My Story and Why I Want to Fix Society (1 of 2)

My name is Malachi and I’m a 19 year old in Eastern Washington. For those with a utopian lifestyle where luck seems to just follow you around like a lost puppy, I am not so blessed. My life story is a little (lot) different from most people my age. No, I don’t have a disease or am missing body parts. My life has turned inside out over the last 6 years for a different reason. And it all started in the horrible year of 2008. Now bear with me, because it’s a complicated story and by the end, you won’t believe that all of this stuff happened to a poor 13 year old boy. Now I am an only child with both of my parents that doesn’t live a very luxurious life. Or a moderate one at that. My dad does freelance work and my mom works at a pharmacy (main income maker but it’s not a lot. At all). This upcoming series of unfortunate events starts on the top of a ski mountain

where my mom broke her ankle at the top of the hill (unknowingly, mind you) and thought it was a sprain and persisted to ride it all the way down. This, in turn, led to her ankle bone completely sheering off where it should be which led to a plate with 4 screws and no work. For several months, we had very little income coming in. With bills piling up and stress growing stronger, we thought this was just a hiccup of bad luck; nothing we aren’t used to. But it wasn’t; this was just the small start of a hellish nightmare lurking in the darkness. In the summer of the same year, my mom and I were visiting my grandparents in Michigan. Their backyard is just a long and moderately steep downhill slope that is leading to a river. My grandfather has this really old, half ton (not exaggerating) riding lawn mower with wheels that go up to my middle stomach covered in big, old rusty chains. I loved riding it and decided to mow their lawn like I did every time I visited them. But this time was different. After mowing for about 2 hours (big lawn), I parked it uphill where I usually did and put on the brake. Now based on the place where I had to park it, the only way to get off and back to the house was to walk around the back of this gigantic lawn mower. That’s when the next awful part of my story began. Unknowing to me, the brake disengaged when I was behind it and start rolling backwards. I didn’t have anywhere to go as it was rolling towards me and it ended up rolling on top of me and pinned me underneath. The blades were searing hot and my right side of my right leg was stuck to the blades and the wheels got caught against my arms preventing it from rolling completely on top of me and skinning my face. Luckily I was skinny enough to fit between the wheels because if I had been an inch or two to the left or the right, it would of crushed and killed me right there. I was stuck facing downhill underneath this lawn mower for about 5 minutes when finally someone heard me screaming for help and got me out. I had deep scrapes under my armpits where the big wheels had dug into me and luckily stopped the lawn mower from rolling farther, and I knew for sure that my leg was burned bad. I just didn’t know how bad. So then we rushed to the hospital and in Michigan they just said that I had a 2nd degree burn and it should heal in a couple weeks and they gave me this burn cream to put on it and bandages and tape to cover it. After a couple days, we finally flew home and went to the doctor and we found out it was much worse. I had developed an allergic reaction to the burn cream with covered my whole body with hives and the doctor said these burns were much worse than we had thought. They were 3rd degree burns and without a skin graft surgery, it could get heavily infected and life threatening (like I hadn’t had enough of that already). But because of the hives, they had to take the skin from my other leg to complete the surgery. After losing my whole Labor Day weekend in the hospital and undergoing massive amounts of pain, we found out that the skin graft had failed. The skin separated from the burns and died. So for the next 6 months of weekly appointments and missing days of school, I had to get my skin scraped off with a tool that looked like a melon baller with nothing to numb the pain. Once we got it off, it took another 3 or so months to heal and scar over. However, this awful event wouldn’t be the last awful thing to happen to us this year. The worst was just about to happen.