Hi! I am a 13 year old female from Victoria, Australia, and I need some help.
This is going to be quite a long story, though.
Five years ago, I had a decline in my vision. I went to an optometrist, who said I had become nearsighted due to being on the computer so much, and I just needed some glasses and I should be fine.
So I received glasses and went on with my life. After moving houses multiple times, we finally settled down in a small house west of Melbourne in 2010
A mere year after we moved in, there was an
extremely severe storm that flooded my area, and flushed the entire neighborhood's sewerage up and into my house.
It came through the shower, the toilet, the taps... every drain we had. In the panic, no-one noticed. When my brother stepped in a puddle when he went to check out the bathroom, he came to me and told me there was something wet in there.
By that point, the entire street was filled with water; stand in the middle of it, and the water would come up to a 5 foot 8 man's knee. The backyard was filled with water, and my mother was piling sandbags at the doors.
I went to tell her about it, but she wasn't listening. She had more important things to do.
So I went and sat on the top of my bunk bed for a few hours until the storm calmed down. Eventually, my mother drove my brother and I to my father's house, using the least-flooded route possible.
We stayed there for a few days. I felt disgusting. I immediately went to take a shower, only to feel sick after.
I didn't sleep well that night.
A few days after, my mother came to get us. She and a few friends had managed to drain out most of the water from around the house. But that puddle my brother had stepped in, she realized, was sewer water. As in, feces and urine, everything that goes down your kitchen sink. Bleach and chemicals, drugs even. We had been stepping in it. It was in our carpet, in our walls. In the tiny cuts on our hands. All of the neighborhood's filth was in our bodies.
Unfortunately, there is no real policy about sewerage in this country. Things like this don't happen often, so no-one really cares.
My mother called officials over and over again, being thrown back and forth by people with no answers. Eventually, someone agreed to come out and look at the house, more than a
week after the incident itself.
Obviously, we couldn't stay in that house. It wasn't clean enough for anyone without a protective suit to go in! So we were sent to a tiny, generally bad motel. All we had was a minifridge, a bathroom, and two beds. I didn't go to school for a while after that.
Instead I sat at home and vomited my guts out. I had diarrhea, worms (Which were dealt with quickly, thank God), and a terrible cold.
I got over it in a month or two. After multiple complaints from my mother, we were moved to another hotel.
Actually, it was less like a hotel, more like a small house.
My brother and I had separate beds, our own bathroom, even a balcony. My health was a fair bit better by that point, although I was still pretty weak.
After about two months there, we were sent home. A lot of things happened between those few months we were away, but this is focusing on my health, so I'll skip over that part.
For a year after that (It's been almost two now), I was weak and sickly. My vision declined even more, I got sick easily, and generally felt terrible. My throat was always sore, and I was often in a bad mood. My personality changed from being a very happy, outdoors-y girl to an introvert who barely leaves her room and is always online.
But, since the beginning of 2012 - actually, it was around May - things changed. In the short year after the incident, my eyesight had become more than twice as bad as it was prior to the incident. Even with glasses I still can't read the writing on the whiteboard at school, or read on my computer from more than forty centimeters away. But that wasn't what concerned me.
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