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TITLE: Mis Tricia has a rare illness By Tricia Jackson 03/07/05 |
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My First Time In The Hospital
My name is Marshal Paul I am one of a group of stuffed animals made by my mother, Tricia. She made me as a mascot for a group of friends she has at church. In June Tricia got sick, she was having trouble with her breathing, she has asthma that effects her breathing.
Tricia was born a problem in her immune system. This disorder is so rare that she went for years without knowing that she had a problem. When she was a child your age she didn’t have any more infections than kids her age but, when she got out of high school and was an adult she started to get sick more often. Her doctors and her parents had no idea that her immune system was not working correctly, as the years went by she would get so sick that she had to go into the hospital for a while every time she got a really bad infection. Before she started getting sick Tricia had seen a movie called "The Boy in a Plastic Bubble" it was based on an actual baby that was born with no immune system, he could not go outside of a germ free room for many years. When Tricia watched the movie she had no idea that she had an immune disorder, it was just another one.
Do you know what an infection is? Let’s say you get scrape on your knee from playing outside, your Mom or Dad clean the scrape and put a bandage on it The bandage helps to make sure to make sure you don’t get an infection, it is important that you leave the bandage on or else you might get sick. If the scrape becomes infected your parents take you to the doctor and he or she looks at the scrape and gives your parents a prescription for medicine you have to take. Sometimes if you have an infection like a cold the doctor may have to take some of your blood so they can tell what type of infection you have and give you the correct medication.
Tricia went through a lot, sometimes she was afraid because she couldn’t understand what was wrong with her. She learned a lot about medicine on her own because she wanted to know what was causing her infections. Nobody else Tricia knew spent so much time in hospitals and at doctors. She thought she was some kind of alien or something but, that’s silly right?, we know that Tricia is a child of God. She made by God with a unique body. Sometimes she spent more time with doctors and nurses than with her family. She had been in hospitals in Redmond, Seattle, and Olympia the capital of WA state. She grew up here on Eastside, she visited Alaska to work before she stated getting sick and during the first years of her illness she moved down to Olympia to live.
Sometimes Tricia would think that she wasn’t sick enough to be put in the hospital but, she was. This caused her to have three life threatening infections. Because of these infections some of her organs were damaged, her lungs had permanent scarring and her kidneys were smaller.
Tricia’s doctors had never treated someone with her disease before so they had no idea that they could run some special tests on her blood, you see healthy people have something called Gamma Globulin in there blood, Tricia and others with her rare disorder do not make enough of it and it helps fight off infections. After eleven years Tricia’s doctor ran the tests and told her that she had a primary immune disorder and now she has to take medicines to stay well, once every three week she goes to a special clinic to get IV Gamma Globulin.
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