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How To Be A Sick Kid

How to be a sick kid

To verify I am no longer considered a “kid”, in fact I’ve looked nothing like a kid since puberty kicked in at 14 and I developed the body of a woman capable of bearing many children. Lots of people get sick, a side effect of our genetically mutated world is sick people. So when kids get really sick it shouldn’t be such a terrible surprise, but it is. When a doctor first told me I was really ill I had been lying in a hospital bed for 2 weeks, I hadn’t showered, brushed my teeth or been able to walk in all that time. I just lay there being scanned and prodded and poked. I didn’t scream or raise my fist to the heavens and curse whatever god had made me, I turned away from the doctor and I cried. The worst moment of my life. I cried silently until my mum couldn’t bare it any longer and left me alone. The weight of that moment is still heavy on my shoulders, sometimes I think back to it and feel the crushing sensation of how utterly desperate and devastated I was. It’s so strange how I can recall the memory of that feeling so well but the words I spoke or that were spoken to me escape me entirely. The worst feeling of all is seeing the effect you being sick has on the people around you, my parents fell apart, my friends disappeared, in fact I hated them for it but what 15 year old knows how to comfort a dying friend? What adult does? What words can you give if any? How can anyone who isn’t you possibly understand what it feels like for your heart to ache with every furious beat or your lungs to refuse to inhale?

One morning lying in my hospital bed I called my mum telling her I couldn’t breathe and that during the night I’d been hooked up to an oxygen tank. She had been in M & S buying me Percy pigs and had rushed out forgetting to pay for them. 6 months later, when I was in remission she told me when she got to the hospital the doctors told her I was dying and unless they started treatment today I wouldn’t last the week. The image of my mum clutching some poor medical student bent double hysterically crying is not an imagined vision that will leave me, ever. To borrow a phrase from John Green and his novel A Fault In Our Stars -a book which has inspired me to share this story - I am a grenade. I felt it then, I feel it now. The damage I have caused to my parents will never be healed, I hate myself for it. A few years after I was out of hospital my mum took me to Egypt, certain treatments I was on left my skin unbearably sensitive meaning strong sunlight was forbidden but after a change in medication we decided to go in holiday. My mum waded out into the sea and I waved from the beach and joined her. When I reached her, she cried on my shoulder.
“When you first got home I used to watch you sleep just to check that you were still breathing.”
“It’s all over now.” I said. I wondered when the tables an turned, when had the sick kid started to comfort the healthy adult? It was what cut the deepest, not chemo or gaining a fuckload of weight or losing my friends or missing out on being a normal kid, it was the pain I had caused the people I loved just by being me.

So how to be a sick kid, how can you possibly deal with it? The truth is you don’t, you never do, there is never a day it doesn’t flitter through your mind or there is something that reminds you of it but you plod along. You get praised for it, told your strong and courageous and a wonderful person. Being sick didn’t make me a wonderful person, it didn’t excuse any horrible thing I’d ever done, it just made people forgive me a whole lot quicker. You don’t pick up old threads but new ones, in fact you give up knitting all together because that’s what we humans do, adapt.

How To Be A Sick Kid

To verify I am no longer considered a “kid”, in fact I’ve looked nothing like a kid since puberty kicked in at 14 and I developed the body of a woman capable of bearing many children. Lots of people get sick, a side effect of our genetically mutated world is sick people. So when kids get really sick it shouldn’t be such a terrible surprise, but it is. When a doctor first told me I was really ill I had been lying in a hospital bed for 2 weeks, I hadn’t showered, brushed my teeth or been able to walk in all that time. I just lay there being scanned and prodded and poked. I didn’t scream or raise my fist to the heavens and curse whatever god had made me, I turned away from the doctor and I cried. The worst moment of my life. I cried silently until my mum couldn’t bare it any longer and left me alone. The weight of that moment is still heavy on my shoulders, sometimes I think back to it and feel the crushing sensation of how utterly desperate and devastated I was. It’s so strange how I can recall the memory of that feeling so well but the words I spoke or that were spoken to me escape me entirely. The worst feeling of all is seeing the effect you being sick has on the people around you, my parents fell apart, my friends disappeared, in fact I hated them for it but what 15 year old knows how to comfort a dying friend? What adult does? What words can you give if any? How can anyone who isn’t you possibly understand what it feels like for your heart to ache with every furious beat or your lungs to refuse to inhale?

