They always fluctuated.
In high school I was off to a good start, out-lifting most of the serious body builders and power lifters at the local gyms, but that didn't last too long as I was soon injured through sports.
Concussions, a torn ligament in my elbow, and a back injury basically derailed my young high school life.
After drifting in and out of school, missing nearly half of my freshman and sophomore year due to health issues, I dropped out the beginning of my junior year.
That never really got me down though, I was young and optimistic.
So, I entered junior college after just turning seventeen and plugged away, only to find that the lingering issues from my concussions hadn't really gone away. I had been living with daily headaches throughout the entire day that were quite painful for about two-years.
That started my first year in high school. By the third year they had gone down to once-a-week headaches but my ability to learn was still impacted.
It was a sad state of affairs really.
I had placed in the 99th percentile in my favorite categories without even trying. I also placed in the 92nd percentile up through 95th percentile for the subjects I disliked and never studied. For all intents and purposes, I was a bit too smart for my years.
Concussions took care of that for me though.
They leveled the playing field.
Maybe it was punishment for squandering my talents… I often find myself wondering why things happened the way they did.
Going forward, I struggled at the junior college level for a semester until I was forced to take a year off to recuperate. I figured that some time off to let my mind heal was in my best interest in the long-term.
So I moved on, doing nothing but playing the most popular MMORPGs of the day to waste time. Through that I discovered I was actually quite good at gaming. I had never played RPGs online before and didn't really know what to expect, but soon found myself addicted to the Player versus Player aspect of the games.
I was addicted to the competition.
Eventually, I made it all the way to the top of the leaderboards with my ranking placing me in the top 3 for those of the Warrior class and top 5 in the Paladin class on my server of 40,000. I wasn't half bad at PvE either, as I ended up being a Main Tank for multiple high-end raiding guilds on my Warrior and was considered at least in the top 10 for Paladin healers in Player versus Environment.
My reputation preceded me and there weren't any decent PvP or PvE players that didn't know my name. I was famous through action and not words… it was something I had long craved.
Something I had been lacking in my real life.
Not long after, I had realized that through video games my mind seemed to have recovered to a respectable level.
All of the small amounts of memorizing game data, learning every class and every classes' skills and cool downs and the strategies behind them amounted to a lot of information. Because it was interesting and I enjoyed it, it was a lot easier learning compared to reading a textbook.
The days where I could read a 300-page textbook front to back and recall everything were long behind me anyways.
I don't expect to ever be at that level again.
So, with my mind no longer feeling sub-standard I went back to school. I got good enough grades to get me into a highly ranked university and things were looking up.
Then I found myself with another health issue: severe food poisoning, on New Year's Day no less. I didn't understand what was happening at first, thinking my stomach ache was just from bad food and all I would need to do was flush my system. But, then I looked down and saw that instead of stool there was just blood.
For a week, there was just blood.
As a male, going to the toilet and finding a large pool of blood is not normal.
After two-week's time, I had lost nearly forty pounds. At that age I was only 165lbs but my height was the same. I turned into a 125lbs, 6'0" guy in just barely under seventeen days. I was bed ridden for about two months; too weak to move or do anything but eventually I started to get healthy enough to return to work.
Returning to my physical nature of work, I ended up severely straining all of my upper body muscles as I was simply too weak to do anything but thought I could push through the pain.
Fast forward nearly two-years of physical therapy later and I was a healthy 195lbs with fairly little body fat thanks to my rapid weight loss turning me into skin and bones.
The world was mine for the taking.
I transferred over to a highly ranked university and continued my education, only to somehow tear my meniscus in my right knee while moving some furniture down a flight of stairs.
Whatever, small setback I figured… I still had plenty of time to heal while in school.
Not to be outdone though, with my bad knee that wouldn't track properly and didn't allow me to walk normally, I ended up stumbling one day while in a hurry and hit my head on the sharp edge of a metal object, directly on my temple.
My jaw was bruised side to side from the impact.
It turned out to be my third serious concussion and one that proved less painful but more difficult overall. There was no pain or headache after two months, but there were mental blocks that persisted.
I failed every class going forward for the next two years as I tried in vain, with help from counselors, doctors, professors, and the financial aid staff at the school to simply graduate. I only needed three classes to graduate, but they had proved impossible even though I had repeated them three times. I had been in the school system now for nearly nine years since I first attended community college.
They wanted to help me, but I couldn't even help myself.
I was a super senior without the partying, without the laughs and glamor of a fraternity. I gave up on schooling. I had had enough of my mediocrity and failures.
I moved back home to live with my family to try and restart my life once again, for a third time. I had been dealing with health issues for twelve years now, but I wasn't ready to quit.
Adversity makes one stronger, or so they say.
Then it happened again.
I was working on some electrical wiring for a house not more than six months after leaving University and was bumped from behind, knocking me off balance. Instinctively I threw my elbow out to brace my fall… unfortunately my elbow braced my fall with a metal pole with a hot wire in my other hand.
I got lit up.
My neck, shoulders, and back were all burned along with my fingers and elbow. My back, stomach, and ribs were all bruised as consolation. I thought, at the time, it wasn't that bad. It was whatever; the pain wasn't anything to give consideration to.
Burns and bruises heal in time; I was familiar with healing over time.
A week passed and I thought I was somewhat back to normal and got back to doing some work around the house when I suddenly started feeling fatigued. I didn't think much of it so I just took the rest of the day off. The next morning I woke up in incredible pain throughout my entire body. I had no idea what was going on, I didn't understand it.
My body had basically shut down on me.
Every injury I ever had, and there were a lot… enough to cover my entire body head to toe, felt like they had ruptured or ripped open. My entire body was aching, throbbing, burning, and stinging with pain. The Achilles tear, the quadriceps tear, the biceps tear, my calf tear, my elbow ligament, my shoulder ligament, my knees, and my wrist that I broke twenty years ago… all of them hurt.
The pain itself wasn't really the worst of it though as I had experienced worse pain before. The worst part of it was that it happened again… and so soon. I had just barely recovered from the meniscus tear and the quadriceps tear was still relatively fresh. I had spent the last few years on a lot of pain medications and anti-inflammatories and my stomach wasn't really holding up to it. Not to mention the pain killers rarely did anything even at maximum dosage. And then here, again, I was struck with another issue.