College. It feels like it was just yesterday that I was stressing over the SAT, deciding where I wanted to apply to, and writing a bajillion essays. I’m a daydreamer, so pretty much ever since freshman year, I was dreaming about what college would be like. Would I get to have the true “college experience”: making a whole bunch of new friends and having the cutest dorm? I had so many premonitions on what my first week could be like. One thing that I had never factored in, however, is that I would be on crutches.
Ever since I was 14, I have had pain in my hip. When the pain first occurred, doctors suspected that it was something that could be easily fixed, so they sent me to physical therapy. After attending for months with no improvement, my mother marched into the doctor demanding an MRI and other tests be run on me, to figure out what the real problem was. After various tests, I finally got a diagnosis for what was bothering me. I found out that I had a severe labral tear in my right hip and hip dysplasia. Soon after the diagnosis, I had surgery which cut down the bone so that it would fit better in my hip socket and fixed my labrum. However this surgery only got rid of the pain momentarily, as my hip dysplasia was worse than they had thought. It would require another very invasive surgery to fix the problem. After delaying this surgery for a couple years, and feeling the pain getting worse I decided I had to have it done before I left sate so it would not impact me for the rest of my life.
In scheduling the surgery I was adamant about not starting off at UD on crutches. I even said that I’d rather be wheeled across the stage at my high school graduation ceremony than deal with that. I believed that I would be left out as the loner, or be the only one on campus with a major injury. I didn’t want to be pitied, I didn’t want to be the girl who couldn’t go out with her friends because she couldn’t walk across campus. Unfortunately life was not on my side. I had my surgery on June 28, 2018. After the surgery my doctor told me that I needed to be on crutches for longer than I had expected, so my nightmare was coming true. Again, my hip was stopping me from doing things I wanted to do.
However, that nightmare turned into being something that helped me rather than hurt me . While I couldn’t walk around campus, I rode the UD shuttle bus, learning how to navigate to where I needed to go. Being on crutches was also a conversation starter, not just for people to feel bad for what I had gone through, and I’ve met some of my closest friends from it. I also was not the only one on crutches, there were plenty of other people going through different situations but dealing with the same thing that I was.
So the moral of my story is that even if things don’t always go the way you had planned it, something good may come out of it. Being on crutches was seemingly the worst possible situation, yet many positives came out of it for me. So whether it’s an injury, not getting the job you wanted, or something else that doesn’t go your way – just think that in the end it will almost always turn out better than expected.