One morning lying in my hospital bed I called my mum telling her I couldn’t breathe and that during the night I’d been hooked up to an oxygen tank. She had been in M & S buying me Percy pigs and had rushed out forgetting to pay for them. 6 months later, when I was in remission she told me when she got to the hospital the doctors told her I was dying and unless they started treatment today I wouldn’t last the week. The image of my mum clutching some poor medical student bent double hysterically crying is not an imagined vision that will leave me, ever. To borrow a phrase from John Green and his novel A Fault In Our Stars -a book which has inspired me to share this story - I am a grenade. I felt it then, I feel it now. The damage I have caused to my parents will never be healed, I hate myself for it. A few years after I was out of hospital my mum took me to Egypt, certain treatments I was on left my skin unbearably sensitive meaning strong sunlight was forbidden but after a change in medication we decided to go in holiday. My mum waded out into the sea and I waved from the beach and joined her. When I reached her, she cried on my shoulder.
“When you first got home I used to watch you sleep just to check that you were still breathing.”
“It’s all over now.” I said. I wondered when the tables an turned, when had the sick kid started to comfort the healthy adult? It was what cut the deepest, not chemo or gaining a fuckload of weight or losing my friends or missing out on being a normal kid, it was the pain I had caused the people I loved just by being me.

So how to be a sick kid, how can you possibly deal with it? The truth is you don’t, you never do, there is never a day it doesn’t flitter through your mind or there is something that reminds you of it but you plod along. You get praised for it, told your strong and courageous and a wonderful person. Being sick didn’t make me a wonderful person, it didn’t excuse any horrible thing I’d ever done, it just made people forgive me a whole lot quicker. You don’t pick up old threads but new ones, in fact you give up knitting all together because that’s what we humans do, adapt.

How To Be A Sick Kid

To verify I am no longer considered a “kid”, in fact I’ve looked nothing like a kid since puberty kicked in at 14 and I developed the body of a woman capable of bearing many children. Lots of people get sick, a side effect of our genetically mutated world is sick people. So when kids get really sick it shouldn’t be such a terrible surprise, but it is. When a doctor first told me I was really ill I had been lying in a hospital bed for 2 weeks, I hadn’t showered, brushed my teeth or been able to walk in all that time. I just lay there being scanned and prodded and poked. I didn’t scream or raise my fist to the heavens and curse whatever god had made me, I turned away from the doctor and I cried. The worst moment of my life. I cried silently until my mum couldn’t bare it any longer and left me alone. The weight of that moment is still heavy on my shoulders, sometimes I think back to it and feel the crushing sensation of how utterly desperate and devastated I was. It’s so strange how I can recall the memory of that feeling so well but the words I spoke or that were spoken to me escape me entirely. The worst feeling of all is seeing the effect you being sick has on the people around you, my parents fell apart, my friends disappeared, in fact I hated them for it but what 15 year old knows how to comfort a dying friend? What adult does? What words can you give if any? How can anyone who isn’t you possibly understand what it feels like for your heart to ache with every furious beat or your lungs to refuse to inhale?

One morning lying in my hospital bed I called my mum telling her I couldn’t breathe and that during the night I’d been hooked up to an oxygen tank. She had been in M & S buying me Percy pigs and had rushed out forgetting to pay for them. 6 months later, when I was in remission she told me when she got to the hospital the doctors told her I was dying and unless they started treatment today I wouldn’t last the week. The image of my mum clutching some poor medical student bent double hysterically crying is not an imagined vision that will leave me, ever. To borrow a phrase from John Green and his novel A Fault In Our Stars -a book which has inspired me to share this story - I am a grenade. I felt it then, I feel it now. The damage I have caused to my parents will never be healed, I hate myself for it. A few years after I was out of hospital my mum took me to Egypt, certain treatments I was on left my skin unbearably sensitive meaning strong sunlight was forbidden but after a change in medication we decided to go in holiday. My mum waded out into the sea and I waved from the beach and joined her. When I reached her, she cried on my shoulder.
“When you first got home I used to watch you sleep just to check that you were still breathing.”
“It’s all over now.” I said. I wondered when the tables an turned, when had the sick kid started to comfort the healthy adult? It was what cut the deepest, not chemo or gaining a fuckload of weight or losing my friends or missing out on being a normal kid, it was the pain I had caused the people I loved just by being me.

So how to be a sick kid, how can you possibly deal with it? The truth is you don’t, you never do, there is never a day it doesn’t flitter through your mind or there is something that reminds you of it but you plod along. You get praised for it, told your strong and courageous and a wonderful person. Being sick didn’t make me a wonderful person, it didn’t excuse any horrible thing I’d ever done, it just made people forgive me a whole lot quicker. You don’t pick up old threads but new ones, in fact you give up knitting all together because that’s what we humans do, adapt.

