Course work (style model 1) UNFINISHED DRAFT

So this story, this part of my life, begins with my first diagnoses at the age of thirteen. I was wasting my time in front of the TV, when my parents attempted to soundlessly edge their way through to the sitting room, i don't know whether this was an attempt to soften the unavoidably devastating news, like their heavy footsteps would make it harder, but nevertheless the news shot me down. The background noise of the TV drowned out the details of what my parents were explaining but I didn't care. My shocked body didn't even notice that the cat had wandered in and shat on the floor.

That first sense of a genuine shock was intensely unsettling. At thirteen, i was entering a phase where I needed to fit in. A phase where popular opinion of those around you dictates your every move. I could feel it creeping up on me as my friends began to regroup and when people started to gain knowledge of my diagnosis; others eyes clung to my skin in the school corridor, i no longer 'fit in'. I wanted to turn round and scream at these onlookers, these nosey 'need to know' scavengers: "I AM NOT ABNORMAL". But i was. There was no running from the fact. I was abnormal. The word shrieked at me from every hospital letter; my peers delicate approach to talking to me; my parents' newly resurrected sympathy became a loop hole to getting what i wanted but it was the kind of sympathy you get when you're two and you graze your knee. I became an object that shouldn't be allowed out of the heavily packed box, and this frustrated me on an enormous level. Pushed off guard by a hormone secreting brain tumour, my ever so important social status was crushed, for the next year those around me named me "the brain tumour girl" behind my back and my self confidence was in shreds. This beginning experience was probably subconsciously exaggerated due to my teenage brain telling me that everything was to come crashing down. It wasn't. It didn't. My mental stability fluctuated massively between the ages of fourteen/fifteen. But aside from that my diagnosis was actually strengthening for me, not only because i was forced to haul myself out of bed so I didn't lose the ability to walk, but for me as a person too. It was the beginning of an extremely long year but I can still count on one hand the amount of times i cried over it.

"Just remember, everything is okay and we'll get this sorted, it's only a two hour operation" the doctor reminded me as she ushered me into a curtained room, covered in crudely coloured octopi (a room I wouldn't stay in very long in the following few months). My mother sat down next to me and brushed my hair into a ponytail and back out. The hospital gown was white, with ugly pink flower blotches that we're barely attached to their translucent stems. Catching a glimpse of myself in the reflective window, my dad made a comment about how i looked like a Norman Rockwell painting.