So like most kids I had that one subject that just absolutely sucked the big one, in my case it was two math and science. I struggled all through school with these two subjects and even though I had an IEP or individual education plan and was in “easier” math and science classes it was still impossible for me! When I was in high school and dealing with my mental health issues my school psychologist refused to do testing to diagnose my mental health or my learning disabilities stating that I was just acting out for attention. It wasn’t until I graduated and got diagnosed. So why was math so hard? I have Dyscalculia. Here’s some info I found on the internet when I decided to look more into this diagnosis.
Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that affects a person’s ability to understand number-based information and math. People who have dyscalculia struggle with numbers and math because their brains don’t process math-related concepts like the brains of people without this disorder. However, their struggles don’t mean they’re less intelligent or less capable than people who don’t have dyscalculia.
The symptoms of this disorder usually appear in childhood, especially when children learn how to do basic math. However, many adults have dyscalculia and don’t know it. People who have dyscalculia often face mental health issues when they have to do math, such as anxiety, depression and other difficult feelings.
Experts estimate it affects between 3% and 7% of people worldwide.
People who have dyscalculia are neurodivergent. Neurodiversity is a term that describes how no two people have the same brain, and everyone’s brain forms and develops in a completely unique way. For people with dyscalculia, that means their brain works differently from the brain of someone who doesn’t have disorders or conditions that affect how their brain works.
Solving a math problem like “2+2=?” might seem simple, but it takes several different skills — and the areas of the brain that manage them — working together to do it. Some of those include:
Visualprocessing: Your eyes see the entirety of the math problem and send the components back to your brain for processing.
Short-term memory: You use your short-term memory to hold onto the specifics of the math problem as you work on it. For example, the number amounts, the symbols and the order in which they appear.
Language: You use this part of your brain to translate the symbols in the math problem into what those symbols mean. That’s how you know what the plus sign, equal sign and question mark mean in this context.
Long-term memory: You access this kind of memory to remember the process of how to solve a math problem. In this case, your brain identifies that this is an addition problem based on the plus sign and the equals sign.
Understanding of quantities and amounts: Your brain translates the symbol “2” into the understanding that it represents a specific amount or quantity. Children usually learn this principle by giving them examples like fruits or animals.
Calculation: This process unites all of the above, helping you solve that 2+2=4.
For a neurotypical person, the above processes all work as expected. Depending on how severe their case is, people with dyscalculia may struggle with certain parts of the process.
So what causes it?
In most cases, especially in children, experts don’t know why dyscalculia happens. There’s evidence that learning disorders — including dyscalculia — may run in families. However, more research is necessary to confirm this.
Experts do know that people with dyscalculia are more likely to have certain differences in some areas of their brain. These differences seem to indicate less development and fewer connections between brain cells in those areas. The affected areas are ones your brain uses when doing anything that involves numbers and calculations. However, experts don’t know why these differences happen and how they influence this disorder’s symptoms.
Related conditions
Dyscalculia often happens alongside other conditions. While these aren’t causes, they can be a clue to help healthcare providers recognize and diagnose dyscalculia. Conditions that often happen alongside dyscalculia include:
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Dyslexia, dysgraphia or non-verbal learning disorders.
Sensory processing disorders.
Autism spectrum disorder.
People with dyscalculia also have a higher risk of mental health disorders. Experts don’t know if these are more likely to happen because a person has dyscalculia, but these are still important factors that healthcare providers will consider when making a diagnosis and recommending treatment.
Anxiety disorder or panic disorder.
Behavior disorders (such as oppositionaldefiant disorder or conduct disorder).
Bipolar disorder.
Depression.
So that’s my story for the night if you have any questions about my life living with this or any other of my disabilities feel free to ask and I’ll answer the best I can!
So I have to say I went back and forth the last few days how I wanted to do this post at first I was gonna read a book about someone living with spina Bifida and write a review but I was having issue finding the “right” book. Ultimately I decided to write a post about my story about spina Bifida and while every case is different with spina Bifida I hope that it sheds light on this defect and more people learn about it. also as I write this post I wanna edit and say it does take a left turn and go into bullying and mental health but it all ties into spina Bifida but I also have a habit of going off topic and I’m sorry 😝.
