The Tying Factor

When I was born my family was normal. A happy group of three, husband, wife, and child. Both of my parents worked as a teacher and carpenter. We lived comfortably, especially me being the spoiled only child. This relaxed lifestyle was abruptly altered when I turned 5 and my brother was born. It wasn’t just because I was no longer an only child that changed our lives, it was the disease that came along with my baby brother and the secrets it would later unlock.
For the first few years of his life, my brother was juggled from specialist to specialist due to no one knowing what his disease truly was. My family was told he “would live or die” countless times and were turned out to the cold with a young child allergic to everything. Our questions never answered and no treatment to keep him safe. When he was about 5 a doctor finally took on my brother’s case. He knew little to nothing about my brother’s condition, but it was help nonetheless.
By the time he was 7 my brother was given medications that allowed him to live life outside his bubble. He wasn’t allowed to be outside until after the sun wasn’t at its highest, when the allergens were too plentiful, or truthfully be a normal kid, but it was a step in the right direction. He suffered what we believed to be his last attack at the same age and then my mother and the doctor’s research started to pay off. The painful life of being allergic to everything all of the time became a little more tolerable and we were able to see specific triggers and things that afflicted heavier than others.
Increments of five must be fated for my family because five years after his last episode of anaphylactic shock, my brother fell unconscious and was rushed to the hospital. The main specialist discovered his case and took him on as a patient. He now has twenty times the amount of aid he was receiving beforehand and they even want to take him on as a case trial for newly invented methods of treatment. The sheer amount of information gained from this experience has shown a lot about my family tree and certain health issues that were left un-diagnosed.
When my mother was five, her father (my grandfather) passed away from skin cancer. He had been extremely sick for many years before the diagnosis and by then, it was too late for him. It seemed as if the cancer had come from nowhere and everyone up until the year of 2018 was baffled by the mystery surrounding the circumstances.
My grandmother has always been riddled with health issues that no one can truly comprehend. Burst blood vessels throughout her entire leg that randomly happen for no reason, a heart attack that just seemed to miraculously heal, ovarian cancer that was a mass the size of a softball. My grandmother is an ox. Crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, my family always believed that her sickness was just her overdoing work or a side effect of her medication, but it wasn’t.
Going through many other people in my family from my mother’s stomach issues to my cousin’s lupus issues, we all feature a small fraction of the same ailment; we all have minor symptoms of Mastocytosis. These seeming medical mysteries can now be treated and discovered in future generations.

Photo on Foter.com