As the summer season ended and I prepared for high school, I started to notice a pain in my hand. It wasn’t like any pain I had experienced before but instead, excruciating. The pain started in the palm of my right hand and shot up into my arm. I would lay in bed at night and feel the pain pulsating throughout my limb. Sometimes I would even cry from the pain. When school started again, my father and I were back on the tennis courts for hours a week. Right where I held the racket was where it hurt the most. I assumed it was playing too much tennis. 

I started high school and insisted on taking geometry and other honors courses. My theory was always take the hardest option because even if you don’t do as well as you would’ve taking the easier course, you still took the class and learned more than you would’ve in the easier course. And it challenged you. 

I finally complained enough about my hand that my mom took me to an orthopedic surgeon. I went to a private Catholic high school where everyone’s parents were doctors or lawyers. The doctor I saw was a girl in my class’ father. With having a cardiologist for a father, this orthopedic surgeon saw me for no cost and fit me into his schedule. He examined my hand, “Looks like you have tendinitis.” 

“What about and x-ray or an MRI?” My mom insisted. 

He claimed he’d seen it all the time and then sent me to therapy. He did earn his medical degree from Stanford so he reminded us. Months went by. We spent thousands of dollars on hand therapy. Nothing felt right. For some reason I was bothered by it. We went back to our so called doctor friend. He said that I was probably making the pain up in my head. Maybe it was a neurological disorder. Maybe my nerves are shot at age fifteen. Still no x-ray or MRI. Yes, I’m fifteen and have tendinitis and nerve damage from the crazy life I lead. Something was fishy. We went to a neurologist where they hooked me up with electrodes and buzzed me. Nerve response was above average, exceptional. Back to hand therapy. 

By then it had been almost the entire school year. Summer was about to start and rodeo would begin again. Because I wasn’t athletically gifted, my parents put my siblings and myself in 4-H at a young age. By fourth grade we were showing livestock at the county fair, cooking pies, making place settings for food and arts day, raising chickens and rabbits, presenting how to make a pillowcase at presentation day, putting flags on veterans’ graves on Vet’s Day, sewing wool outfits for ourselves and our sheep and calling it ladies lead etc. You name it, we did it. 

My oldest sister has the same heart condition as myself. By high school she had her second valve replacement, a cadaver. Sometimes I wonder if the family of that person who died realizes what their deceased loved one did for my sister. That valve was with her through both of her pregnancies in her thirties. Side note: a statistic stated that if everyone was a donor, we wouldn’t be facing an organ shortage. I know my sister is forever grateful and indebted. She herself is also an organ and blood donor.

My brother is ten years older than me. He suffers from a condition called transposition of the major arteries. Basically, his major tubes that transport blood out of the heart are switched. This is a problem because the artery taking blood to the body is vastly larger than the valve taking blood to the lungs. They told my parents my brother was going to die when he was born and a nurse baptized him in a drinking fountain before he was rushed into an experimental surgery. They said he wouldn’t live past age sixteen. My brother is well past age thirty, alive and healthy.

My middle sister is the healthy one. Beautiful, kind, and artistic.

We grew up on several acres but owned a ranch thirty miles from home that we went to on weekends with our horses and rode. We had 2,000 acres of dry farming. The ranch was a playground. As far as you could see was ours. We’d drive out into the canyons in a 1976 yellow jeep and ride dirt bikes all day. We’d shoot rifles and go pig hunting. There were times my dad and I would sleep out on a tower of oat hay bales with guns in order to keep the pigs from eating the hay. Every day was an adventure. My father’s parents lived out on the ranch so every time my siblings moved in college and my parents went to help them I would stay with Grandma and Pa. Pa and I would tend the bee hives, pick apricots, crack walnuts, pistachios, almonds, feed quail, or ride the harvesters. My Grandma and I would make apricot jelly when it got too warm outside. She’d have me wear my boy cousins’ clothes when I’d go out with Pa because they were more durable and I didn’t have to worry about them getting dirty. I remember doing my state and country reports in grade school when I stayed with them. Their encyclopedias were from the 80’s so when I did a report on Germany, I talked about East and West Germany. Little did eleven-year-old me know that the Berlin wall had been taken down in the 80’s…whoops. No wonder my teachers looked so confused. 

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I grew up privileged. My parents were supportive of everything we did and always encouraged us to educate ourselves. My father, like myself, went to Cal Poly in chemistry while my mother earned degrees in biology and chemistry. My father went on to medical school at UCSF where he met my mother in Berkeley. They were married in the Catholic church in 1976 and moved to Minnesota where my dad completed his residency in cardiology and my sister was born and had her first heart surgery at one years old.

My parents pushed us to work hard for what we wanted. They always wanted us to earn it. I think one of my biggest pet peeves is when people find out I’m the daughter of a cardiologist and assume I’m smart or wealthy. Little did they know my dad helped me halter break my pregnant heifer behind the back of that yellow jeep in our arena. I then sold that heifer for $3500 at the county fair and bought my first car my senior year of high school from all the money I earned from my livestock through the years. Little did they know my mom made us take piano for 8 years and never bought us the cool gummy snack packs. We didn’t have video games and weren’t allowed to watch TV. Everything was always homemade and we never really needed to buy anything. We were privileged in areas most kids weren’t. We went to Europe several times growing up and then Washington DC. My mom would plan extravagant historical trips where we’d learn extensive history of landmarks, cathedrals, monuments. Including Buckingham Palace where we saw the queen’s corgis, a must see. My mother was very hands on and encouraged us to be creative. Outside of being a biochemist, she is also an artist and cook. She raised us while my dad worked and was on call. She made sure we made our annual heart check-ups in San Francisco and that we went to church every Sunday. 

My sophomore year of high school my mom got into a horseback riding accident that I caused. We were on a moonlight ride in the canyon of our ranch. My horse spooked and I let her run so then my mom’s horse bucked her off and drug her for a few strides. Our truck and trailer were parked on the other side of the mountain so my dad had to walk back to the truck to come back, load the horses, and get on the road. My dad thought my mom was okay but my mom insisted we go to the hospital. Three cracked ribs, a punctured lung, and four fractured vertebrae later, we had to get a hospital bed at home for her because her back pain was so severe. I slept on an air mattress next to her in the living room, waking up every few hours to make sure she was taking her meds. This was my first experience of being a nurse. I suppose it was always in me. I cooked every meal for her. I took showers with her. I shaved her legs for her. Washed her hair, helped her go to the bathroom, brushed her hair, changed her sheets, etc. Our roles had reversed. It broke me, seeing my mom in the state she was in. She wanted to shoot the horse after that night. To be fair the horse was kind of a dumbass. (Yes, I do believe horses are usually quite intelligent however this one was stupid.) 

I stopped going to hand therapy for a while and had to get rides to school with our neighbor who conveniently attended my same high school. Before school started I read. My mom recovered and I would lay next to her and read for hours. I read science books, echocardiogram books, teen vampire romance books…I didn’t have a license. My dad’s brother had to drive me to my driver’s test. I finally got it a month after I turned 16 and even then I drove an old farm truck to and from school. Time heals what reason cannot. My mom started walking again and was able to get around. She was driving again. Things were improving. That May I was set to receive the sacrament of confirmation in the Catholic Church and my sister, Audrey, was graduating college. A week after that I had my annual heart exam and learned that the day I had been waiting for had finally come. The valve was failing and I needed open heart surgery. 

“Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.”

Brené Brown