I’ve given Chapter Four of ‘Beyond the Red Door’ the title of Invisible Scars. In this chapter, I describe my struggles with that difficult time we all go through - adolescence.
Just being a teenager is hard enough to survive with the emphasis on fitting in, looking good, and knowing yourself. Add to that the extra pressures of having a disability, which immediately sets you apart from the rest, and being adopted and without a solid foundation to fall back on.
These were the issues I had to deal with as a teenager going through high school. In my transition to high school, I lost the strong and confident qualities I had as a child. It was as though they had been sucked away from me. I was left with low self-esteem, no confidence and no idea of who I really was. My adoption issues came to the fore without any prompting, making me feel different because I didn’t know anything about my past. And this was on top of feeling different because I was vision impaired.
At this time, too, the long term effects of the radiotherapy I had as a baby started to show themselves. This meant frightening vision changes, many treatments and surgery with an uncertain result.
How do kids ride the rough times in adolescence? The answer to this depends on a lot of things. Read how I survived the bullying and teasing and depression I suffered in my teenage years.
Looking back now, I can see how I built my resilience. With this knowledge, I hope to help teenagers today to build their own resilience and survive adolescence.
Archive for December, 2006
The struggles in adolescence
December 27th, 2006 by janetWhat is the red door?
December 12th, 2006 by janetI promised I’d give an outline of each chapter in the book, so let’s continue.
You find out about the red door in chapter three of ‘Beyond the Red Door’.
I met the red door when I was about eight years old. I’d just been transferred to a school for the blind to learn braille, because the doctors thought I’d go blind very early on in my life. The first thing I saw at the school was this red door. It spoke of a warning to me, indicated somehow that the route I wanted to take in life was barred. It was a challenge.
And I took up the challenge. That’s where the rebel in me came out, where I learned to stand up for myself and maintain my identity. I wasn’t about to change who I was and no-one could tell me otherwise.
It was during this time that I discovered that I could only see out of one eye. Before that, nothing had fazed me. But realising that half my world was ‘missing’ came as a huge shock. Why did this happen? Purely because I was at this school and had been told that I was there because I couldn’t see very well, that I was legally blind.
It’s one of those sad ‘we know best’ stories that are dotted throughout history, the well-meaning experts who actually can cause more harm than good. As a child, I could only do what was within my powers to survive. What lay ahead was beyond my control.
The importance of knowing your medical history
December 4th, 2006 by janetI came across a blog post by Jacki Donaldson which emphasises the need to firstly know your family medical history, and secondly, tell your doctor about it.
In particular, this blog post relates to cancer. It made me think of two things.
Firstly, I remembered a recent conversation with a friend who was born with retinoblastoma, the same eye cancer as me. He had two children, neither of whom developed the condition, and they were monitored very closely right from the time they were born. What happened later on was a shock to him. One of his grandchildren was born with the condition. The tumours were picked up when the child was only five months old. It was lucky they were looking out for it, but they didn’t really believe that retinoblastoma could jump a generation. On doing more tests on his children, it was discovered that his son, the father of the RB child, carried the gene. This story shows just how important it is to know your family’s medical history, right back as far as you can go.
The second thing it made me think about was my parents’ reactions when they found out I had RB. They wanted my natural parents to be told, just in case they had other children, for one thing. Well, it didn’t turn up amongst any of my half siblings, but now I know this doesn’t necessarily mean one parent wasn’t a carrier, and that someone else in my family could be. The likelihood is probably very small, but it can’t be ruled out. Adoption always makes these sorts of issues so much more tricky to deal with, and there’s not always an easy answer. And adoptees aren’t the only ones to have these sorts of issues; children born from sperm donation also have this difficulty.
It was easy for the doctors to declare to my parents at the time of my diagnosis that the chances of my natural parents having a child with the same condition were unlikely, because they thought I was the start of the chain. But in reality, this was a poor decision. At the time, though, the technology was not available to do DNA testing to determine if someone was a carrier. So there was no other option at the time.