AVM

The first day of school in 8th grade began like the boring old first day of school... new teachers and same old classmates. Half of us were exciting to be heading to the high school the next year, and the other half were going to struggle just getting through the upcoming year. In my history class, the teacher wanted us to pair up with someone that we didn't really know that well to do an interview to share with the class. My friend Bekah and I looked at each other from across the room and scowled. Everyone had found someone to pair up with except me and one other girl in the class. We were left over so the teacher put us together. We introduced ourselves but knew that we had some serious early judgement about each other. She said a few years later I looked like a bookworm, someone snobby who thought everyone was dumber than me. I thought she was a druggie right away and probably from a dysfunctional family/home life. Somehow we made it through the interview with each other nicely and shared them with the class. She was a new student that year so I knew she didn't have many friends... and I volunteered first.

We hung out each day, because most of our classes were together. She was kind of an outcast. Which was pretty much perfect because so was I. I had a group of close friends, but everyone else, at that point in school, seemed to want nothing to do with me. Being an artist, swimmer, bookworm, backstage-oriented person, that was fine with me.

Dawn wasn't in school one day then. I began to wonder about where she was, because she didn't really miss a lot of school. When I saw her later that day, she expained to me that she was sent to the emergency room the night before when she had a terrible migrane and seizure. She had something called AVM.

I know zero doctor-babble. So AVM to me was a bunch of letters. I believe, Dr. Kearney, that this is what you said that you have. It stands for Arteriovenous Malformation. She didn't have enough capillaries in her brain, and she would slowly be bleeding to death inside her skull. She said that people with AVM were born with it, and it's only something that you find out once you've started having symptoms.

She told me that people born with AVM don't live past the age of 22 or 23.

She was an extraordinary person in my life through the rest of school. We both were crazy about music, and she always had something to say about it. We could talk about music for hours. Yeah, she was in the band, but she knew much more than that. She was a prodigy with any instrument that you handed her. And she didn't think it was that big of a deal.

We made it through a lot of bumps in the road, fist-fights in school, yelling match when she got hot chocolate thrown on her, out-of-school suspension, all the questions about life and growing up and our diseases, her father being in jail, and her AVM... all the while giving her seizures and making her cry. Of course when she cried it looked freakish because they always had blood in them.

I haven't seen her in years now, haven't talked to her since last year. I'm hoping that she's still around. She had quite a gift for the world. It makes me wonder now if her talent was brought on by her disease. Her creativity only stemmed from the blood seaping through her brain. I'd like to think that she got something positive out of her condition. And I just hope she's still out there somewhere, trying to make her own place in the world.