Petition Letter
My first year of university was one of the worst times in my life. I have agoraphobia, anxiety and depression. During my first semester everything grew worse. At the same time my Grandfather, whom I have lived with my whole life, was dying. This added to the depression and anxiety, I felt sick all the time. I convinced myself that I didn¿¿t have any friends and I was a huge disappointment to my family and especially to my Grandfather. A couple of times I had panic attacks so bad I ended up in emergency. I was prescribed a tranquilizer to help with the panic attacks. It was hard to get out of bed in the morning, hard to go to class, and even harder to get work done. Leaving my room felt like I was walking straight into combat unarmed. I would stand by my door, shaking, waiting to make sure I couldn¿¿t hear anyone in the hall, and that was just to go to the bathroom. Outside of my room I couldn¿¿t breathe, I couldn¿¿t think, all that was going through my head is that it wasn¿¿t safe, people could see me and they were thinking negative things about me. I missed more and more classes and found it difficult to leave my room even to eat. At the end of November, I went home to see my Grandfather, he was much worse and was back in the hospital, at that time I felt couldn¿¿t stay at school a moment longer. My mom noticed I had lost weight (turns out I had lost 15 pounds since starting school). She was really worried about me and we had some very serious talks. I went back to school the next week and my mom and I saw a counselor from the university. At that time she indicated that I may need to go on academic probation if my grades were not good. At that time we decided that taking the rest of the year off would not help me work on my issues and that I should continue to try to leave my room and get to class, that going home would only delay dealing with my issues. At this time working with the counselors suggestions, my psychologist and my doctor we decided to work with a service dog to see if that would help. Then after fighting first lung cancer then bone cancer for the last year and a half, my Grandfather died December 21, my Grandmother still lives with us and it has been a difficult year for our whole family. I am continuing to work with my doctors to improve every day. I had registered with the Disability Services Office last year and have worked with them again when I returned to school in January with my service dog.