Underdeveloped

My parents met in high school. It was a blind date on Halloween, full of embarrassment and corduroy pants. They fell in love, and created a life together. They got married at the common age of twenty-five, after my mother found out she was pregnant. They had a beautiful baby boy, named him Zachary, perfect in health. Eighteen months passed and another baby was on its way. This time, a girl! My mother struggled throughout the entire pregnancy to stay in good health. She was forced to attend constant doctor's appointments to keep a close eye on the baby. Her endometriosis was making the chances of a healthy child extremely slim. Getting closer and closer to the due date, my parents because significantly worried as my mom’s health continued to deteriorate. They rushed my mom to the hospital, and she began having contractions. Not long after, my mother’s body began to fill with fluid, physically becoming so large that she looked like a balloon. Her blood pressure had skyrocketed - all signs of a dangerous condition called toxemia. At 3 PM, my mother’s doctor induced her labor….six weeks before her due date. And so, the process began. Everyone worked very quickly, as no one had any idea if my mother, or the baby, would survive this. Two hours and twenty one minutes later, at 5:21 PM on May 28th, 1999, their daughter was born… and immediately taken away. She wasn’t breathing. My mother didn’t even get to hold her daughter before being told that the baby’s lungs were underdeveloped and working at nearly half of the capacity that they should. She was immediately placed in an incubator before being taken to West Penn hospital, over an hour away. This baby was me, and I stayed in that hospital, in that incubator, for twelve days. When I breathed, my chest simply went flat. No one had any idea if my lungs would ever develop to their full capacity, but nonetheless, my four pound thirteen ounce self fought as hard as I could. Once my mother was released from the hospital, she and my father visited me every single day. When I was finally released, my parents were told that I had asthma. After this entire process, their little girl only withheld such a minor issue as asthma. It was such an incredible story, that they chose to name me “Destiny.”

“The hidden power believed to control what will happen in the future; fate.”

Growing up, the asthma definitely caused problems. I was forced to carry around an inhaler at all times, and had extreme attacks as often as twice a day. Today, nearly nineteen years later, I have not had an asthma attack in over ten years. Such a terrifying, tragic story has become such a minuscule problem that I no longer even think about. I hope to spend the rest of my life looking for and finding my purpose - my ‘destiny’ - and why I survived such a battle, when all odds were against me.