Narrative Essay About Home Life

Growing up, my home life was complicated at best; I was the youngest of 3, by five years, and everyone but my father and myself suffered from drug addiction. It was a bleak situation, but it was manageable. It’s important to reach back in to my childhood years because they are what drive my ambitions today. The environment that I was raised in explains both my struggles in education as well as why I want a career in occupational therapy.

My father was a type one diabetic and I was the only one available to help keep him healthy. I was brought up knowing what to do in the case of a diabetic emergency and by the age of ten I was trained in administering shots and taking glucose measurements with ease. While these responsibilities added to my overall busyness as a child I was still able to lead a fairly normal life. However, when I was twelve years old, due to complications with his medication, he suffered a major brain hemorrhage that put him in a coma for 6 months. The stroke affected the entire left side of his body, along with his speech, memory and word recognition. This catastrophic event was the start of a very difficult journey for my father and me. While other kids enjoyed fairly normal lifestyles, I was attending therapy sessions and learning how to reteach my dad basic activities of daily living.

The doctors we were dealing with simply refused to share information and we didn’t understand what we were doing, let alone why we were doing them. So we fought, my father fought the nurses and I fought the doctors and we made little progress. It took about a year before we were placed with a doctor that would actually make sure we were informed and we began to see