How To Be A Sick Kid

To verify I am no longer considered a “kid”, in fact I’ve looked nothing like a kid since puberty kicked in at 14 and I developed the body of a woman capable of bearing many children. Lots of people get sick, a side effect of our genetically mutated world is sick people. So when kids get really sick it shouldn’t be such a terrible surprise, but it is. When a doctor first told me I was really ill I had been lying in a hospital bed for 2 weeks, I hadn’t showered, brushed my teeth or been able to walk in all that time. I just lay there being scanned and prodded and poked. I didn’t scream or raise my fist to the heavens and curse whatever god had made me, I turned away from the doctor and I cried. The worst moment of my life. I cried silently until my mum couldn’t bare it any longer and left me alone. The weight of that moment is still heavy on my shoulders, sometimes I think back to it and feel the crushing sensation of how utterly desperate and devastated I was. It’s so strange how I can recall the memory of that feeling so well but the words I spoke or that were spoken to me escape me entirely. The worst feeling of all is seeing the effect you being sick has on the people around you, my parents fell apart, my friends disappeared, in fact I hated them for it but what 15 year old knows how to comfort a dying friend? What adult does? What words can you give if any? How can anyone who isn’t you possibly understand what it feels like for your heart to ache with every furious beat or your lungs to refuse to inhale?

One morning lying in my hospital bed I called my mum telling her I couldn’t breathe and that during the night I’d been hooked up to an oxygen tank. She had been in M & S buying me Percy pigs and had rushed out forgetting to pay for them. 6 months later, when I was in remission she told me when she got to the hospital the doctors told her I was dying and unless they started treatment today I wouldn’t last the week. The image of my mum clutching some poor medical student bent double hysterically crying is not an imagined vision that will leave me, ever. To borrow a phrase from John Green and his novel A Fault In Our Stars -a book which has inspired me to share this story - I am a grenade. I felt it then, I feel it now. The damage I have caused to my parents will never be healed, I hate myself for it. A few years after I was out of hospital my mum took me to Egypt, certain treatments I was on left my skin unbearably sensitive meaning strong sunlight was forbidden but after a change in medication we decided to go in holiday. My mum waded out into the sea and I waved from the beach and joined her. When I reached her, she cried on my shoulder.
“When you first got home I used to watch you sleep just to check that you were still breathing.”
“It’s all over now.” I said. I wondered when the tables an turned, when had the sick kid started to comfort the healthy adult? It was what cut the deepest, not chemo or gaining a fuckload of weight or losing my friends or missing out on being a normal kid, it was the pain I had caused the people I loved just by being me.

So how to be a sick kid, how can you possibly deal with it? The truth is you don’t, you never do, there is never a day it doesn’t flitter through your mind or there is something that reminds you of it but you plod along. You get praised for it, told your strong and courageous and a wonderful person. Being sick didn’t make me a wonderful person, it didn’t excuse any horrible thing I’d ever done, it just made people forgive me a whole lot quicker. You don’t pick up old threads but new ones, in fact you give up knitting all together because that’s what we humans do, adapt.

How To Be A Sick Kid

To verify I am no longer considered a “kid”, in fact I’ve looked nothing like a kid since puberty kicked in at 14 and I developed the body of a woman capable of bearing many children. Lots of people get sick, a side effect of our genetically mutated world is sick people. So when kids get really sick it shouldn’t be such a terrible surprise, but it is. When a doctor first told me I was really ill I had been lying in a hospital bed for 2 weeks, I hadn’t showered, brushed my teeth or been able to walk in all that time. I just lay there being scanned and prodded and poked. I didn’t scream or raise my fist to the heavens and curse whatever god had made me, I turned away from the doctor and I cried. The worst moment of my life. I cried silently until my mum couldn’t bare it any longer and left me alone. The weight of that moment is still heavy on my shoulders, sometimes I think back to it and feel the crushing sensation of how utterly desperate and devastated I was. It’s so strange how I can recall the memory of that feeling so well but the words I spoke or that were spoken to me escape me entirely. The worst feeling of all is seeing the effect you being sick has on the people around you, my parents fell apart, my friends disappeared, in fact I hated them for it but what 15 year old knows how to comfort a dying friend? What adult does? What words can you give if any? How can anyone who isn’t you possibly understand what it feels like for your heart to ache with every furious beat or your lungs to refuse to inhale?

