radioactive girl.

I guess in fairness, my life started before birth itself. My parents were visiting Finland when my mother was four months pregnant with me, she traveled all over, but it was not until she reached Sweden that the locals informed her that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had exploded and she had probably been exposed (along with her fetus) to the radiation....

When she returned to California, her doctors and midwife reccomended she have an abortion. They said her child would probably be severely mentally and physically challenged (ahem.), and that she should start over trying to have a child. My mother refused (although she believes in the right to choose), insisting that I was already her baby and she would love me no matter how I turned out.

The doctors examined me after birth. They said there were only a few things that seemed to have affected me. First, was that I was severely retarded (kidding), second that I was about a million times more likely to get leukemia (but thought I would have developed it by a very young age), third, that I had extremely thin enamel on all of my teeth (which led to endless dental battles as a child, perscriptive toothpaste as a teenager, and giving up dark colored drinks), and fourth, that when the moon is near an eclipse, sometimes at night if you rub my belly button it glows.

As a teenager I joked (but secretly kept hope) that anyday I was about to realize the superpower I must have developed as a side effect to the radiation. But as a young adult, I now have come to terms with the fact that I will never have invisibility powers... all I became was a glow-bright stick.

In all seriousness though, if you want a frightening look into what my life might have been like just google: chernobyl babies.
I don't want to post such negativity onto this blog.

The truth is, nobody knows what all the side effects of the chernobyl radiation are. They say the three groups most affected by the blast were: teenage girls, pregnant women, and fetuses (all of which were in stages of development). A few years ago information was starting to come out as the girls who were teenagers during the explosiong started reaching their child-bearing years. Many of them are incapable of having children. In my case, nobody really knows all of the side- effects because we are just starting to reach the age, where some might be trying to have children of their own.

Most of the time, I don't think about this at all. But every now and again I realize I might not be able to have kids, and I try not to care either way.

"A plant reactor exploded during a failed cooling system test, igniting a massive fire that burned for ten days. The accident, which was blamed on design deficiencies and lax operating procedures, released radioactivity equivalent to 400 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

More than 350,000 people were displaced in the weeks after the explosion, and scientists estimate up to 90,000 square miles (233,000 square kilometers) of land in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia (all part of the Soviet Union at the time) were contaminated with unhealthy levels of radioactive elements."

-http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/photogalleries/chernobyl/