DIFFERENT BECAUSE YOU'RE SICK?

How Alexa found his voice and courage to cope with the bullyies of school mates after being diagnosed with a chronic disease.

Imagine that you are 16 years old and a colleague tells you that you are the first name he thinks of when he hears of a disease.

You've got your left foot three times more swollen than the right one. You get bigger and higher shoes to disguise the difference between the two legs. You step differently. You haven't peed your ankle bones in two years.

Imagine that many of your colleagues are often taken from you because you miss high school. She calls you "sick."

Now imagine that I don't even believe you have a problem. That you're probably inventingyour pains to stop coming to school.

Sometimes you wonder if you're not fabulating. For almost two years you are looking for a response to the pain and swelling of the foot, and no doctor decides what you have. You were a cancer suspect. They said you had a tumor. You've done MRI, Doppler, X-rays, ultrasound scans, and hundreds of blood tests. You've learned every guard room and every pediatric ward on the outside. You recognize them in photos that you see on Facebook from other friends or strangers who raise money to operate abroad: "Ah, this is the bed of Marie Curie! This is from Gomoiu! This one's from the IWTO. " You've always learned to walk around with pajamas and robe when you're scheduled for analysis, that you never know when they get in and they've caught you so many times unprepared. You've been looking for an answer for over two years in all the children's hospitals in Bucharest. It never officially came, but the last doctor who saw you in the summer of 2019 told you it seemed a lymphedema and suddenly everything made sense.

Alexandra Vija is 16 years old, in the X-A in an economic profile class in the "Nikola Tesla" high School in Bucharest and knows how to handle an infinite hospital better than the author of this text. Understand doctors ' explanations and prescribed treatments better than her mother. It uses medical language, so it impresses nurses and nurses. It has been customary since 14 years for doctors to gather the wheel around her foot and call their residents to show them "the girl with the horror foot". He endured the humiliation of being asked on the table of consultations "What is the swollen leg?", although it was obvious to anyone who was.

It all started in the EIGHTH grade, when Alexa suddenly woke up with a bușan swollen leg. He put ice and thought maybe he steped an insect. After a few days, he had all the red and hot tibia and could no longer step. He arrived at the Marie Curie Hospital where they admitted her for analysis and treatment. They had her compressed with rivanol, administered her antibiotic to six hours and spent 15 days hospitated because the analyses indicated a strong infection. It was extremely hard days because he rarely heard a good word or saw any gesture of empathy from the staff. He was going to compress the walls because he couldn't walk, but nobody offered him a wheelchair. The nurses called her a beast because she didn't touch the hospital food. At the discharge, his leg was as swollen as admission. Father Alexei, a 58-year-old man, who had been confronted with hospital life because of a chronic colon disease, told the doctors, "are we leaving exactly as we came?!". They've been told that in time, it will deflate.

Because it doesn't deflate, the parents started searching. An MRI showed suspicion of lymphoma. A doctor asked my mother Alexei how sincere she could be with the girl, because he was convinced that the diagnosis was cancer. My mother told her this scene only after a new MRI contradicted that certainty.

The new MRI confirms edema, that is, the swelling, and the "tumor formation" that he received as a diagnosis from a rheumatologist. Alexa tested oncology at Fundeni, and so he came to want to be a volunteer in hospitals and help them smile at sick children and their families with whom he often met and see them with lost eyes, as if they were always waiting for something: a treatment , an answer, a change, a visit, a good word. He doesn't think he'll ever be able to get the pictures of the children in the head or the mothers who slept in a chair.