S.N. Lamblin
Entry Twenty
Guess I don’t get to go to college now- As SAT scores and applications to colleges were received by my top school choices I settled back into the beginning of my senior year. The year started out with me feeling resentments at home but at least I had my school life to keep me away from the bullshit. Cross country session had wrapped up and it was time to start trying for western regionals and indoor session. One day while at practice I collapsed at practice. I turned blue and was unresponsive. I was rushed to the hospital. The doctors told my mom I had a near fatal asthma attack. I had actually flat lined by the time they took me to the ER. We didn’t even know I had asthma. When they ran more test, they were concerned that my white cell count was alarmingly low. My immune system was taking a nosedive and they didn’t know why. Words like cancer were being tossed around and I was in total panic. What would happen to my running career, my athletic scholarship? What the fuck was going to happen to my life and my plans to get the fuck out of here? I ended up being home schooled the rest of the year. I missed western regionals. I had to drop all of my AP classes because the tutors didn’t know how to teach them. I needed ½ a credit of English to graduate at the end of the first semester, so I took a concurrent creative writing class at the local community college and graduated early. I was on breathing treatments every 4-6 hours to control my asthma attacks and spent most of the spring in and out of doctors’ offices to seeing specialist to make sure we could get my asthma under control and get my immune system healthy again. I never even really was told what was wrong with me. I was just told that my parents and the doctors were taking care of it. I was well enough to walk in my graduation ceremony with my classmates. Most of them hadn’t seen me since the fall and acted like they had seen a ghost when I walked in. I had graduated high school and my healthy had improved enough by graduation that I was under the impression that I was still going to be able to go to college out of state. Even without the athletic scholarship they had saved up enough for me to cover the first year and we could figure out the rest later. I had been accepted to the University of Memphis and was on the wait list for the University of Central Florida. During homeschooling time, I decided to change majors and was planning to study musical theater and technical design. Florida had internships with Disney for students in their program and Memphis had them with the Grand Ole Opry. The plans were now different but I still have an escape route. I was all packed up and had been working all summer to earn money to drive myself cross country to start my new life. Three weeks before I was scheduled to go, my mom sat me down and told me that I was no longer able to go. My step brother had stolen her check book and drained her bank account. This included my college fund and most of their small business funds as well. I was now going to have to use the money I had saved for my trip to pay for my tuition at the local community college. I was crushed. I found out later that my mom was told she could not turn it in to the bank to protect the funds because my step dad didn’t want his son to go to prison. They instead kicked him out of our house and told him to stay away for a while so he could fix things. Yeah, fixed at my expense. All of my hard work was now for nothing. Running no longer an option, an no money to pay for school, I was trapped in my own personal hell with no hope of escaping.