One morning lying in my hospital bed I called my mum telling her I couldn’t breathe and that during the night I’d been hooked up to an oxygen tank. She had been in M & S buying me Percy pigs and had rushed out forgetting to pay for them. 6 months later, when I was in remission she told me when she got to the hospital the doctors told her I was dying and unless they started treatment today I wouldn’t last the week. The image of my mum clutching some poor medical student bent double hysterically crying is not an imagined vision that will leave me, ever. To borrow a phrase from John Green and his novel A Fault In Our Stars -a book which has inspired me to share this story - I am a grenade. I felt it then, I feel it now. The damage I have caused to my parents will never be healed, I hate myself for it. A few years after I was out of hospital my mum took me to Egypt, certain treatments I was on left my skin unbearably sensitive meaning strong sunlight was forbidden but after a change in medication we decided to go in holiday. My mum waded out into the sea and I waved from the beach and joined her. When I reached her, she cried on my shoulder.
“When you first got home I used to watch you sleep just to check that you were still breathing.”
“It’s all over now.” I said. I wondered when the tables an turned, when had the sick kid started to comfort the healthy adult? It was what cut the deepest, not chemo or gaining a fuckload of weight or losing my friends or missing out on being a normal kid, it was the pain I had caused the people I loved just by being me.

So how to be a sick kid, how can you possibly deal with it? The truth is you don’t, you never do, there is never a day it doesn’t flitter through your mind or there is something that reminds you of it but you plod along. You get praised for it, told your strong and courageous and a wonderful person. Being sick didn’t make me a wonderful person, it didn’t excuse any horrible thing I’d ever done, it just made people forgive me a whole lot quicker. You don’t pick up old threads but new ones, in fact you give up knitting all together because that’s what we humans do, adapt.

How To Be A Sick Kid

To verify I am no longer considered a “kid”, in fact I’ve looked nothing like a kid since puberty kicked in at 14 and I developed the body of a woman capable of bearing many children. Lots of people get sick, a side effect of our genetically mutated world is sick people. So when kids get really sick it shouldn’t be such a terrible surprise, but it is. When a doctor first told me I was really ill I had been lying in a hospital bed for 2 weeks, I hadn’t showered, brushed my teeth or been able to walk in all that time. I just lay there being scanned and prodded and poked. I didn’t scream or raise my fist to the heavens and curse whatever god had made me, I turned away from the doctor and I cried. The worst moment of my life. I cried silently until my mum couldn’t bare it any longer and left me alone. The weight of that moment is still heavy on my shoulders, sometimes I think back to it and feel the crushing sensation of how utterly desperate and devastated I was. It’s so strange how I can recall the memory of that feeling so well but the words I spoke or that were spoken to me escape me entirely. The worst feeling of all is seeing the effect you being sick has on the people around you, my parents fell apart, my friends disappeared, in fact I hated them for it but what 15 year old knows how to comfort a dying friend? What adult does? What words can you give if any? How can anyone who isn’t you possibly understand what it feels like for your heart to ache with every furious beat or your lungs to refuse to inhale?

One morning lying in my hospital bed I called my mum telling her I couldn’t breathe and that during the night I’d been hooked up to an oxygen tank. She had been in M & S buying me Percy pigs and had rushed out forgetting to pay for them. 6 months later, when I was in remission she told me when she got to the hospital the doctors told her I was dying and unless they started treatment today I wouldn’t last the week. The image of my mum clutching some poor medical student bent double hysterically crying is not an imagined vision that will leave me, ever. To borrow a phrase from John Green and his novel A Fault In Our Stars -a book which has inspired me to share this story - I am a grenade. I felt it then, I feel it now. The damage I have caused to my parents will never be healed, I hate myself for it. A few years after I was out of hospital my mum took me to Egypt, certain treatments I was on left my skin unbearably sensitive meaning strong sunlight was forbidden but after a change in medication we decided to go in holiday. My mum waded out into the sea and I waved from the beach and joined her. When I reached her, she cried on my shoulder.
“When you first got home I used to watch you sleep just to check that you were still breathing.”
“It’s all over now.” I said. I wondered when the tables an turned, when had the sick kid started to comfort the healthy adult? It was what cut the deepest, not chemo or gaining a fuckload of weight or losing my friends or missing out on being a normal kid, it was the pain I had caused the people I loved just by being me.

So how to be a sick kid, how can you possibly deal with it? The truth is you don’t, you never do, there is never a day it doesn’t flitter through your mind or there is something that reminds you of it but you plod along. You get praised for it, told your strong and courageous and a wonderful person. Being sick didn’t make me a wonderful person, it didn’t excuse any horrible thing I’d ever done, it just made people forgive me a whole lot quicker. You don’t pick up old threads but new ones, in fact you give up knitting all together because that’s what we humans do, adapt.