My Biggest Struggle by Robyn Fox

As a child, I lost my hearing in my right ear. I had a mastoid that grew and ate my ear bones. However, like most children, I was born in a hospital with no complications. I did not start having problems with my hearing, which affected my writing, until third grade.

In the third grade, I started to have earaches and bad headaches. It was affecting my learning as well as my life at home. My mom took me to see an ear doctor and he said, “Oh, you just have swimmer’s ear. Just put some eardrops in your ear twice a day. You will be better in a week.” We did everything the doctor told us. A week went by, and I was getting worse. Therefore, my mom took me back to see the ear doctor. Guess what he said? He said the same thing. “Oh, you just have swimmer’s ear.” My mom stopped him before he could get another word in. She said, “That is what you said last time we were here. However, she is getting worse, and it is affecting her learning and our communication. I want you to give her some kind of test to see if there is something in her ear that is causing her so much pain.” The doctor said, “I will, but I doubt that we are going to find anything.” So the doctor ordered an MRI and a CT scan on my right ear. My mom and I had to wait a month for the results to come back.

By that time, I had missed a lot of school. The results came in, and we went to see the doctor for the results. I missed another day of school to see the doctor to find out if he found anything wrong with my ear. And he did. He found a mass that was in my ear that destroyed my ear bones. It was too late to save my hearing, but he could take it out and go from there. He said we needed to set up a day to have the surgery, and it would be an inpatient surgery. So I ended up missing more school by the time I had the surgery. I had already had no clue what was going on in the class. Therefore, my mom had to teach me my vowel sounds and everything I had missed since I was absent a lot.

Missing all that school has really changed who I was as a writer, reader, and person. When it comes to writing a paper, I can tell someone what I want it to say more than I can actually write a paper by hand. That is because I missed so much school; I did not fully learn how to write as well as everyone else in my class. My comprehension level was very low, as well as my reading level. As I grow older, I have been doing everything in my power to become a better writer as well as a better reader. In high school, I was reading at a 4^th grade reading level. However, now that I am in college, I am reading at a college level, and my writing has improved greatly.

In conclusion, I now know that writing is a great part of my life. I will need to be a strong writer if I want to get any kind of job or get anywhere in life. Now I am reading and writing at a college level and not having as many problems as I was when I first came out of high school. I feel that as I grow to become an independent adult, I need to make sure my writing skills are very well-developed, as well as my reading skills, especially, if I really want to go into the education field and be a teacher in the future. My struggles throughout most of my elementary school life, trying to be a better reader and writer, has shaped who I am today as well as who I am as a writer. This struggle has made me a stronger person as well as a more self-evaluating writer.