“Hello, my name is Ezra, and I was diagnosed with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy when I was seventeen,"
Ezra said, taking his turn in the support group, What that means is it became difficult for my heart to pump enough blood, and I grew weaker and nearly died. But here I am, alive and all.”
“Thank you for sharing, Ezra. Since you’re new here, would you mind sharing your recovery story with us?” the support group leader asked.
“Um, yeah sure. Well, when I went in for a simple checkup when I was seventeen, the doctor found my disease. He… He told me that I had twenty days to live…” Ezra stopped there, flashing back to those twenty days with a grimace.
He grew bitter and depressed in those twenty days. Everything beyond his limited days he had to live made him upset and mad at basically everyone. He heard about stories where people with numbered days did everything they had ever wanted to do before they died, but the truth was that he was too sick to do what he wanted to do.
Ezra had always wanted to be someone, be famous and well known. But now he knew that that was impossible. He started to give up on everything and everyone.
“That’s great, Ezra. Would you mind sharing how you are doing now?”
“Sure. I’m finishing up my biomedical engineering doctorate and the heart is holding up. My experience made me want to pursue the medical path, to help others the way I was, you see,” he said, explaining his career choice. “Of course, I am limited in physical activities because of my heart, but it’s much better than being six feet under,” he said with a chuckle.
“And… That’s my story. Thank you.”
My story truly begins when I had just turned 15, a young rebel boy. I was venturing the streets with my friends at night. We were having a blast, going around town with sparklers in our hands, running from the police. At one point they got too close, so we decided to take refuge in an abandoned building. It was damp inside, the roof rotted and old from exposure, the floor creaking as we entered. We dropped our now dead sparklers and decided to look around. To be honest, I was a little unnerved by the dark atmosphere, which was only illuminated by light filtering through the broken window. I grabbed my lighter from my pocket and lit it. As we looked around different rooms, one stopped me in my tracks. There, before us, was a large, molded stereo, a broken drum set, and a guitar that was split in half. My friends weren't interested in it, but there was something about it that fascinated me.
