I know several bloggers are blogging “Letter To My Body” which I seriously considered jumping on to. But then all the good thoughts I had to say (about how my body has kept me awake on 40 hour road trips, wrestled some ingrates in high school, and survived an interstate car accident) vanished when I started vomiting. Then, I remembered all the issues my body has plagued my life with and I didn’t feel so thankful.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because I’m not. I’m more annoyed and completely, utterly, distressingly frustrated.

Let’s start from the beginning shall we? I’ll try to refrain from boring you too much as I explain my health history.

I was born a month late, but this is better explained in this post from last October. Because of really weird health conditions, both my mother and I had to stay in the hospital for two weeks before being released. I’m not completely clear on why, but surely the blame of not knowing can rest squarely on the shoulders of my mother’s military doctor. (If you’re not a Navy-brat or any other military branch brat: military hospitals, at least twenty years ago, were not known for their amazingly skilled staff. I’m not saying I personally shook hands with each military hospital professional, but this was the general knowledge at the time.) Granted, I no longer have really awful jaundice, but some in my family have said I never recovered from flying out of the womb and immediately into ICU.

When I was three, I was attending a daycare in Florida. To make a long story short – I developed some kind of weird facial warts. I had most of them frozen off a few weeks later, but there was no real cause for the wart, the MILITARY doctors had no clue (shocking!) what caused this facial wart. I still have one to this day and it is visible on my cheek in this photo (the red dot). (P.S. I totally chose a really embarrassing photo of me; who can resist a tired Whitney with sandwich hanging off of her lip?) My doctor assures me this wart thing won’t spread and that it’s more of a permanent fixture on my face now; more of a mole, really. But still, so gross to admit that I have a semi-wart on my face. (One of many side notes: In second grade, I told my then-boyfriend, Spencer Javier, that I had a wart on my face. The prick proceeded to dump me during math hour and told everyone to stay away from “Warty Whitney.”)

When I was three, I was also bound to leg braces. I was Forrest Gumping it up because when born, it was discovered that my hips were tilted inward and my knees tilted outwards. You can imagine the freak show I was.

When I was five, my ears became incredibly infected from earrings while I was vacationing in Syracuse with the grandparents. My dad panicked and removed my earrings. My holes closed up, but two years later we re-pierced my ears…only for it to happen again. This entire process happened four or five times before my doctor discovered I have the all common nickel allergy. When I was in my teens, my nickel allergy escalated (oh! another blog post here) when I was unable to eat rye, red beans, gelatin, certain nuts and Godiva chocolate. HOLY HANNAH CAN YOU IMAGINE FINDING OUT YOU ARE ALLERGIC TO GODIVA? There was a common joke in my family: If a guy gave me jewelry that put me into anaphylactic shock, he was a cheapo. Also: If a guy gave me chocolate that didn’t send me into convulsions, he was a cheapo. So buy me good jewelry and cheap chocolate, I happen to love Hershey’s, Snickers and those really ridiculous Easter bunnies. (Side note: Once, in high school, I developed a massive rash across my abdomen from a jean button. While at a party one evening, my then-crush rubbed my stomach while trying to put the moves on me. The next day, everyone at school had heard – from him – that I had herpes. My insistence “I have a SKIN CONDITION!” fell on deaf ears.)

I started my period when I turned twelve. But then it disappeared until I was almost sixteen. Ever since then, it’s been on and off. I’ll finish my cycle on a Monday and, who knows, it could start up again that Saturday or disappear for six months. I actually recently received my first cycle since I was in Idaho (and that was in August). I know, I know, but I’ve tried birth control. All it did was make my periods last for 4-5 weeks and packed on an extra ten pounds. Believe it or not, I was more aghast at the extra poundage than the 35 days of heavy flow. My doctor can’t explain it.

