Have you ever wondered how a day on an ordinary calendar claims the title of THE day that changes a life?

Jan. 15, for example. Sounds pretty mundane, just another day to flip past in a planner, searching for April 8. The latter is another equally unimpressive date to the majority, except for the Kappa Deltas of Tech who must have a dress to wear and a date in mind for a highly anticipated formal of 2006.

Already readers have forgotten Jan. 15, a date that I have not. It marks the ever-growing anniversary of the day my life was forever altered.

Jan. 15 was my first day in a life filled with incompetent doctors, godsend physical therapists, scheduled surgeries, unplanned hospitalizations, eleven scars, alternate personalities due to pain medications, nurses to fear, nurses to thank and finally, neurosurgeons that save lives. In particularly, my life.

It was a simple fender-bender car accident, the kind no one remembers. But eight knee surgeries spanning from the end of my sophomore year of high school to the week after graduation makes it hard to forget.

Feb. 7 was another unexpected milestone that will affect me for the rest of my life. My already weak body succumbed to Bell’s palsy, which caused temporary paralysis of my face for about six months, making the Valentine’s Day of my senior year the least of my problems.

Feb. 7 evolved into an unforeseen hospitalization, complete with the misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Three hospitals later, doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., discovered a cyst in my spinal cord, also known as a disease called syrgomnelia.

Two weeks before I went through Formal Recruitment, I went to the Philadelphia chapter of Shiner’s Hospital for Children and was finally diagnosed with a chiari malformation, which is an abnormal growth of the base of the brain that causes a variety of debilitating neurological symptoms.

The solution to such a problem? Making Nov. 30 a date to dread by scheduling brain surgery in New York and in addition to tacking on one last disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a skin/connective tissue disorder.

Nov. 30 was soon accompanied by Dec. 23, when at 8 a.m., I went underwent emergency surgery to eliminate the newly acquired inability to swallow, which apparently ranks in significance over preserving curly hair.

Dec. 23 brought my brain surgery total to two in three weeks, making the always animated Dec. 25 a day when feasting was replaced with fasting.

The surgeries’ estimated time of recovery is one year. Despite how miserable my winter quarter was, I look forward to the following Dec. 23.

I think it is about time I had a new date with significance. A day that is remembered as the day I feel okay. A day when I did not just feel mediocre, but a day because of all of the ones before it, I feel wonderful.

And that is a date my family, my friends and I could not forget if we tried.

 

Melissa Walker is a junior journalism major from Baton Rouge and serves as a news editor for The Tech Talk. E-mail comments to mew018@latech.edu.