BETH

My name is Beth and I deal with Doctors, being sick and all that goes with that. I’m about nine years old and I know what your thinking isn’t that young to be dealing with doctors? The simple answer is NO! I’m smart and I read A LOT. Plus I live is this body so I know what’s wrong with it and why. I am kind of a morbid little thing and very sickly in and of myself , even if I am a fighter. I get my name from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women’s character. You know the sick one that dies at the end.
For a long time, the Shadow would whisper in my ear about how easy it would be to end the pain, suffering and disappointment. That he could take it all away. Now I know that that’s just Damien trying to pull a fast one on me. It’s his way of teasing me. I don’t think it’s very funny, because it isn’t my fault that I’m sick. Fortunately Ammy decided to come out and now I have a friend to help me get though the hard doctor stuff, even if she can sometimes be a flake. Ammy also keeps Damien away from me when being sick is too much and I get depressed.

I was formed when “A” was about 8-9 years old. This is the age that “A” started having Tonic-Clonic (or grand mal as they were called at the time) seizures. For those of you that don’t know, I could give you the generic description (what the computer says) of what they are like, but to truly understand you have to try to understand what they were like for me. First of all they are scary as hell. Usually I have them first thing in the morning. Here I’d been in the bathroom getting ready for the day, when suddenly my neck muscles would start to pull to the left side. If I was quick enough I could get a scream for help out before I lost the ability to speak, sometimes that didn’t happen. My mom says that she could tell what was happening just by the way I’d scream “Mom”. Then my vision would go hazy, and my muscles would start to jerk uncontrollably. If I was standing or sitting I’d fall without being able to control what I hit as I went down. From there everything just disappears till I wake up a couple of hours later. Usually I needed a shower because with the lack of muscle control comes a lack of bladder control. Then I start to notice the damage I’ve done to myself. If I was lucky when I fell all I hit was the ground, if not, I may have bruise and bumps from whatever furniture or bathroom fixtures I’d hit on the way down. Then there is my tongue, it almost never misses getting caught between my clinched teeth – (it usually takes a week to heal enough not to hurt when I eat). To top all this off is the Migraine that feels like some one is sucking my brain out through a straw. Basically the equivalent of what the Egyptians did to get the brains out of people they were mummifying. This usually lasts three days, during which time I couldn’t do anything but be in pain and wish for quiet and dark. After a couple of trips to the chiropractor, I’d  finally get to feel almost normal again. But in the meantime I’d have missed school, and when you’re nine how do you explain this to your friends.

We spent the next 5 years dealing with this about once a month, because our mom didn’t want to put us on medication. In that time We went through what my dad called every “feather and rattle” treatment imaginable – acupuncture, Chinese medicine, reflexology, herb medicine, hair analysis, etc. It was too much for “A’s” 9 to 14 year old mind to handle so that’s when I took over.

As you can tell from the way I got my name, I love books, especially ones like, Jane Erye, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Pride and Prejudice, etc. When you are stuck in bed and your mom won’t let you watch TV, the next best escape is a good book. Books would allow us to go somewhere where there was no pain and we could be someone else, at least for a little while.