Little did I know that this event would change my life for years. I would soon have a metal bar through my chest, pushing me farther away from my goals. It was June 26, 2018, at 4:30 a.m. “Get up,” my mom yelled. I woke up to shower and leave with my family to travel to Cleveland Clinic Hospital for my surgery. I put on my soft cotton candy crew neck with my charcoal athletic shorts and had my mom braid my hair.

At 5:00 a.m. we left. The close to three-hour car ride left me feeling too exhausted to care and I sat silently during the trip because I felt sick to my stomach. We arrived at the hospital at 7:30 a.m.

It took hundreds of years to find the right parking garage. Scrambling in, we checked in, and the lady working the desk gave my mom a buzzer and stated, “It will go off when the surgeon team is ready to prepare you.” With time going as slow as a snail, the buzzer finally went off around 1:00 p.m.

The surgeon team called me back with my parents and explained how everything should go and around how long the surgery should take. It would be a three-hour procedure. They allowed my mom to go back into another room with me, while they gave me a gown to change into, and prepared to give me my IV. Tears started to wet my face as I grew more nervous about the IV needle. I hate needles, I hate them. I also hated the taste the chalky medicine left in my mouth. I lay there, thinking this can’t get much worse. The cutest doctor ever wandered in, while I was bawling, and started asking me about my favorite type of music, questions about my summer and school to distract me from the fact that I would soon have to get a needle injected into my arm. I started to feel dizzy and loopy like a drunk man.

 The surgeons pushed me to the OR room, and my mom walked, whined, and wandered to the opposite way to the waiting room. Tears streamed down my face, as I felt like death, while visions of blurry red, blue, and white coats from the nurses and surgeons rushed around me. Completely out of it to actually understand and focus on what the doctors are even saying. The doctors picked me up from cotton white-covered bed where they pushed me into the room on and set me on a sky-colored cloth table. Through my tears and blurriness, I watched the tall, brown-haired and blue-eyed doctor above me. His hand approached my face and put a mask on me. I breathed in the medicine, and I slowly watched everything fade away. The doctor whispered, “Start counting backwards from ten.” I counted to seven and that’s the last detail I remember.

 I woke up to see all of my family and friends who waited there with me the whole time, once I woke up from the anesthesia. They had me on very strong pain medication, that pumped through my IV’s into my veins of ice. Attempting to talk with my family, the room slowed down. Next detail I knew I was out like a light, again.