At the time, my father was unemployed and my mother was the teen-mom stereotype. They were already burdened with a daughter before me...

My new parents were loving, good-hearted people who tried to adopt children with special needs who otherwise might not get the care they...

I stared blankly at the interviewer, unable to comprehend the words she had uttered. Tears formed in the corners of my eyes...

I couldn’t wait for the day I...became a teacher, and had my own classroom. The world was at my fingertips…until…it wasn't...

When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with a birth defect called phocomelia. Both my legs are defective, twisted and lifeless...

That was, until my life took a nightmarish turn after I was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of seven...

Growing up I watched my mom and sister struggle from their symptoms and try medication after medication to achieve some relief...

With tears in her eyes, she softly said, “I am glad you are here, Papito, and even if you’ll be in a wheelchair, I still want you to...

Stand, sit, eat, drink, poop, pee, and breathe—thoughtless functions for a healthy body. But there I lay, a limp, lifeless, 27-year-old...

It’s an easy sentiment to offer someone else, but it took a long time for me to view my own figure in this way. Loving my body has been...

All the while, I felt a sense of urgency to get a medical degree. I knew that I could try and make a difference in the lives of those...

My health anxiety, the irrational fear of being or becoming ill, leads me to manifest symptoms of sicknesses I’m afraid of catching...

Our small, close-knit family was overflowing with love and happiness. I was a chubby little girl who loved packing her stomach with...

But the most prominent memories from my childhood involve my hands gravitating constantly towards my face and my skin...

There are some days that stay in our memory longer than others. They are often the turning points in our journey: when something...

In fact, I seemed perfectly normal until about age four. That’s when I began walking on my toes with a sort of limp, as if I were...

This was the day I was born, miraculously, to a drug-addicted mother who couldn’t take care of me. I was born with fetal alcohol syndrome...

It was a great a place to grow up in the 80s. It is where I have all my childhood memories, where I met my husband, and where we go to...

Times in the southern US during the 1940s and 1950s were trying ones, indeed. We were poor. I guess you could say “dirt poor.” I remember...

When I head out to my daily walk in the park, I like to remind myself of the poems I love the most, many of which I know by heart...