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queennaenaebee · 7 years ago

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My Testimony

I do believe there is an episode in my life about which you should know. One Sunday during the summer before my fifth grade year, I was sitting in our church sanctuary just after the service had ended. I was talking to my friends when all of a sudden I started having a seizure. Everyone was confused and surprised because I had never had a seizure before. After someone called 911, I was quickly transported to Cook Children's Medical Center in downtown Fort Worth. The emergency room ran the usual tests and then sent me home. But about two weeks before school was to start, I had another seizure at home. This time my parents drove me straight to the hospital. Again, blood tests revealed nothing conclusive. Eventually, one doctor decided to do a spinal tap in order to test my cerebrospinal fluid. We finally discovered that a viral infection had gotten into my brain and I was experiencing complications due to encephalitis. Little did I know how difficult the road ahead of me would become. The hospital would become my home for a while because my case became so severe. In just a couple of weeks, I lost my ability to talk and then to swallow, so a surgeon had to make a fancy hole in my stomach for a feeding tube to keep me alive with liquid feeds. I could not walk or even control my urinating or bowel movements. I literally lost my mind. My stay at the hospital lasted almost seven months. After the months had passed--and still not talking or swallowing--I was sent home to continue recuperating and rehabilitation. It was the Spring of 2007, and my days were filled with rehab sessions with speech, physical, occupational, and cognitive therapists. Throughout that summer, I excelled in my therapy enough to be admitted back to my school. But this time, I was going into the sixth grade as a student in our special education department's community-based instruction (CBI) program. I continued all of my rehab both at school and at Cook Children's. Then in seventh grade, while I was still in CBI, I began taking my math, language arts, science, and elective classes outside of CBI and in regular classes. When my scores for Texas' required year-end standardized tests came in, I passed the reading test and, to the shock of the school administration, I was commended on the math and writing tests. Also in my seventh grade year, I finally got my speech and my ability to swallow back again. Before my eighth grade year began, I found out that while I would remain in the special education program, I no longer needed CBI. All of my classes would be with regular teachers and mainstream students. In high school I began taking honors classes and in the end I took a total of eight honors classes in my high school experience. Ever since my return to school, I and my parents regularly attended Admission, Review, and Dismissal (ARD) meetings with my diagnosticians, teachers, and administrators to discuss my progress and to set out future plans and goals. But my most recent ARD meeting during my junior year was for my dismissal from special ed. Those who attended that meeting had never seen a student be released from the special education program of my school district before. I am thankful and blessed to have a family who continued to believe in my comeback and that I would come back even better than before.

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queennaenaebee · 8 years ago

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