Amanda

3 Pages 680 Words

I spent one night at Mass General, sleeping with an oxygen mask to pump my lung back up. The doctors sent me home the next morning with a sore back and no sleep This collapsed lung was just a singular event, a one-hit wonder. Wrong. In October, my lung collapsed again. This time I spent two nights with the oxygen mask. This time when I left I was scheduled for surgery a week later. The day of the surgery I saw Mrs. Penn behind the desk, but she didn’ t wave. I realized that with my oxygen mask I was about as recognizable as the face behind Darth Vader’ s mask.

Though I knew I was in good hands, my main feeling as a patient was helplessness. Nonetheless, I experienced one small triumph near the end of my stay. On the way to the CT scan, my wheelchair attendant had no clue where we were going. Not only did I know the way, I knew a shortcut. The attendant was impressed. For a moment, I was not a patient, but again part of the invisible fraternity of hospital workers.

High school is a strange time. After three years of trying to develop identity and friends in middle school, students are expected to mature immediately on the first day of ninth grade, but I never did this. I never fully realized in the earlier grades how important high school success, as measured by GPA, would be to my future life, and as a result I am applying to college with seemingly contradictory measures of my ability to perform college-level work. If I had worked and studied hard rather than hanging out with friends and viewing high school as an opportunity to socialize, I would not have to apply to school with a 1300 SAT and a 2.7 GPA. Had I taken my grades in my earlier years seriously, I could have been a college's dream candidate.
This year I have made an earnest effort to improve my work ethic. My grade point average is rising and my study habits are improving. However, after performing poorly for three years, my GPA cannot reflect the transformation I...