College Admissions Essay Anyone? Tell me what you think!?
My name is Elizabeth Hissim and when I look into the mirror I see myself, but I don't. The person I face is disfigured. She has visible scars on her neck, hands, and underneath deep sunken eyes, not from misadventures of childhood but the cold steel cut of a surgeon's knife, she has unnaturally small unformed ears hidden under honey blond hair, she is someone I don't really know, someone who has faced trials that I find difficult to remember, someone I respect and someone I dread. I have never understood how people, my family and my friends deal with it so well. Sometimes I'll catch myself in a mirror at an angle that makes my whole self constrict, and I always wonder how people deal with me, the opposite of perfection that all of mankind revere, someone who has always looked wrong in a photograph. I will most likely never understand it fully, but for the most part I treat it as separate part of me that has no affect on who I am personally, and yet people seem to treat the way I look, and the way I am as the same. It seems as if in having Treacher Collins Syndrome, I seem to affect how other people see me in more serious ways than my personality ever could. Adults would tell my parents that they respected me for living each day as if it were a trial for me, like I was child with leukemia battling each day to live and get rid of the harm that ravaged their bodies. In truth it is nothing like that, I have had this syndrome my whole life and therefore I simply live each day, but more so I do not have a mirror in front of my face at all times, and I only know my personality. I have had many horrific trials in the past due to me having Treacher Collins, but at seventeen I hardly remember any of them. When I do they are like they happened to someone else, recalling them is like remembering a movie I saw a long time ago, I remember the screaming, the nasty hospital food, and the star wars legos my sisters would give me after a surgery, but I do not recall any of the feelings. I have forgotten the pain itself, though I can recall that it was so intense it felt as if I were hearing someone else screaming, that I could not feel the tears I no doubt shed until I would pass out. Recalling my worst moment, I remember waking up to nothing; without my hearing aid I could not hear, my sense of smell had always been obsolete, and to my absolute horror my eyes had been swelled shut. Taste and touch had numbed and all I felt was an enhancing fear and a searing pain spread throughout my body, thundering in my head, enveloping me like the unfamiliar darkness that swallowed me whole. I was eight years old. At seventeen I scream and curse when I get paper cut like everyone else, and sometimes I wish I wouldn't, I wish that the things, the pain I've gone through would keep me from acting so trivially, that I would act as strong as people tell me I am. Because I do not remember things, I've always been interested in what my family remembers during times that happened in my youth, and most of the time I find myself respecting who I was as I child and wishing I had remained so. I have been told about the surgeries I have had starting five days after my birth, and the experiences that I have never recalled. To hear about me at eight going into a coma, or at ten, when I had thrown up blood, hearing what I went through during time lapses when I had passed out scares me but interests me at the same if only because I survived them. When I was four years old my parents wrote articles for a "newspaper" that talked about cranial facial conditions. Reading them now brings a maelstrom of mixed emotions, and reminds me of why I act the way I do, and there are many ways that Treacher Collins had influenced the way I am. In my mother's article she talked about technical things, an emergency tracheotomy at seven weeks old, and how I had therapy to teach me just how to move toys, vocalize, and move my arms and legs. Reading and hearing about such things is difficult, it is hard for me to accept that I needed help doing the simplest of things, the most normal occurrences in life like breathing, and moving. Therefore I've always found myself needing to prove myself, to get better grades then my classmates, to succeed. What my father's article revealed is much different in its specific description. His story started off with a normal day, sunshine and all, but then became a sort of nightmare as he narrates his worry for me and my mother who had gone into labor six weeks early, and dread at the unsmiling faces of the doctors in green. When the doctor told him I was born via c-section, he waited until continuing that I had "anomalies, problems". This article has always brought tears to my eyes, always made me think about the fact that the moment I was born my family had been given a burden, few others go through, and yet they handled it like a gift, handled me in the best way they could have. My parents who within my first hours of life, had baptized
- archaea
gritty...check this link.
http://www.treachercollins.org/main.html
God bless you...
Leukemia — Comprehensive overview covers symptoms, causes, risk factors, treatment of this blood-related cancer.
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