From Then To Now

From Then To Now

Froot Loops: it’s a Kellogg's brand of breakfast cereal and one of the best memories I have. I remember it very well; when I was in 2^nd grade I remember one day I had an asthma attack in school and I was sent to the nurse where they ended up calling my mom to take me to go see a doctor.  After going to a clinic which I always went to, they did an x-ray and they informed my parents that something wasn’t right with my lungs and they had to take me to the hospital immediately and so they did. On my way there my mom couldn’t stop crying because she was very worried while I remained clueless about what was going on.

 Shortly after arriving to the hospital I was rushed into the emergency room where the nurse took my hand and said I was freezing cold, shaking, and possibly dying! I was kept in observation waiting to see if they would need to do an emergency surgery to have a tube placed in my lungs to help me breathe better. The room I was kept in almost seemed like a jail to me, it was very big, plain with a creamy beige fading color, a window where the nurses could watch me, a small table with a toilet next to it, and a small chair in the corner. While in observation, the doctors and I had a bit of a struggle when it came time for them to put in my I.V. and all the other machines that would monitor my health, due to the fact that I was terrified of needles and I panicked when I saw the nurse trying to put the needle in my arm. I kicked, screamed, yelled, and cried, so the doctors had to call in back up to hold me down and I remember seeing my mom cry while I kept crying to her to help me. For 5 days they didn’t allow me to eat or drink anything which I never understood why they did that. All I had as a source of food those 5 days were ice cubes in those pink drinking containers they have at the hospitals which I constantly kept asking the nurses to fill up with ice cubes. Every time I would finish my ice cubes, I would hold up the pink container and the nurse who would be watching over me would bring me more.

 After those 5 days in the observational room, my health got a lot better and I was finally transferred into the normal patient rooms. It was morning time and I remember having my legs and arms full of wires from the machines I was hooked up to so I couldn’t really walk so they wheeled me off to the new room in a wheel chair. The new room they took me to was definitely a big improvement compared to the observation room. The room was small, with a window view to the street, a light blue color with children friendly decorations. Since it was morning time the nurse brought in a menu and told me to pick out a breakfast so they could bring me something to eat. After 5 days of having nothing but ice cubes to eat, I was just about ready to eat anything but I picked Fruit Loops as my breakfast choice even though I had never had it before. I was honestly a bit skeptical of whether it would taste good or not since at that time I was a bigger fan of chocolate cereals instead of fruity ones. As soon as the nurse brought me my cereal I was beyond ready for my first meal and as soon as I had my first spoonful of that cereal I felt like I was in heaven! That cereal was possibly the best thing I had ever tasted at that point of my life but of course after not eating for so long, almost anything would’ve also tasted like heaven to me.

 I remained in the hospital for 3 more days and those days were far from the ones I had

spent in the observational room. The hospital had a library which I would tell my mom to

 take me to and I would always pick out a few books and board games to play with my

mom even though we both had no clue how to play them. Aside from that I’d spend the

rest of the day watching television which the observational also didn’t have, and I would

enjoy watching Goosebumps which was a Television serious based on the Goosebumps

books which I was fascinated with. The day before I left the hospital I’ll never forget

when I was in bed watching Goosebumps and the nurse came in to finally take all the

needles and wires off me. While trying to remove them she had her eyes on the television

 too, curious about the scary show I was watching and her puzzled look just made me

want to start laughing.

It had been years since that scary hospital experience I had as a child. Even though it had been a brief experience, somehow it still remained as a very scary part of my life which I did my best not to remember. I had told myself I’d never want to experience anything like that again and I probably wouldn’t but in life things always have a way to prove you wrong.

 It was the summer of 2007 and I remember the scorching days that Houston tends to experience during the summer. For a couple of months my sister and I had resorted to having to walk home since she had crashed her car and we had no way to get home from work which was pretty far from where we live. As soon as we got off work around 1 p.m. we had exactly 15mins to leave from work and get to the bus stop before the bus would get there and after that we’d have to wait for another bus which would drop us off at a mall near my house. Once there my least favorite part came. We’d have to walk for almost an hour to get home, which in the summer is very unbearable because of the heat and humidity Houston is well known for. By the time we’d get home it would be a bit past 3 p.m. and the first thing we’d do in run inside our cold house, drink a giant glass of cold water,  and lay in bed to recover from the grueling walk. Because of our limited time to catch the first bus to get home, we had no time to eat an actual lunch so we’d stop by the store that was next to the bus stop to get something fast to eat and nothing seemed faster at that moment but buying a soda and a bag of chips. For the whole month of June that was our routine, get to work by 8 a.m., then work till 1 p.m., leave work, get something fast to eat, eat at the bus stop before the bus got there, get on that bus and get dropped off at our next bus stop, catch the next bus, and once dropped off at the mall by our house walk about an hour to get home.

Once the beginning of July rolled around, that bad combination of chips and coke as a lunch, and walking in the heat everyday finally caught up with me. I began to feel horrible pains near my lower back on the sides, but I didn’t think much of it. I figured it was just pain from always being tired and my body just needed rest. As days started passing, those pains began to become more frequent; needless to say, I was starting to have to use the restroom more often than usual. I wasn’t sure why this was but I didn’t tell anyone and as days kept passing I began to start feeling a burning pain whenever I did go to the restroom. Since the pain was getting more frequent I began to get worried about what might have been wrong with me and since I still carried in my mind my previous bad hospital experience as a child, I didn’t want to end up back there so I kept telling myself that eventually those pains would subside so I went on pretending nothing was wrong and dealing with the pains on my own.

