Hair loss - Like many girls, my hair was really important to me when I was younger. Due to the mixture of radiation and chemotherapy that I got, my hair grows back very slowly and very thin.

Weight loss - After surgery I temporarily lost the ability to feed myself and had to be fed almost entirely through a feeding tube. By the end of my treatment I had lost a lot of weight, and because of my shrunken stomach and highly sensitive gag reflex, I still only maintain a minimum weight for my size and age.

Memory loss - I know everyone loses some of their childhood memories as they grow older, but I definitely suffer from memory loss. I have had to re-remember and relearn many things I used to be certain about. As I said before, I had to re-remember how to feed myself, I also had to re-remember how to walk and talk and live a life where I didn’t need to depend 100% on someone else to do, or help me do, everything. There were also many academic things that I had to re-remember. I say re-remember because for most things, both physical and mental, the knowledge and muscle memory were there, I just had to find and access them.

Lost Skills - Starting at age 5 I danced ballet. I didn’t have a dream of becoming a famous ballerina, but it was something that I loved. A lot of the steps, jumps and positions I can still physically do, but because of balance problems and nystagmus (uncontrollable jumpy eye movements) I can’t spin. There are other things I’m just not willing to put the time and effort into trying to do, because I expect to find out that I can't.

Friends - In elementary school I had a wide variety of peers and casual friends. But my really close friends, the ones that I invited to play-dates, sleepovers and birthday parties, all had houses with birth mothers and fathers - lives similar to my own, growing up with the same moral values as I did. Now my friends come from all kinds of lives and don’t necessarily have those same values. I find that I often need to be the sensible and responsible person in the lives of my friends, when I’m still learning to be sensible and responsible with my own life.

Abandonment - Most of my friends from elementary school and my other activities stopped coming around, even the ones I went to Middle School with and saw every day. I had to make an entirely new group of friends at a new school, with a slightly different schedule than everyone else, a slow body and a slow brain. I understand that its normal for some friends to come and go throughout your life, but to have nearly all of them leave me at a time when I needed my peer support group the most, was devastating.

Sympathy - At times I’ve felt that people who don’t see me frequently (or who love me a bit too much) offer me more sympathy than necessary, and treat me like I’m a small fragile child. Other times I’ve felt like I wasn’t receiving enough sympathy, and wanted to scream, “I’m only a small fragile child!”