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Living in Pain

True Story

By Natalie C..Published 6 years ago 5 min read
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I am a very active person. I have been seen I was really little. I went to dance from 3 to 7, then cheer for one year, then gymnastics from 8 to when I was in the middle of 5th grade. I go camping all the time I possibly can go. I can’t just sit around for very long. I have to keep moving.

Fifth grade is when it all started. I was doing a front handspring in gymnastics. I ended up tearing the tendon of my right foot. We decided to go to a specialist after about a couple of weeks of being in constant pain. When we got there, the doctor said that he has never seen someone tear the tendon where I did. I tore it by the pad of my foot not near the heel. They put me in a walking boot. I was in a walking boot from then on until the middle of about sixth grade. In constant pain, taking painkillers almost every day to keep in front of the pain, I had a little break for seventh grade not having to have any injuries to deal with.

Then August 5, 2015 was a normal day. I was hanging out with my friend over at the river climbing on a log that hung above the river. I slipped getting up onto the log and hit my back on the edge of the river bank. I felt fine and it was just a shock to me that I slipped. I went home that day feeling happy and not expecting anything bad to happen the next day. August 6, 2015 changed my life upside down, I was walking in the kitchen in the middle of the day when I went to go wash my hands in the kitchen sink when I collapsed by the oven. I dislocated my patella. I was walking and my kneecap dislocated. I landed hard on the tile floor with a thud. I remember thinking, "Why did this have to happen to me?"

Then I had to figure out a way to get my phone and tell my mom what had happened, so I scooted myself slowly and painful across the tile floor until I got to the side of the island table. I then sat there and rested for a few minutes in pain. I tried to reach my phone from where I was sitting but that didn’t even work. I looked down at my knee one last time only seeing that my tibia and femur were not in the right place. I pushed the thought out of my mind that I was hurt really bad and I was just determined to get my phone and call my mom. It took me ten minutes to finally get my phone having to lift myself up and grab my phone at the same time. It took me ten more minutes and three tries to final get a hold of my mom. She said that she would get someone to come over and stay with me until she could get there.

Dian came over and stayed with me and kept me company while I was waiting in agony. It took my mom about a half hour for her to get home. Once she was home, she parked the old rugged red Ford as close as she could to the front door, running inside to see what had happened for herself. She saw me then ran into the garage to get two pieces of wood to stabilize my leg from moving. She just verily touched my leg with the wood when I said there was no way, and that my knee was too swollen and hurt too much for her to stabilize it. She then helped my onto my feet put my arm around her neck and hers around my waist. She told me that this was going to be really painful. Dian could not help me because she is an older lady. So we took 20 minutes to get me out into the truck.

The trip to the ER was terrible. I could feel every little bump, crack, and hole. Once we got in there, the nurse was really nice. He helped me get comfortable any way he could. Then the doctor came in, did not even introduce himself, and came over to me and popped my patella back in. After that, I was in so much pain. I did not know it was possible to be in that much pain. My mom asked him to do an x-ray. The radiologist was really nice. Every position he put me in I would cry out in pain, in agony. Once I was done with my x-ray the radiologist went to the nurse's station and told my doctor to give me something because I was in so much pain. My doctor then finally came in and asked me if I needed something to help with the pain. They found out that I had bone fragments in my knee from when he relocated my knee cap. He then decided to send me to a specialist.

The specialist made me get an MRI to see where the fragments all were. Once she saw that, she made the decision to take them all out because they were migrating. I had surgery on August 25, 2015 because they had to get the surgery done before school started. Every day before and after the surgery I was still in constant pain. The surgery was supposed to solve the problem, but it didn’t. I ended up being in pain for the rest of the year on and off crutches and in constant pain. Almost a year later, I found out that I was going to have to go into surgery again because my knee cap did not heal correctly. So all that pain finally explained, I will be having reconstructive surgery on March 15, 2017. They will be taking both tendons from the sides of my knees and making an internal brace inside my knee. Hopefully after that, I will live a pain free life without having to be in pain 24/7. In the end, I will hopefully be able to go back to an active life again. Will this be a happy ending or a sad ending? We will never quite know.

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About the Creator

Natalie C..

I am a young writer who lets her creative flow through her writing. I tend to write on the darker side of topics because a lot of people don't. I have a darker imagination than most people.

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