Following an uncharacteristically emotional upheaval during a seventh grade science class frog dissection, I became a vegetarian. This lasted for five-six years before my doctor, during one of her “let’s figure out why you’re so anemic-looking” episodes, tested my urine and found substantial amounts of protein in my urine (read: protein leaving my body). Being the helpful doctor she was, she didn’t explain this to me so I assumed I had to start eating cow again. My current doctor has explained that eating meat will not necessarily fix this problem, as I still have way too much protein in my urine. As wonderful and helpful as current doctor is, she’s clueless.

Around the same time, I developed stress-induced asthma. Nothing really noteworthy, because really, everyone and their dog have asthma these days.

When I turned fifteen I started developing white patches similar to this across my arms. My doctor was concerned and decided to run several biopsies on them (side note: running biopsies on someone related to many cancer survivors is an emotionally traumatic thing). Thankfully for me, they found out I have vitiligo. (Number Four over here) I am extremely lucky that my case has, so far, stayed just on my upper arms. There are some very sad stories out there of people with much darker skin than I suffering from this disease and I almost, guiltily, feel like I shouldn’t even explain my mild case.

Also around fifteen, I started to notice a pattern. If the room I was in suddenly became over crowded, steam-filled or unnaturally hot, I’d vomit. I have mild claustrophobia, which I thought was the cause, but my doctor insists my symptoms are a form of heat exhaustion. Basically, it is completely impossible for me to blow-dry my hair right after a shower.

Once my monthly cycle resumed, I started having rolling-on-the-floor pain in my lower abdomen. The first time it happened, it felt like my uterus was trying to squeeze itself out of my body through my urethra. Not that I would know what that really feels like, because – again with the HOLY HANNAHs, I apologize – HOLY HANNAH THAT WOULD SURELY KILL ME. But it hurt. My doctor tried to run a pap smear (I won’t even go into how intense and embarrassing that pain was), but she, in her own words, was “unable to reach my cervix.” (I just had an OMG- am I really putting this on the internet? Am I crazy? Maybe.) She promptly prescribed me a heavy dose of naproxen sodium and sent my traumatized self on my way. I still get really horrendous pain, but due to the following health issue, I can’t take that dose of naproxen any longer.

When I turned sixteen, I started having a hard time keeping food down for too long. I was consistently vomiting up nearly everything I ate and vomited up anything caffeinated. My doctor (who, at this point, was probably sick to death of me) decided I needed a gastroscopy examination. She discovered I had peptic ulcers. I took the prescription for ranitidine and went on my way. Five years later, my doctor has decided I have chronic or recurring ulcers. Thankfully, the only side effect I’ve had from continuing ranitidine is a lower white blood cell count (which makes me more susceptible to illness, but better than vomiting every candy bar I inhale).

Between sixteen and seventeen, I started noticing shortness of breath that did not change after using my inhaler. My doctor took my heart rate while resting and active and discovered I had an abnormally fast resting heart rate. She had me go from sitting position to lying down and noticed several skipped beats between the two “activities.” She also observed a habit I had developed in the process of laying down that I’d left unnoticed: my pupils dilated and I had a very sharp pain that clearly read in my face. After x-rays and more urine tests, she concluded that I had been living with fractured vertebrae. I was a lazy high schooler – I was not part of any extracurricular activities that would explain a fractured vertebrae. I went to physical therapy, which helped the pain, but three years later, a new doctor in a different part of the country told me I had re-fractured the same vertebrae. I haven’t gone to physical therapy, yet, mostly because my doctor has said this sort of fracture seems to be one I’ll continually have. And snap, physically therapy isn’t for those with shallow wallets.

I’m going to be real right now: it’s very unnerving revealing this to the universe via my blog. I realized I could probably go on, because my medical file is starting to resemble Marcel Proust’s “A La Recherché Du Temps Perdu”, however I want to spare you the more embarrassingly and definitely too-much-information aspects of my medical file and give you a taste of the reasons my doctors all make the big bucks. Perhaps I will continue this another time (you’re missing out on the fact that very soon I will need surgeries on my feet and jaw!), but it is three pages alone right now in MS Word, I think that should suffice for the time being.

Please, feel free to share your weird medical maladies. I’d like to know I’m not the only freak out there.