So let’s start with the basics what exactly is Spina Bifida? Spina bifida Latin for ‘split spine’ is a birth defect in which there is incomplete closing of the spine and the membranes around the spinal cord during early in development in pregnancy. There are three main types: spina bifida occulta, meningocele and myelomeningocele. Meningocele and myelomeningocele may be grouped as spina bifida cystica. The most common location is the lower back , but in rare cases it may be in the middle back or neck.
So for example I was born with myelomeningocele and my spine was incomplete at the L4/L5 vertebrae of the spine. People with spina Bifida at this level typically either use a wheelchair full time to get around or if your stubborn like me you use AFO’s commonly known as leg braces. It’s also not uncommon for bladder issues I’d say 99% of the people I’ve met use a catheter for the bathroom that 1% that don’t catheter have something called neurogenic bladder and basically all that means is a person can’t hold their bladder so when they gotta use the bathroom there’s no waiting it’s then and now or they are gonna have an accident.
So I get two questions often get are 1. did my parents know I was going to be born with spina Bifida? and 2. Am I the only handicapped person in my family? So no my parents didn’t know I was born in 1989 and as I understand it women who where expecting at that time didn’t go often for ultrasounds like they do now, and yes I am the only person on both sides of my family born with spina Bifida. At this present time all they know about spina Bifida is a deficiency in folic acid can contribute to it but usually by the time a women who is expecting a child knows she’s pregnant the damage is already done so taking folic acid supplements doesn’t do much good. There are some advancements in the medical field with “treating” spina Bifida and I say it like that cuz there isn’t an actual treatment for spina Bifida however there is a surgery that women can have while still carrying the baby that closes the spine before birth and can make the effects of the spina Bifida less severe.
That’s another question that comes up quite often, how many surgeries have I had? I always start off by saying I’m extremely lucky to not have had as many as other people in my position to date as far as my spina Bifida is concerned I’ve only had 6 surgeries the last being in 2006 or 2007 when I was just 17 years old. My first four surgeries occurred in the first year of birth, so when I was born first we had to find a hospital that had a bed for an infant that specialized in spina Bifida my parents options where Hershey medical hospital, children’s hospital of Philadelphia and I believe (cuz I honestly don’t remember) but I think the third was DuPont. So within the first 24 hours I had my first surgery and I was also born with hydrocephalus which is common in spina bifida patients so I had a shunt placed at a few days old for that (more on that condition coming) but unfortunately my shunt malfunctioned when I was six months old so I had another surgery THEN it malfunctioned again when I was nine months old so back to the OR I went finally I caught a break and didn’t need another shunt replacement until I was 17.
So I mentioned hydrocephalus and I know your say WTF is that? Simply put its a build-up of fluid in the cavities deep within the brain.The extra fluid puts pressure on the brain and can cause brain damage. It’s most common in infants and older adults. So literally I’ve had a total of four brain surgeries three of which occurred before I was a year old, major flex if I don’t mind saying so myself.
So I get a lot of questions about my childhood and let me just start off by saying I HAD THE BEST CHILDHOOD EVER! I get so sad for the people I met who’s parents coddled them because they had disabilities or because of health issues they had in general, first off by no means where my parents cold and horrible people but my parents definitely came from the mind set of telling me at a young age that the world wasn’t made for someone like me and I just simply have to adapt to it. My house isn’t some special made house like you see on little people big world where they had everything lowered to their height and all that, speaking of height I got teased a lot in school for being short so let me just clear the air, I didn’t win the lottery in the height department (thanks mom) my mom who is the oldest of five is 5’3, her mom my nanny is 5’3 ish and her mother was 4’11 or so I was told she died before I was born so dunno there but I’ve seen photos she was little. So there’s that, there’s also the issue of being born with spina Bifida and that typically people with spina Bifida are on the slightly shorter side so there you have it, and if your wondering I’m 4’11. But back to my childhood it was awesome! I will be the first to point out I was an unplanned pregnancy made apparent by the fact of the age gap of my siblings and I. Christopher my oldest brother is ten years older then me and Kevin the middle child is seven years older then me. My brothers on the other hand are only three years apart. I was a typical younger sibling I teased my brothers and tagged along with them and their friends growing up. Chris and I are the most alike we both LOVE to talk and we are full of energy supplied by our diagnosis of ADHD. Kevin is the polar opposite, which my mom will blame on Chris mostly because when they where kids Chris would answer for Kevin when my mom would ask him questions. To this day Kevin will sit back and watch Chris and i bicker back and forth rather then join in.
