Not Allowed To Have Asthma

My n-mother was always convinced I was "exaggerating" any illness or problem I ever had.

When I was nine, my mother decided I wasn't "allowed to have asthma anymore." She threw all my medications away and told me that it was all in my head. When I went to her late at night wheezing, she became angry. She told me that if I really believed in God, then I wouldn't have asthma anymore. I was sent back to bed convinced that if I only loved God enough, it wouldn't hurt so much to breathe. I'm just so thankful that I never had a life-threatening asthma attack.

I broke my finger when I was about ten or eleven. It was all crooked and super swollen She said it wasn't that bad because I could slightly move it and that I was just trying to get out of doing chores (which she still made me do). In fact, it was two months later, when I went with my brother for a check up, that the doctor happened to notice my finger and told my n-mother I needed X-rays. She was very upset, but she couldn't very well look like a bad mother in front of other people. My crooked finger is a daily reminder about how my n-mother never cared about me.

I'm pretty sure I had pneumonia in my mid teenage years. I was coughing up fluids and it was excruciatingly painful just to breathe. After about a week, my loud wheezing and coughing fits apparently got on her nerves. She, very angrily, asked if I needed to go to the emergency room. She said it in a tone that I took as "you'd better not." I was too scared to say yes because she had convinced me that it was probably nothing and then she'd end up paying all that money for nothing. Since I said no, she then assumed I was exaggerating and just trying to get attention. I was ordered to stop coughing and breathing so loudly because it was annoying everyone else.

I had terrible migraines that made it impossible for me to do anything other than sleep when I wasn't at school. I also had very painful menstrual cramps that got so bad that I couldn't stand up straight. All I wanted to do was curl up in bed and cry. I tried bringing it up to the doctor, but my n-mother was always quick to say I was just exaggerating. She would then force me to go on long walks for exercise. It didn't matter that any movement made me sick to my stomach. Interestingly, she did later admit that my pain seemed excessive and that she probably should have done something about it (the one and only time she admitted she did something wrong).