Write about a time when you were injured or ill. Focus on the adaptations you had to make to accommodate whatever the problem was; walking on crutches, writing with your other hand, only seeing out of one eye, etc. After digging out highly specific details, explore how the experience changed you.

I don’t look like it here, but I’m in some pretty serious pain.
I had just got a new laptop for Christmas and was probably drunk,
so that may account for the smiling.
Also… wow my teeth were white.

Back at the end of 2007 going into 2008, I got what I call the Four Month Sore Throat. I’d started getting sick at the beginning of October, but because I’d had a lot of trips scheduled, I had a lot of plane rides ahead of me. Plane rides + sore throat + painful inner ear = BADNESS. It didn’t help that I worked at a place that offered very little sick time (vacation time was easier to earn but was still like squeezing blood out of pennies), so I was in the freezing cold all day and I never had time to rest and recover. I was stressed at LIFE in general as well, and round after round of antibiotics did nothing to help.

I was in pain all day and night. I couldn’t sleep because of the pain, and I was popping ibuprofen like candy. So much food went bad over those four months because I couldn’t swallow without a lot of pain. I ate sparingly. (By the time the ordeal was over, I was able to wear size 14 in girls jeans.)

I had coughing fits, I had migraines, I had pink eye, I had bronchitis. It just went on and on and on. I was a hot mess.

I coped the best I could… but it was difficult. I finally got cured in early 2008, when I went to a new doctor who actually listened to what was wrong with me, prescribed me the proper medicines, and even some pain pills. Things got worse before they got better. All the gunk that was in my head and causing me so much misery (turned out to be a chronic sinus infection) started to drain and my entire face felt like it was on FIRE. The one day, the pain felt different. I knew it was coming to an end. And as the days went by, the pain lessened until that whole nightmare was over.

The main adaption I had to make was eating less. It just hurt too much to swallow. Fortunately, not eating much was pretty easy for me for reasons I won’t go into. I also had to spend money I really didn’t have on doctor visits, time off (when things became extra unbearable), and expensive medications. I suppose I just took money from the grocery budget to cover it.

This experience has made me not take my health for granted. I got terrible sore throats every quarter when I was a little girl, but nothing of that magnitude. Any time I get a sore throat now, I monitor it carefully and try to take precautions to keep it from growing to the mammoth nightmare it was those four months. Now I think I have the tools to avoid such things now. I am much less stressed, and I have medicines (holistic and traditional) that will be much more effective at helping me fight something of that magnitude, were it to dare come back again.