By the end of July, I couldn’t handle the pain anymore. By then I had spent many nights crying because of the pains and I was ready to tell my family that something was wrong except that I didn’t tell them in a way that I thought would have been less dramatic. It was Sunday morning and my mother was folding the laundry clothes in her bedroom and she was telling me that my uncle had barely been recovering from kidney stones as she was explaining to me how he said it felt, I suddenly just busted out in tears and told her what had been happening to me and my mother quickly hugged me and wiped my tears away. She asked, “Why didn’t you say anything before if you’ve been feeling like that for weeks?” “Because I felt scared, Mom!” I replied. She quickly told my father to take me to the hospital. I remember the whole ride there I kept looking out the window and crying because I felt foolish for thinking I had that situation under control when I really didn’t.  As we got to the hospital, I was dreading finding out what it was that I had. As I filled out the patient information sheet, I couldn’t help but look around at all the other sick people in the E.R. and it scared me even more. When I gave the paper to the nurse behind the desk, she quickly read through it and told me to go through the doors where they would test me to see what was wrong. After getting tested I was moved into a hospital room where I would await my results, I was told to put on a hospital gown and I did and I waited laying down on the hospital bed. A few minutes later a doctor came in to examine me and he asked where I had been feeling pain and I pointed towards my back.

 The doctor then proceeded to poke near my kidneys and when he did, it felt like sharp knives were cutting through me and I started crying once more. He asked me a series of questions and he then told me I had a urinary tract infection that was causing my kidneys to be in pain.

After the doctor left, I laid in the hospital bed wondering how I had let myself get back to that point. One thing the doctor asked was if I would drink a lot of things containing caffeine or eat lots of spicy foods and it was embarrassing having to explain how for more than a month I had been having nothing but cokes and spicy chips as a source of lunch. As I kept thinking to myself in that bed, I told myself that no matter in what rush for lunch I would be in, that I would never consider cokes and chips as a fitting lunch anymore. No matter how painful that experience was, I learned a lot from it and as days followed I got a lot better and the pains left thanks to some medication I was prescribed.

I’m the age of 24 now, and I have learned a lot from making wiser health choices. Throughout my life I’ve had my ups and downs with my health life and the last health issue I am working on overcoming is my weight problem. I’ve always had this issue, even as a child but it wasn’t long ago that I finally had a wakeup call that changed my outlook on that problem.

It had been a couple of rough months and I had been going through a bit of a depression. Somehow it felt like my life was going nowhere and eating somehow seemed to fill that void. Every day I was caught in the same routine and I had no motivation to fix any of it till one day I had a very embarrassing moment which opened my eyes. It was near Halloween time and the fair was in town and my little sisters were eager to go and have fun, but sadly the weather was not cooperating with us and the day we chose to attend the fair it was a rainy day. As a result of that rain, the only ride open was the bumper cars and so my little sisters and I decided to not let the rain stop us from having a good time. When our turn to get in the bumper cars came, my little sister climbed in and I climbed in after but when I tried to pull down the safety bar somehow it wouldn’t click all the way. “Maybe since it’s just for little kids and I’m an adult it’s not going down all the way,” I said to my little sister sitting next to me. When I looked at the parents climbing in with their kids into the bumper cars I felt a bit ashamed of myself seeing all the other parents being able to easily pull down the safety bar and click it in place. There were no more excuses for why I couldn’t click the safety bar other than I was too fat to fit in there. After spending various times riding nothing but bumper cars that night, it felt like it was slap after slap of pure reality. As soon as we got home, I rushed to the bathroom and I took a long look at myself in the mirror and I got on the weight scale and when I saw how much I weighed, I began to cry.

How did I let myself get that fat? How did I let that depression get the best of me? Why was I always so quick to make up excuses for why my clothes weren’t fitting anymore instead of accepting the facts? That Monday after that moment of breakdown, I woke up determined to defeat my demons. No more excuses, no more being down, only I could decide my life and I was bigger than anything ready to bring me down. That Monday afternoon for the first time in years, I stayed after work to exercise and it felt like I had taken the first step into a better moment in my life. The weeks that followed weren’t easier than that first day back to exercising but with every sweat I dropped exercising, I felt I was moving one more step forward to finding myself again. My life had changed since that day at the fair. Now exercising had become my new routine, I wasn’t eating just to fill a void but I was eating healthier for my body to have more energy. Week after week passed by and I was just as determined and once the year was coming to an end, I had lost a bit more than 20 Lbs. I felt so proud of myself. I wasn’t the depressed fat girl anymore, now I was the strong confident woman who was working hard to get fit.

As a result of my downfall, I learned to stand back up and keep fighting. I also learned that I’m not the only one who has been battling this weight problem and it became my new goal to help others like me find their motivation. Statistically speaking in the current year of 2012, among many Americans at the age of 20 and older, 149.3 million are overweight or obese. As I am currently working on becoming a personal trainer I hope to fix that statistic even if it’s in a small way. While talking to Jeff Biehl, the fitness director of the gym I work at, he told me something that gave me more determination to become a personal trainer. Jeff told me, “The most rewarding part of this career is seeing your clients succeed and accomplish their goals.” With that in mind I realized that as a personal trainer I will be helping people live healthier lives and just like me they’ll look back at who they use to be and see how far they have come and they will feel just as proud as I felt when I realized how far I’ve come.

 When it comes to the human body, nothing is ever guaranteed. We can’t predict when we’ll get sick or when our bodies will finally shut off but one thing is certain; from all the health experiences I have been through so far, I now know that if I don’t take care of myself, my body won’t do it for me. My body is what I live in and as such it’s my job to take care of it as well as making sure to not let it fall apart like before.