While home life was the best, school was another story, first off before I even started school my mom pretty much had me in every early childhood intervention class you could think of in the early 90’s one including Easter Seals. But when I was about four or five it was time to start school. So first thing you have to understand is I’m a complicated child I was a social butterfly once I got to know people but until then I am utterly the most painfully shy person you will ever meet and that stands true to this very day and I’m thirty-four! But kindergarten was amazing I made friends most of which I still have to this very day. As easily as it was for me to make friends some parents weren’t thrilled with the idea of a handicapped child being in the class, I to this very day remember there was a parent who was concerned that their child would “catch” what I had, yep you read that right. Over all elementary school was average I had friends and I played with some after school I did have one girl in my class who was a neighbor who’s parents basically told her to be friends with me and she had to befriend me to be nice which was whatever she thought her poop stank like roses and I didn’t care much for her anyway. I also was in Girl Scouts in elementary school I dropped out after 6th grade because I was being low key bullied by another girl and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore.
In 2001 I started 7th grade and my dear readers that’s where things get interesting in my life. SO, 7h grade was pretty meh for me nothing special made friends was nervous about jr high you know same as everyone else experience I guess. I made a lot of friends that year joined a club and that was really it sorry guys if I disappoint you. It wasn’t until my freshmen year things got rough for me. At this point my freshmen class was at the Jr. high and would be going up to the high school the following school year to make more room for seventh and eighth grades. But anyway, everything was fine the first few weeks into school but I wanna say after the first month or two is when things took a dark turn. There was a student in my grade who that year was in three maybe four of my classes and he just started pointing out how I walked funny one day in class like he would literally mimic how I walked and everything. So I would brush it off and was like whatever pretty soon he would make fun of me or make comments to me in every class I was in with him. I went to the vice principal at the time to report it and he called the student in and talked to him, it continued. A few weeks went by and in that time when I say I was in the vice principal’s office every single day two or three times a day I’m not even remotely exaggerating. After a while they called a cop in to talk to him, that did nothing. Next they call his mom in and have her and her son read an article about spina Bifida and then discuss it, did it work? Nope. Next thing you know they call the mother in one more time and do you know what her excuse was as to why her son was bullying another student? His father was serving our country in Iraq, yep his father was gone and that’s why he was doing it. While I applaud anyone who served our country, I myself have several family members who have served, it doesn’t give someone the excuse to bully another person. During all of this I became withdrawn, normally my mom picked me up after school and I wouldn’t shut up about my day. However after the bullying got this bad which was maybe half way through the school year my mom was lucky if I said two words to her at the end of the school day. As for friends none of them knew what was going on I felt let down by my vice principal since nothing ever came of telling him what was going on so I just stopped talking about it. I became extremely depressed. As if verbally bullying wasn’t bad enough by this time it also became physical at one point he pushed me down a set of three steps that led to one of the wings of the Jr. high building.
