My name is Nicholas Carmichael Osteogenesis Imperfecta but most people just call it Brittle Bones Disease. My condition affects one in 10-20,000 people and there are 8 known types. Every type has its diffrences but most of them have these symptoms in common  easily broken bones, bone deformities, such as bowing of the legs, discoloration of the white of the eye (sclera), may be blue or gray in color, a barrel-shaped chest, a curved spine, a triangle-shaped face, loose joints, muscle weakness, skin that easily bruises, hearing loss in early adulthood, soft, discolored teeth. Luckliy me and my sister are only expected to have type 1 which is the least severe. I have treatments for it now but before I started I would break quite easily. One time I had 152 healing stress fractures in my back and almost had to be permanantly placed in a wheelchair. The treatments are not a cure but it helps lessen the severity of the condition. The first treatment happens 4 times a year and is a pamidronate infusion, and the second treatment happens every six months is a zoledronic acid infusion.  My sister has the same condition as me but she also has spina bifda and club foot putting her in a wheel chair for life. With my sister being in a wheel chair I try to help as much as I can like helping her reach things that are higher up and helping her move over rough terrain that is harder to push her wheelchair through. Both me and my sister attend the doctor at least 4 times a years due to our conditions but most of the time we go a lot more. We used to go to the doctors a lot more when we were little, but things have gotten better over the years. The doctors do a lot of diffrent things during my appointments but the average appointment includes a DEXA scan and X-rays to help analyze my bone health.

There are a lot of times where this condition has affected me. In 6th grade I broke my leg, And in 7th grade I broke my arm. Both of these breaks were caused by dogs.  I love my dog, but sometimes he’s not the brightest, and so he backed into me, I fell, and then my leg broke, and I was in a wheelchair for about a month. The other one was not my dog, it was instead my grandma’s great dane, and he got defensive of my cousin during a pillow fight, causing me to be knocked down and fall on my elbow. The next day, I was walking on a frozen frog pond with that same cousin, and I fell through the ice. Luckily, the water is super shallow, but my foot got stuck. It was the weekend before Christmas, and my cousin went in to tell my grandpa what had happened, but he forgot about me and so I was out for about ten minutes just waiting for someone to come rescue me. My grandpa had to pull on my arms to get me unstuck from the mud, and for the rest of the week, I kept using my arm because it didn’t hurt, so I thought that everything was ok. The weekend after Christmas, though, we discovered that my arm was broken after it swelled, and we went to the hospital. I had to have surgery on it, but a week after surgery, it became infected. I then spent a week in the hospital to have another surgery to remove the hardware, and then started infection treatments with a PICC line. I had the PICC line for about 2 months, but the first fell out, and I had to get a second. A PICC line is a tube that goes from your bicep area to your heart to pump medicine through your home to your heart.

This might be a little more than you were expecting, and I hope that it isn’t too much. No matter what I have to face I know thing will be alright, and thats what makes me happy to be alive.