My college experience has, on the whole, been…weird. It's been complicated, it's been difficult, and it's been stressful, but mostly just weird. This is a long story, so buckle up!
In my freshman year, I was a Biology major. I had a third-floor dorm on the edge of campus, and the science building was all the way on the other side. I was incredibly excited to go to college; I had always loved science, and I've always loved learning. I was positive that these were going to be the most wonderful years of my life. And then, on the third day of class in my first semester, I twisted my ankle walking back to my dorm after class. I painfully shuffled the last hundred yards or so to the stairs, where I had to sit down and rest. While I contemplated exactly how I was going to climb three flights of stairs, two guys from a nearby dorm saw me crying and offered to help. (Very rarely had I experienced sympathy and kindness like this before, and it really touched me that these guys would go out of their way to help some random stranger.) For the rest of that semester, I struggled to heal. I wore a brace and used the RICE method like I had been instructed to, but I really should have been on crutches or a cane for a few weeks too. By the second semester, I spent a few mornings a week at physical therapy, which did approximately nothing for me. I was doing alright in my classes, though I was slow getting to and from, and I was struggling a bit to stand during my lab classes. The content was fascinating and engaging, and I was excited for the prospect of learning more and growing in the field. However, little issues here and there began cropping up. I was having relatively minor aches and pains (compared to where I am now), but the ankle still wasn't healing well. I was also having trouble keeping my blood sugar up, which led to me feeling ill towards the end of long labs (those were 3-hour classes right after another 2-3 hours of lectures). I'd have to pop glucose tablets and occasionally run out to vomit because the spikes were too low. My sensory processing issues were making the biology labs a bit difficult, as those subjects can be particularly smelly, and it was often loud because of equipment. That would trigger anxiety and panic attacks, but I mostly got that under control by the end of the year. The biggest issue though was my vision. See, in biology courses, microscopes are an essential tool. Most of what we were dealing with was on a very small scale, down to tiny microorganisms that would swim across the drop of water on the slide. Unfortunately, a person really needs two eyes functioning at around the same level to use compound microscopes effectively. We tried hooking it up to a computer display, but there was so much lag and high contrast that I couldn't make heads or cloacas of anything. By the end of my first year, I had to accept that a science field may not be a possibility for me. It broke my heart. I was dead-set on a career in lab science; I had planned to go to graduate school and study neuroscience, and I thought I had my whole life planned ahead of me. But, as things tend to go, the best laid plans can fall flat. I decided to pursue my "back-up" major of Special Education. To be honest, I wasn't fully sure why I picked it. I didn't necessarily want to be a teacher. But I had done a lot of soul-searching, and I knew I wanted to help other people with disabilities. At the time, I had no idea how far that would go. I still grieve the loss of the life I had planned for myself from time to time. It's worse when I realize how much I still remember from that one year, and even more so when I realize how much I've forgotten. I have notebooks full of equations and notes that I only vaguely understand now, and it can honestly be kind of depressing. I actually excelled in my education classes, despite not being fully committed just yet. I enjoyed the observations I did in a few classrooms, though I quickly found that elementary was not the place for me. Unfortunately, the program at my university focused on elementary/primary education for most of the classes, with only a small handful even breaching secondary (middle and high). During those years, I was gradually losing more and more mobility. Small aches and pains when I walked a long way soon became widespread, intense pain. My longest distances became embarrassingly short. I couldn't stay on my feet more than ten or twenty minutes at a time, and it soon became that I would continue to hurt as soon as I stood back up…and then, even when I was still seated. I started using a cane, then a rolling walker (aka Rollator), and occasionally forearm crutches. In the fall of 2018, I struggled to complete a pre-clinical placement. I was in the classroom all day for one day a week, and I was in classes at the university almost all day for the rest of the week. I was also planning my wedding, which was blissfully simple and required almost no work on my end. But I was exhausted. My pain was so intense that I started using a wheelchair (secondhand from Craigslist) to help me get around. But even that just wasn't enough. My cognitive functions became so impaired from the pain and fatigue that I was constantly forgetting assignments. I was losing everything, misplacing documents and important items, forgetting what I'm saying halfway through a sentence--even my balance became impaired. I was so overwhelmed with classwork on top of my health crisis (increasing pain, CPTSD symptoms, IBS symptoms, and fatigue), I ended up dropping the ball on all of it.A I ended up having to take a medical withdraw from the semester. It was a shockingly easy decision to make. I knew that my only hope of graduating was to cut my losses and find any path out of this. The medical withdraw allowed me to take a full month to myself (all of December), during which I got married and felt a tremendous amount of relief. The fog was lifting, albeit slowly. I changed my major to a related course of study, which allowed me to use all the credits I had earned and take an internship instead of student teaching. This is where I am now. I'm doing so much better overall, and my ability to think and focus and actually complete work has come back to levels I haven't had in years. I'm still in pain, and I still have fatigue, and I still deal with all my other symptoms as well, but I have finally gotten to a manageable place. It's a somewhat nerve-wracking place, since I have less security in this degree than the certainty of a special education job, but I'm so much healthier. My load now is just two classes (which are practically identical and require very little extra work) on top of the internship, where I spend three days a week. It's still new and I still have several weeks to go, but I think this is going to work.
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