On to high school which if it wasn’t stressful enough that I was starting a new building and they brought up the ninth graders as well so that just made it more chaotic, I was also very anxious at this time. Summer was great I was my old self talking,laughing, just enjoying life. But then high school loomed over me as august approached and I became depressed and anxious I had the worst fear that the bullying would continue. I started cutting classes, and hanging around the wrong people basically. I wasn’t into partying but I did get a little wild I don’t want to get into details here but I was doing things that looking back on it I’m very ashamed of. Long story short tenth grade just consisted of lots of anxiety and anger issues I had a hard time focusing in class and had to leave class and would hide in one of my teachers class rooms out of anxiety. And before you ask no my bully wasn’t in any of my classes that year. In tenth grade I had surgery on my shunt which had malfunctioned which meant another surgery which happened a few weeks after I turned seventeen. Bare with me here cuz it’s around this time things get fuzzy after the bullying started in ninth grade I started to have blackouts I would get so depressed and have rages of anger that I would just black out and sleep for like an hour and wake up and not remember a single thing that happened. Prior to my surgery I had seemed out help from my pediatrician for depression I was put on medication Solly for depression and it helped (kinda) after my shunt surgery my depression got better at first but a few weeks post op. It reared its ugly head again and I started back on the depression medication. Then I got tired of taking my medication it wasn’t helping and I was at a very high dose so I just decided to cold Turkey stop taking it after about a week my parents figured it out and took me to the hospital they didn’t know what to do with me I was out of control emotionally I was beating up my mom, fighting with her staying in bed, crying none stop it was horrible. So my parents had me admitted to the hospital psych unit for teens. Technically I admitted myself but I don’t remember it that way but we will leave it at that. So I spent three days of my spring break in the psych hospital. To answer your questions, no there’s no padded walls and no there wasn’t any jackets with straps. After my three days there I went to the out patient program at the hospital for teens it was meh, lots of therapy, an hour of school every day, hospital food not much to say.
Junior year I don’t remember much of at all so this paragraph will be short as hell, sorry. I got worse depression wasn’t getting better at this point I was seeing a therapist weekly and was seeing a proper doctor for meds I still didn’t have a diagnosis but bipolar started being thrown around at this time. I also did another stint of out patient therapy cuz I wasn’t going to school at all by this point like flat out refusing to leave my bed my anxiety was that bad.
Senior year, everyone looks forward to it right? College, becoming an adult, moving bout of your parents place all the things. Ya that’s not the story here sorry to tell you. So at this point your probably wondering why I’m spilling my guts and telling you my life story cuz it started out being about spina Bifida and now it’s about how shitty high school was well my dear reader as it turns out my senior year we learn through going to doctors and talking to them about what’s going on with me that bipolar disorder is pretty darn common in people with spina Bifida. Yep. But I hadn’t been diagnosed yet as a matter of fact my therapist suggested to the school psychologist that they do the testing for me to be diagnosed and his response? He said that there wasn’t anything wrong with me and I was just acting out for attention, I know what your thinking we where floored too. So in attempt to have a somewhat normal high school experience I got a ticket to prom I planned to go with a kid I kinda liked at the time found out he only wanted to get in my pants and ended that pretty quick. A few weeks before prom I ended up back in the out patient program again basically the school didn’t wanna deal with me at this point and would just ship me off to which ever program would take me. However and I’m gonna make this short, one day I got into a disagreement with the head of the department/ program at the time like he was basically the principal of the school. He proceeded to call my mom of which I told him not to cuz I knew she was asleep and he did anyway woke her up put her on speaker and began to tell her how disrespectful I was and how I wasn’t gonna amount to anything in my life and I was basically going to rely on my parents the rest of my life. Ya good times. So I immediately discharged myself right there with my mom on the phone requested the papers to sign, I was 18 at this time so my parents and basically any adult couldn’t do anything so I signed and my mom came and got me and that was that. Oh and that guy in charge of the out patient program who told my mom I wouldn’t amount to anything? Ya he’s now the director of the chapel of the hospital or some shit like that, funny right?
