and I just looked at them with a confused face hoping that they would get the hint that I don’t speak Russian. I’m pretty sure that they were saying hi and expected me to say hi back in Russian, but they were very surprised at me when I responded with “what’s up” and just kept working and kept to myself and just followed along with my grandfather who let me work where he had worked at for a couple of days. I got two hundred dollars for my work, and I decided to get some new shoes for school and a new sweatshirt. I was dead set on buying my first pair of Nike shoes from the champs store in Natick Mall in Framingham, so I did. They were high tops, black and white so I could have worn them with any colors that I wore to school that day. I went to the North Face store and bought a black and grey jacket to match my shoes. They were having a sale that day, so my mom wanted a bright yellow fleece jacket, and she told me how much it was, and I bought it for her.
The tenth grade started, and I couldn’t wait to show off my new shoes and jacket that I worked hard for and living in Massachusetts all summer long and talking about that to all of my friends. Football tryout signup sheets were posted during lunch, and one of my friends convinced me to join and try football out again. I started working out with the team after school a few days a week and then almost every day after school. I really enjoyed lifting weights and I still do, being active make me feel healthier and more energetic as a person. I joined football a year late to be on junior varsity, so I was on the practice squad or if someone got injured I could potentially be their replacement. I remember playing a scrimmage game as a practice, and I told my dad after on how I loved playing and that I felt like a “million bucks” after doing some drills and playing a scrimmage game where I was heavily involved. My right knee started to bother me, so my mom had gotten me a simple knee brace to help with the pains that I was feeling. During a practice with just the lineman, I wasn’t paying attention for just maybe ten seconds and they yelled “peg leg,” and I immediately turned and looked and payed attention. The nickname was so well that “peg leg” was all I really got called during practice.
This one practice, we were doing lineman drills where you come up and hit the bag the other person was holding. I went and apparently, I was coming up fast and hitting the bag hard and fast, coach came up to me and shook my hand and said, “I’m coach Gorman, nice to meet you.” That’s when I knew that I needed to take advantage of that opportunity and shine during another drill, in hopes of getting a starting position. During the summer, as a football team, we would visit other high school and compete in drills against that school. Our lineman coach had told us about the lineman challenge and to be ready for it.
That day had come quicker than I expected, and it was time for us to get on the bus and head to that school. I wasn’t nervous or prepared as I wish I was, but when we got to the school, we had walked through their weight room to get outside. Their weight room was bigger than ours, and they were working out when we arrived to try to intimidate us. We all got outside in the hot sun with just our shoulder pads on and our helmets for warming ups. It was just the usual stretching and loosing up before each player went to their individual group drills.
I had gone to the lineman drill, where it was our school lineman going up against their lineman. The drill was a simple but classic one-on-one and being set in the three-point stance facing each other. The three-point stance was where the player was down on his hands and knees, feet shoulder width apart, heel to toe ratio, your back foot toe was aligned with your front foot heel, keeping your hips underneath your feet, one hand down on the ground behind the line of scrimmage and the other hand cocked by your knee, back and open handed. Your hand that was down depended on what is your dominant hand. With your hips above your head, you’re looking straight ahead. I’m pretty sure that I either went first or right after, because I’ll never forget what had happened during my turn. I was just about to go up and coach Gorman stopped me and said, “Are you ready?”
And I looked at coach and said, “I’m ready.” Surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous. I was looking at this as an opportunity to show that I wasn’t just a backup lineman on the junior varsity team. I got down in my stance, trying to be in the same mindset that I was where the coach thought that I did so well that he introduced himself to me and shook my hand. I briefly looked at my opponent and saw that he was about the same height and weight as me. He might have been just a little bit bigger, but I wasn’t going to focus on how my opponent looked or trying to figure out if he was stronger or not. I got down into my three-point stance and turned my head up and looked straight. The referee that was there was starting each challenge off with a “Go!” and a quick whistle blow. The moment that I heard the word “Go!” come out of the referee’s mouth, I had blacked out and woke back up immediately on the ground.
I could just feel the disappointment from my coach because he saw potential in me, and I had just blown my one opportunity besides a practice to shine through and stick out from the other junior varsity lineman. I didn’t even get the chance to explain what had just happened to me; I didn’t even want to tell the coach what had happened to me. I felt as almost that I let my teammates down because I know that they expected more from me. When we regrouped into our football team as a whole, I just remember looking down at my left arm and there was a huge lump bulging out of my forearm. I went up to another player and asking if he had seen something like this before. He told me that it’s normal and that he gets those all of the time. He was just telling me that, probably, so that I wouldn’t freak out and stay calm about it until I could get it looked at by a doctor. On the bus ride home, still upset and regretful with my performance and how I did that day, I was just looking out of the window with my headphones in listening to some music thinking about how I could have done better. I wasn’t very popular since I joined football late, so a freshman was sitting next to me on the ride back to the school. He noticed the large sized lump on my forearm and said to me, “You should go get that checked out, that’s not normal.”
I responded to him, “One of the other lineman told me that he gets these all of the time and said its normal.” I just shrugged my shoulders like there wasn’t anything that I could’ve done about it and that getting bruises and bumps is normal. It was a gigantic lump on my arm, and I was very fortunate to have gone to the doctor when I did.
My junior year of high school was coming up, and I went to go check out where all my classes were going to be at that year. I remember walking with my mom to find all of my classes and some were upstairs, and every time that my mom and I would have to go upstairs, I would be dragging behind. I was desperately trying to catch my breath and getting really unpleasant headaches every time that I would have to go up some stairs, whether it be at my house or going up the school’s staircase. The doctor’s appointment we had set up for me to go get checked out could not have come soon enough. It was my brother’s birthday, July 29, 2014, and he wanted to go to Marion Splash House to celebrate. I had taken off my shirt to go get into the wave pool, and my uncle looked at me very puzzled. He knew that I was playing football and taking hits, and that’s what I thought the bruises were from, but he said that I had looked like I had been in a car accident.
Chapter 5
Rare Discovery
It was time for my hospital visit and hoping to find a simple and easy fix on to what was currently happening to me. I was pretty positive that from what my dad was telling me, was that it was just a simple vitamin deficiency. That I was hoping that I would simply just have to change my diet and eat more fruit or something along those lines. Unusually, my dog kept coming up to me and whimpering, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. Little did I know that my dog was trying to warn me.
It was time for the hospital visit with my primary care physician, just my dad and me that just went at first, just a usual finger prick and just checking some basic vital signs and hoping they could tell me what the problem was. After I had got checked in and they recorded my weight and height, I was seated in a doctor’s room awaiting the nurse to do the checkup because
