This post isn’t about the outdoors. It isn’t about climbing a physical mountain, but it is about climbing a figurative one, in an attempt to break the silence surrounding a rare birth defect…
Cloacal malformation. 1 in 25 000 baby girls are born with this congenital defect, whereby the lower GI tract, reproductive system and urinary system are fused together and not properly developed.
I was that 1 in 25 000.
I have wanted to use this blog to raise some awareness of this condition, but it had become a taboo subject. There are no awareness campaigns, national charities, or support networks, that I know of. I’m now 23, and have only recently discovered a Facebook group. As a child, right up until the age of 10, I was led to believe that everything I faced was a result of kidney disease, when in actual fact, kidney disease was just another effect of cloacal anomalies!
This is the first time I have really put anything ‘out there’. I’m happy to talk about my experiences now, but have yet to find a way of approaching the subject in order to do so. Maddie’s first blog post is an inspiring read, and sums things up perfectly.
Before I really start this blog, I feel like I need to give some background information on who I am and what my life has been like these past nineteen years. Some things have been impossibly hard to put into words, and other things are incredibly scary for me to finally share, but that’s the point of Five Seconds of Fearlessness. With that being said, here’s my first five seconds …
One in 25,000. Those are the odds of being born with a birth defect known as a cloacal malformation, a congenital fusion of the urinary, digestive and reproductive systems that occurs while a baby girl is developing in the womb. I came into the world as one of those statistical anomalies. In layman’s terms, the pipes going into my body worked fine, but the pipes leading out were a jumbled mess. After more than a dozen reconstructive surgeries, I am now…
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The Dash Between My Years 