So with only a month of school left what would happen? Well as it turns out there was only two options 1.kids peace of which I knew in our area had a shitty reparation and there was another program my school had been made aware of that was an alternative school for at risk youth. It was about an hour away in Pottstown so they set up a tour of the school. To say it was a school is not right I was basically in a building that had been once used for something else of which I’m not sure what that was. So I went on this tour the principal also named Amanda was really nice, another student showed us around the program in question was called community service foundation or CSF for short basically the way this program ran was there was a back room and a front room kids where divided up between the two sides and every morning you started off in group therapy, you know stereotypical sitting in circle and talking every single morning started off with an affirmation that a person picked every day a different person each day, a quote or a song lyric it literally could be anything. Then after that we put up dividers in both front and back of the building and we went from area to area for our schooling each class started off sitting in a circle and talking then we had class and if any issues arouse during class we sat in the circle and discussed it. Long story short you learn to hate circles. After a classes was lunch and then we had more group therapy divided again between front and back of the building. We also had specials we got to pick two that we really wanted to be in and one just incase one of those was full. I picked photography and music class and the art class as my third option I was really artsy at this point so I liked anything where I could express myself. So anyway after my tour of meeting the other kids and the staff Amanda told me to call her when I made up my mind about attending it wasn’t up to the parents they literally expected the students to call them with their choice. They even said they had students who called them I r he parking lot or on the way home. Well I ended up loving the place after the tour and so did my mom so yes I did indeed call her fifteen minutes after leaving to accept going there. So I started the program the next day from what I remember cuz again I was blacking out from my depressive episodes so I don’t remember a lot. And at this point it was three weeks before senior prom and about a month before graduation. I had a rough start to the program but adapted pretty quickly I took a school bus that picked me up everyday there was maybe three other kids that came from my school district at that time, that’s another thing kids from all the school districts in the area went to this place and the schools were responsible for providing transportation there were also foster kids in this program the program CSF had a foster home program where kids lived and then attended the program. Senior prom came I went alone I ended up sitting with a few friends and had a pretty decent time overall, I don’t regret going despite the fact I wasn’t actually at my school. I also got to attend graduation practices and all CSF gave me permission to leave for practice for graduation and anything else I would need to attend. It was Important for me to actually get my high school diploma I knew how hard it was for people to get jobs and be accepted into college programs if they had GED’s and my only other option was a certificate of completion which I wasn’t excited about. However for me to get my actual high school diploma I needed to attend an extra semester of school meaning I wouldn’t actually graduate until 2009. So I came back to CSF in the fall did what was asked of me some of it was difficult like the swearing rule, if u swore you had to come up with three alternative words for whatever word you said and at that time I swore as I put it “worse then a sailor” yep I eventually swore so much I had to sign a contract I forget what the contract said but basically I had to give up cursing and if I didn’t I had to miss future field trips. But I was able to curb my mouth long enough to graduate CSF was amazing they would have special days planned for students who were leaving early like me since I graduated after the first semester of the following year which meant I left in January of 2009 they had a graduation ceremony just for me. My parents where there and my niece who at the time was only a few months old, both my brothers, and a few of the staff from my high school who actually supported me through everything that I had been through. One of the students sang a song during the ceremony and my brothers best friend who is like a third brother to me presented me with my diploma. A few weeks after graduating I started working with an agency that helps people with disabilities find work and one of the first things they did was do the testing my school psychologist refused to do and at 19 I finally had a diagnosis I have bipolar 1 disorder, general anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, ADHD, math deficiency disorder, and short term memory loss. So ya that’s basically my story.
My point of sharing this all with you reader is to show if your going through something your not alone I know people say that all the time and trust me I still roll my eyes when people say it but it’s true your not alone and everyone has a story and just because someone is handicapped doesn’t mean they are less then or are less capable. I’m 34 years old now I was 19 when I graduated and I’ve had struggles in the 16 years since I graduated I’m struggling with getting a job (maybe I’ll do another blog post about that?) I’ve struggled with relationships but am currently in an amazing one. I still struggle with my depression. But things are getting better I still have issues because of my spina Bifida as a matter of fact things will only get harder as I age I count my blessings everyday that I’ve been luckier then most in my situation tho.
I hope to do more post like this in the future if you have any questions about anything I’ve posted please don’t hesitate to comment and I’ll answer the best I can.
But honestly let me know in the comments if I should do more post like this about my life or if u think I should keep it about books?
Introverted Little BookWorm 