Bio
I was born a baby, on April 7th 1988. I specifically remember it being a Thursday, thus setting up my life-long love for the day Thursday. My parents worked at Hutton Settlement, an establishment for foster children that is located in the Spokane Valley. While there, I learned how to whistle at the ripe old age of two, thanks to the boys my mother took care of in Cottage Three.
I turned three in Japan, as my father, being in the Air Force, was relocated there. This also happens to be where I turned four, whereupon I learned how to ride a bike. It was a traumatic experience that I have mostly blocked from my memories. I turned five in the same apartment that I turned four in, and so at this point in my life I felt pretty grounded in my environment. I felt comfortable enough to explore my space. I decided the best way to do this, would be to ride my bike around the neighborhood naked. This, as it turns out, is frowned upon in the general establishment that is "The World."
We were briefly relocated to a base in New Mexico. My parents have never said why we, as a family, decided to make this transition. I have lived my entire life with the assumed guilt that we were kicked out of Japan for my nakedness. That aside, New Mexico is where I held my first yard sale/lemonade stand combo, and earned enough money to buy a Princess Jasmine halloween costume. This precious commodity was lost in the move back to Spokane.
While is Spokane, my mother resumed working at Hutton Settlement- this time in the girls' cottage, Cottage One. I was now six and a half, and my sister, Victoria, decided now was a good time to be born. She was born December 31st, 1993, on a Friday. Thus setting up my life-long hate of Fridays everywhere. However, it was also around the same time that I discovered computers. It was a magical joy to know that I could play Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis- but, being six and a half, I hadn't learnt how to read yet. If you recall, in the 90's, most computer games were point-and-click, with large amounts of text. But Indiana Jones was the man I was going to marry, and by damn I was going to play that game. So I learned how to read.
My family stayed on at Hutton Settlement until I turned eight, and then we moved to Mead, which is really just a fancy way of saying No One Likes You, So You're Not Allowed To Be Part Of Spokane.
I don't remember much of these formative years, only that I attended Colbert Elementary and met my best friend of seventeen years. The most important thing to happen to me within elementary school would be when, at age eleven, the first Harry Potter book came out.
After Harry Potter, the highlight reel reads as this: learning to drive, getting my driver's license, achieving Maximum Blonditude by freezing myself in my car, and graduating high school. It was exactly six months out of high school that major suckage happened: I was diagnosed with mesenchymal chondrosarcoma. Which is a really long word meaning: "Sara, you're going to die."
So, my family traveled to Philadelphia to visit Will's Eye Clinic and CHOP (Children's Hospital Of Philadelphia should really have a better acronym). Once there, the prognosis was "well Sara, you're going to lose your eye, have a 50% chance of dying, and we're going to bring in twenty doctors to look at you because you're like, the fifth case of this cancer." It was great, I visited the Liberty Bell, was given free bagels by an honest-to-God Philadelphia native, and accidentally hailed a cab.
So, I had surgery to remove my eye and then got on a flight the next day to head back to Spokane, where I had a meeting with my oncologist at Sacred Heart Pediatric Oncology, floor three on the star elevators. I underwent two doses of chemo a month: one that was five days long, and then two weeks later one that was three days long. And, further down the treatment line, I got to spend entire months at a time in the hospital due to fevers and infections and needing blood and platelets and having too small of a count to function normally. It was right around there that my wisdom teeth started growing in, which hurt a lot and sucked because I couldn't have them removed since I had no white cells. Two years later, when my counts were finally high enough, I had them removed. I had a full-on panic attack and to this day it was the scariest moment of my life.
After treatment I joined Eastern Washington University with the goal of receiving my Visual Communications Degree. Six years later, I'm still here, with a hopeful graduation in spring. Thus concludes my life thus far.
