I'm a case and a half - grab some snacks, sit down, and enjoy the ride:
I was born with a birth defect known as a cleft palate. It's basically when the roof of your mouth (or palate) never forms (google it.) I got it stitched up at 6 months old and again at 5 years old.
The cleft palate meant my speech and eating were severely affected. I was fed milk from a bottle with a very special nipple as I was unable to suck. I was fed for a minute at a time constantly throughout the day and never drank much. It got easier when I started solids but even that would become hard for me in later years; my upper 'jaw' never grew with the rest of my head as it had no natural bone-stitching, meaning my upper set of teeth were completely unaligned with my bottom set and I couldn't chew properly until I got braces a year ago.
I went to a speech therapist from since I started speaking until I was 8. My doctor told me at age 14 that I was the quickest and best recovery from CP he's ever seen in his career. I'm lucky.
I was often frustrated as a small child when people asked me to repeat myself over and over. To me, I sounded fine, but my words never really made sense. I couldn't say any sound that required my tongue to touch my palate.
My frustration led way to me being an irritable child; a thing that was only made worse by the fact that I'm on the Autism spectrum (diagnosed at 4) which was much more severe when I was younger. I'm still affecting by it, of course, but I'm so much better at handling it.
When I was in 6th grade and getting out of my bus seat at my stop, the bus suddenly jerked a bit as the driver put the handbrake on, wobbling me enough that I fell backwards onto the metal step leading to the back seat. My butt hurt but that was about it...until I tried to get out of my desk chair a couple of hours later and fell straight to the ground. Turns out I hairline-fractured my tailbone as well as pushing my spine a centimetre up. I'm okay but I have trouble sitting down and have to shift a lot to avoid pain.
My knees are also screwed from chemicals in Pepsi Max deteriorating my joints. Goes to show that you never know what might affect you negatively, especially in the case of 'diet' products.
Due to Autism I also suffer from audio processing issues. In short, it is the inability to process the meaning of the sounds I hear. We attach meaning to sound with reference to more than just the auditory signals. I have difficulty associating sounds with written language; have problems recognising sounds and therefore decoding words or messages; have difficulty in organising auditory information to effectively decode the meaning of a given message, often as a result of one of the above two problems; often speak in a monotone, without rhythm or intonation, and have a hard time perceiving these subtleties in other speakers (like sarcasm and emotion); and am unnerved by background noise and loud noises, meaning I often cannot follow what other people are saying if present in a chatty place like a party or classroom.
On top of this I've had a horrid home life filled with emotional and mental trauma which has shut me off from trusting people and resulted in me having major anxiety of both social and general.
Sorry if I just put a super downer on your day...but there it is. And I didn't even mention that I'm blind as a bat and have the depth perception of a one-eyed person.
