Hippocrates once said, “ A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses,” When I was only 11 years old, I was faced with the challenge of almost dying. This quote reminds me that I shouldn’t dwell on the fact that I almost lost my life, and that I should learn from my experience.

When I got my tonsils taken out, I thought it would be normal. I went in to get the surgery and was perfectly fine. I didn’t have to get an IV, the doctor seemed nice and everyone was trying their hardest to make sure that my surgery went smoothly. I wish that were the case. My throat was obviously very sore after the surgery, but after a few hours, I was fine. The only thing wrong was that I could not talk at all.

Over the next few days, my seemingly easy recovery proved to not be so easy anymore. First, I became allergic to the pain medicine and got hives all over my legs and neck. That meant I had to stop using pain medicine; which made it very hard on me because everything hurt much worse.

I went to bed one night and my mom was sleeping on the floor, just in case anything bad happened to me because of my throat. I woke up at around 2 in the morning and threw up an unbearable amount of blood all over my bed. I immediately started getting very dizzy and obviously anemic from all of the blood loss. I also got chills. My mom had my dad call 911 to bring the ambulance to take me to the hospital.
When the EMS crew came, they told my mom that what I threw up was not a lot of blood compared to what they’ve seen in the past. I went to my bathroom and threw up even more blood. The EMS crew still didn’t think it was enough blood, but my mom demanded that they took me to the hospital. When I got in the ambulance, they gave me an IV (which I hated a lot) and we were on our way.

When we got there, I was sent to a room and a nurse came in to look in my throat. I couldn’t open my mouth so he wasn’t able to see anything going on. My stomach was in severe pain. The hardest part of all of this was that I couldn’t tell anyone how I really felt because I couldn’t talk even if I tried. The nurse finally gave me a note pad to write down what I needed to say.

The nurse hooked me up on an IV again and numbed the area, using a cold spray. He showed me that it didn’t hurt by spraying it on his own, rather hairy arm. As if that was supposed to make me feel better. He basically just sprayed cold stuff on his own built in sweater! The nurse sprayed my arm and put in the IV. My arm hurt very badly because it was so cold.

I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t. I kept replaying what had happened over and over in my mind. When it was time to leave, my arm didn’t hurt from the IV, but hurt because of the cold spray.

I got home and went right to sleep. I slept all day long but my parents kept making me drink water every hour and eat things. My stomach still hurt really badly and it was hard to smell the delicious Thanksgiving Day food wafting up the stairs from our kitchen. I thought to myself,“ That’s ironic that it’s Thanksgiving and I really don’t have much to be thankful for,” but I knew that was not true.

Over the next few days, I was slowly recovering from that awful night. I was upstairs in my room watching a movie and started spitting up blood clots again. I rung a little bell my mom gave to me to use if I had any problems. She came upstairs and I showed her the clots.

She called the ENT office and a new doctor (not my ENT) said that we could come over to the office so he could look at my throat. He had me sit in chair like the one’s you would find at a dentist office. The doctor had to use a suction machine to suction out all the blood clots in my throat; which tickled and hurt a lot

He also sprayed in two different numbing sprays that tasted really gross and did not do their job very well. After he was done, he had me drink a huge glass of ice water. By the time I was done drinking about the seventh glass of water, he said I could leave and to call if my mom and I needed anything.

When I got home, my throat hurt even worse than ever before and I refused to drink water because it hurt more than when I wasn’t drinking anything. After a few hours, I was lying down on the couch when I started spitting up bigger and denser blood clots then the first time that happened.

My mom called the ENT office and the doctor on call (not the person who performed the surgery and not the person who suctioned out my throat) said that I had to go to the hospital so he could cauterize my throat. When my mom was on the phone, I passed out again. I truly believed that I was going to die.

My dad told my mom to call the ambulance to take me to the hospital again. The EMS crew came and this time took me immediately to the hospital, without asking questions. One of the men even picked me up off the couch and carried me to the ambulance himself. They tried to give me an IV, but I was so dehydrated that my veins had collapsed. At the hospital, the doctor set me up in my own room so he could talk to my mom. The expert ER doctor from my other hospital visit came in and said that I was a lot paler than the other day that he saw me.
The doctor who would perform the surgery from my ENT office told my mom that I could get a blood transfusion, but they do not like doing those for kids. Fortunately, he decided I would be fine without one. Another nurse came over to give me an IV and that’s when I spoke my first words. I told him to not count because that made me tense up.

The doctor told me that he was going to have to sew up my lingual artery. It turns out that the doctor who performed the tonsillectomy cut my lingual artery during the surgery. This meant that all of the blood from the rather large incision was draining into my stomach. Blood does not agree very well with the stomach acids, which caused me to throw up and spit up blood. The ENT that was doing this surgery also said that he would have to vacuum out my stomach, to get rid of all of the blood.

After the surgery, my mouth felt swollen up and I couldn’t get to sleep especially because I was still in the hospital. I was very happy when my doctor said that I could leave the next morning. When I got home I had to get a check-up with my actual ENT. He said he was very sorry about what had happened and said this only happens about once a year. He said that I was one in a million and that there were a really small percentage of people that had this near death experience.

Those words have stuck with me since the surgery. One and a million. I figured that I could look at that in two ways: I could be the one in a million for bad things or I could be one in a million for good things. I decided that I would rather choose the good one in a million. You see, if you look at things expecting and waiting that something bad will happen, than you won’t ever have fun enjoying the great parts of life. You could say that if you give money to a stranger, they won’t spend that money on important or legal things. You could say that people are gossiping about you when you really don’t know if they are. You could say you will fail your math test. You don’t know. This is why I am telling you that I can’t guarantee that life won’t throw obstacles at you, because it will; but the stronger person is the one who takes those trials of strength and turns them into a positive thing.

Before that long process of surgeries and hospital visits, I was horrified of needles. Throughout that experience, I learned how to deal with needles and shots.

Without my terrible experience, I wouldn’t of realized how much my family and friends meant to me. I can’t even imagine going without the cards and the hugs and the reassuring text messages that I received during that time. I had just accepted these things and looked at them as a normal thing.

I now know that some people don’t have that advantage. This experience has made me want to help people like that. I donate clothes and food once a month to my church. I take part in donating to Charity: Water; which supplies water to villages that can’t receive clean drinking water. I clean up litter at local parks to make our environment. If I hadn’t gone through this event where so many people helped me, I probably wouldn’t help people as much as I do now. I know that people have it worse off than I did, so I try to help them as much as I can. I would like to end my story in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt in hopes that I may inspire at least one of you to overcome an obstacle you are struggling with in your own life. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “ I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” …You must do the thing you think you can not do.”