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Post 17th Birthday: I no longer thought that any boys were cute. I didn't want to date anyone. I just wanted to commit suicide but I couldn't afford a gun. I was still too sick to get a job and I was still too much of a shame upon my family to receive an allowance. I didn't think Dr. M. was entertaining anymore. Since my sickness continued I started pushing my parents to let me have the plastic surgery done to repair some of the damage to my face. I didn't want to look shriveled, even if I felt/looked sick and was crippled (by swollen joints) all of the time. I wanted to at least LOOK MORE NORMAL. I wanted to LOOK MORE MY AGE. And I wanted my face back as much as that was possible. My parents laughed at me and mocked me and then my dad told me seriously, "No, it was a waste of money and a girl should make it on her brains and hard work and not on her looks." Then he pointed out the example of a successful lady architect he knew, who was always complaining that men didn't take her seriously in the business world because they were always fixated on her pretty appearance. In the meanwhile, a male friend of mine, not a close friend so much as a distant friend, told me about his sister who had been driving drunk and had an accident hitting a light pole. Her father had paid top dollar for her to have a well known local plastic surgeon repair her broken nose because he didn't want her to have to live with facial imperfection due to the accident (caused by her own drunken driving). My friend's sister was close to 30 years old! I just didn't understand. Why shouldn't my damage, which wasn't my fault, be repaired? Why wasn't I worth more? And I was only 17 years old. Hadn't I been through enough? Why was I such a terrible girl that no one cared about me? I'd never taken drugs. I'd never messed with boys. I'd never done anything that was so bad. But my school grades were just awful, yet I was so sick I couldn't perform. I'd have given my whole life and gotten a million A's for my dad if he'd just CARE enough to see how badly this sickness was hurting me -- just see how my face looked and understand that a 17 year old girl isn't supposed to look like that. I was devastated. That's why I wanted to kill myself. All I wanted and all I asked for was for someone to care and to help me not be so sick and then to repair whatever damage could be fixed. I knew I'd never be beautiful again, but I thought I could look better -- maybe look like I'd never been that sick, if I ever recovered. There had to be an answer somewhere. There had to be a diagnosis or a cure and then if my faced was fixed, well it would stay decent as long as my illness wasn't allowed to run rampant anymore. Since no one seemed to care that I wasn't getting any medical help whatsoever, perhaps I could just get my face somewhat repaired (partially repaired) and then the rest was my problem -- my responsibility to stop the sickness, even though I'd failed thus far. I would have taken that bargain or any other just to have the plastic surgery done at that point. I had lost all sense of the fact that I was STILL A CHILD in reality. I had lost the sense of exactly how vastly different a drunken 30-year old and a sick blameless 17-year old should have been in their father's eyes. I had lost sense of the fact that I should have been my parent's responsibility. I knew things weren't right, but I couldn't pin point exactly why anymore. I couldn't imagine what it was like to have someone care about me. I was becoming a non-human, trying to be a human living a more normal life -- a more normal life with the same rights as every else around me seemed to have that I in some confusing manner was consistently denied. |
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