Gina: A Tiny Heart With a Big Reminder

Gina, 21

I couldn’t have picked a more perfect subject for my first blog post. This is the story of strength and perseverance behind my friend Gina’s simple heart outline tattoo.

On the day of Gina’s 19th birthday, she called her mom to tell her she would be going out to brunch with her friends, but what she didn’t tell her is that they were stopping to the tattoo shop before.

“While I was getting it done I was really able to think about what I was doing and the meanings behind it and I feel like I almost unlocked all of the meanings. I had an initial ‘this is what I want to do, here is why,’ but then it just so happened t it was multiple meanings in one and I hadn’t really thought about them until the needle was on my skin.”

Since her sophomore year, Gina has been chronically ill and in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices conquering obstacles I could never imagine facing at 15. She was diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), median arcuate ligament syndrome (MALS), and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS); all of which overlap and feed off of one another. In other words, Gina is a bad-ass and goes through shit on the daily with a smirk on her face and jokes to tell.

“Being in the hospital and being sick meant I had a lot of IVs and my veins are a really shallow. Part of my condition is that I am a hard stick to get a needle in my vein, so I had a lot of luck with my right arm which is the arm my tattoo is on. This was usually my sweet spot.”

About a month had passed since Gina had gotten the tattoo and she was with her mom in the parking lot of the physician’s office. “That was the year that I got really sick again and we knew something was wrong so we were taking time to calm down before going into the office and...I told her. I was like ‘alright, so we are going to go in and we know the drill, they’re going to make me roll my sleeves up to get my blood pressure and you’re going to see this…I got a tattoo.’ I explained it and of course the waterworks came out a little bit. She didn’t have time to be angry about the tattoo because we found out that day that I needed open chest surgery.”

“I honest to God think that when we walked out of that office she was thinking about it and she understood that it wasn’t a meaningless tattoo.” The heart outline symbolizes her cardiovascular condition, something Gina never thought she would have to go through at such a young age. “I got it to remind myself to stay whole, to be one, and to love myself and to always rise above the challenges that my health wanted to throw at me. I will always see this and remember what I went through and what I suffered from and how I overcame it. Suffering is a choice and this tattoo is a reminder not to suffer after a certain point.”

Through her battles, Gina has grown into someone she is more comfortable and secure as. Her tattoo is a symbol of her struggles and triumphs as she lives with chronic illness.

“While I lost a part of who I was, I have grown into a new being. It may have taken pieces of me but I was able to grow from that and I’m not going to let that happen anymore.”