I felt an intense pain shoot into my chest and neck, and I had to run to the bathroom as fast as my disabled body would allow me to. I heard my mother scream out “Dustin, what’s wrong?” but I couldn’t answer her, all of the soft food that I had tried to eat had come back up, and this was just the first of thousands of times that this would happen over the next nine months. This incident previously described happened on Thanksgiving Day 2014, I was recovering from a surgery that I just had three day prior in order to repair a hiatal hernia. Little did the doctors, my family, or I know that a plethora of other problems would soon arise.
Of course my mother figured that this was just a side effect from the surgery I just had. Most people get
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Jecius told me and my mother that the next step would be for him to put me to sleep and perform an esophageal dilation. We proceeded, only to find no avail. My condition was getting worse, I was losing even more weight, and my body was beginning to show the effects of malnourishment. These negative effects were exemplified on a day that I looked forward to every year during high school—honor choir day. My chorus teacher, a few selected classmates, and I were at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. We had just finished our first rehearsal and we were eating lunch at KFC. I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat, but for some reason I always tried had a little tinge of hope that one day I would try to eat and it would go down without any discomfort. Of course this was not the case, and on this particular day the aftermath of me trying to eat was the worst I had experienced. My teacher was alarmed and pulled me aside and said “Are you okay?” of course I responded with “Yes ma’am, I’m fine.” The last thing I wanted to do was ruin my teacher and friends experience because of my sickness. Apparently my response wasn’t convincing enough, as she told me “You can’t continue to go on like this. When I see your mama today, I’m going to tell her that she has to do something. You need to get somewhere like Chapel Hill or Duke and leave the doctors in Whiteville