part. Thank you♥

That was actually the second surgery in my life. When I was 6 months old, I believe my first was done, but I am unsure.

I was born with 2 inguinal hernias

One on each side of my body 

Indirect inguinal hernias. These occur when the inguinal canal fails to close before birth. The hernia may appear in a male's scrotum or skin fold when opening a female's vagina. This is the most common type of inguinal hernia. And it may occur at birth or later in life. Indirect hernias are more common in males

but women of all ages can get them.

I want to be very clear about something before I move on,

No, they were not testicles. They were hernias, my mom even asked.

In part 2, you would have read about my second surgery when I was 7, so let's skip ahead a little.

My mom has never treated me any different from other kids, so let me tell you about how I was different from other kids (you are allowed to laugh)

I was 5 years old, and I had just gotten my first wheelchair. I was so excited! I wanted to show it to my grandma and grandpa, who lived across the road from us.

My mom and I went over, and my mom told me to wait at the bottom of the staircase while she went to get grandma and grandpa. I waited and waited. To my right, there was a staircase down to the basement, and being 5 years old, I suddenly had the idea to see if my wheelchair could go down a staircase.

I wheeled myself closer and closer to the edge until I suddenly started to tumble down headfirst. Of course, my mom came running and saw me lying at the bottom of the stairs with the wheelchair on top of me, unconscious.

The next thing I remember is waking up in the ambulance with a broken arm and a very severe concussion, at which point I just said, " can I do that again?"

I think my mom knew from that moment on I would be her little "trouble maker."

Fast forward to when I was 14 years old. I underwent my first major surgery on my left hip. My left hip had dislocated about two years before my actual surgery, so I was in an extreme amount of pain for two years. I was in and out of hospital almost three times a week because I was in so much pain. One of our neighbors actually called the cops because she thought that my mom was hitting me. That's how loud I screamed whenever she tried to dress me or undress me, basically whenever she tried to do anything with me.

I think the surgery took about five to six hours. I'm not sure, but afterward, the doctor told me that the hip joint and the socket had rubbed against each other for all this time, so my hip joint was not around a ball anymore it basically was just a stick.

So, of course, he removed it and told me that I shouldn't have any other issues.

I went home the recovery with pretty OK, but then I started to feel this shooting extreme pain in my left hip again, and I was thinking to myself, what the fuck? There is no hip there, so why am I in this extreme amount of pain again?

So that started the whole process of being in and out of hospitals for two years straight again until the doctor that performed the first surgery on my left hip basically said to me that my femur is no rubbing against the socket where my hip joint had previously been.

He said, "I probably should have removed more bone, to begin with. I'm sorry."

I just looked at him and said, what happened to “do no harm?”

And I promise you, the moment I said that his face went completely white, and he didn't know how to respond.

He scheduled me for another surgery, but unfortunately, I had to wait so long that he was no longer practicing at that hospital, so another surgeon performed the surgery. I actually begged her to take as much bone as she needed because I couldn't take this pain anymore.

She ended up taking away about 10 centimeters of my femur to make sure that there was no bone whatsoever rubbing against the socket of my hip.

I should mention that both of the doctors informed me that by doing these surgeries, I most likely would never be able to walk even if I tried.

My thought process around this was that the surgery that was performed on me when I was seven years old already fucked my chances of ever walking, but there was still a chance, with my hip surgeries, that slim chance would basically be gone, but I just couldn't take the pain anymore, so I said yes do whatever you need to do.

So this is actually a very accurate picture of what my hip looks like. As you can imagine, my left leg is much shorter than my right leg, and my left leg is much smaller in terms of muscle mass.

My leg is kind of held together by muscle and tendons.

It kind of just hangs or lays depending on what I am doing.

It hurts if you put the leg into "wrong" Positions; otherwise, I have full feeling in my leg.

Perhaps the most difficult and the biggest hurdle I have ever had in my life came in 2004 and was completed in 2005

2004 I was diagnosed with scoliosis. Scoliosis is where the spine twists and curves to the side.

By this point in my life, I was so sick of doctors and hospitals in general that when I found out that I had yet another diagnosis, I kind of just yelled to myself, "come on, give me a break, give me a fucking break!"

I told him straight away that I didn't want any surgery whatsoever, but he told me that the curvature of my spine was so severe that I had no other option but surgery.

This is actually the X-ray of my back, or rather my spine back in 2014, now I'm not really sure what Cobb stands for, but I imagine it stands for how big the curve of the spine is.

A normal spine is supposed to go straight up and straight down. As you can see, my spine decided to become a race track.

I started to prepare myself to undergo this major surgery that would change my life forever. They would put two metal rods going up my back together with about 10 screws so they would basically fuse my spine into a permanent position.

This is my spine. After 10 hour surgery, the metal rods are in place and I have bone fragments from a cadaver between three of my vertebrae's

The rods go from C6 in my neck all the way down to my pelvis where it is screwed in place so I will never be able to go through natural childbirth, it would have to be via C-section.

The hardest part about this surgery was not the metal rods in their selves, it was actually the 200 staples in my back that were the hardest to deal with after the 200 staples were taken out. The recovery was quite speedy.

Before I got to go home from the hospital, the doctors told my mom that I would probably be bedridden for about six months. My mom just looked at the doctor and said, you don't know my daughter.

What should have taken six months to a year took Me 2 months to completely recover from.

After my recovery, I started to feel this pain in my back whenever I would move. So the whole thing with hospitals started up again.

the doctors couldn't figure out what was hurting me so badly, so one day, I had enough, and I asked my doctor if I could take a look at my X Ray,

He kinda just smiled and laughed, but he said OK, sure.

my mum wheeled me into the room, and it took me about 10 seconds to find the problems on my X-ray, I pointed to the last screw on my right side, and I asked him where is that located, and he looked up at my back, and he touched to the spot where I was hurting, and he just said well I'll be damned.

So yet again, I was put on the waiting list for surgery as soon as possible that took a year.

My doctor said that the surgery would go quite quickly because they only needed to open me up and take out the sprue or replace it with a shorter one.

So I didn't think much of it, really.

The surgery was supposed to take 45 minutes. When I woke up I found out that 45 minutes turned into five hours.

today after the doctor told me that my bone was so hard that he had to physically put his whole weight onto the screwdriver for it to even loosen.

I also had to have two blood transfusions.

After the last surgery, I made the decision to not undergo in the other surgery ever again except for life with threatening ones because The more you get operated on, the longer the recovery time is, and it also takes a toll on your body every time you have to do it.

I think this concludes the little mini-series of how my disability affects my body. Thank you for reading this far I really appreciate it! I hope you have a better understanding and perhaps a little bit more knowledge.

/Tessa