Autobiography of Jillian Hannah

People tend to make plans for themselves.  It usually goes something like this: “When I grow up, I want to be fireman,” or “five years from now I would like to be graduated from college and starting a family.”  What differs between all us dreamers is the way we react when these plans fall through and we are forced to adjust.  Despite my emotional strength, I was one of those people who took a while to adjust.

I was a self-motivated athlete who did it all.  I was one of the only girls who would join the guys who played basketball at the park.  I climbed rock walls and real mountains, ran, and played every sport with a board or a ball.  This is why it was strange when I blacked out in aerobics class my sophomore year in high school.

Waking up in the nurse’s office was a horror story, and I didn’t remember anything that had happened.  The story has been told to me several times by people with many variations on the skill of exaggeration.

“You just started seizing and fell over!”

“It wasn’t a big deal, in fact most people didn’t even notice.”

“We thought you were going to die.”

The general consensus seems to be that first I had sat down on the gym floor, complaining that I couldn’t see.  My friends had thought I was joking, but they quickly realized that wasn’t the case when I went limp and collapsed.  They called the nurse and she took me out in a wheel chair.  In front of the whole class.  What a horror story.

I am the type of personality that firmly believes in personal space.  If you don’t break into my bubble, we can be friends!  But over the next few months I learned to adjust that attitude as classmates had to help carry me to the nurse every other day, and eventually doctors probed at me trying to figure out what was wrong with me.  This new mind set wasn’t the only thing that had to change about me.  When I was forced to drop out of high school a month or so later and take the GED route, I started to realize that my life wasn’t going to be average.  Thoughts like “I’m too smart to be a high school drop out!  I wanted to be valedictorian and graduate with my friends!” had to be expelled from my mind.

But soon I found myself writing off every opportunity I thought I would ever have as “impossible.”  I had to try really hard to get out of bed in the morning and sustain the idea that life had a purpose when I knew that by the end of the day I could likely be at another hospital or doctor’s office.  I hate doctors.  What a horror story.

It was a couple years into my sickness, with the doctors still clueless as to what was causing my seizures, when I decided to step back and reevaluate my life.  Doctors were trying to tell me that I might only have a few months or years to live, and rather than being bitter I decided to make the best of the time I was given, and even, if I could, prove the doctors wrong.

From that day forward I began living my life.  I actually consider myself very fortunate, because I have been given many opportunities that young people like me don’t usually get!  When you are trying to cram seventy-five or eighty years of life into each day, uncertain that you will have any more, it is crazy how many adventures you have, and even how many opportunities you open up for your self.  I came to realize religion’s impact on my life stronger than ever before.  I spent time with my family and found a love for them more profound than I had ever had previously.  Most prominently, I grew as a person because my perspective changed almost completely.  The petty concerns that would normally afflict a nineteen-year-old girl weren’t there anymore.  There was no: “oh my gosh!  Allison was totally talking behind my back!”  I only had time for the important things, so I really learned how to determine what is important.  One of those important things being showing the doctors who is boss.  Here I am, months after they said I would die, alive and “well” and having the time of my life.