love is health
Relentless5/28/2020 I'm beginning to see a very obvious pattern in my life that started since before I was born.
Coming from a large family, my parents took "certain precautions" to ensure they didn't have a 6th child. However, in spite of that, my mom became pregnant with me. During her pregnancy she was told her health was in danger and that the pregnancy wasn't viable. She ignored her doctors recommendations to terminate the pregnancy, put her life at risk, and birth me uneventfully. I was her easiest pregnancy. When I was around age five or six, I accidentally swallowed a penny, which lodged itself in my throat. Being the exact size of my airway, had it moved even a little, I would have choked. That car ride to the ER had my parents on pins and needles, as they struggled to keep an energetic, young me still. Just a few millimeters is all it would have taken to completely occlude my trachea- a pot hole, a sudden stop. From what I was told, I was bouncing around the back seat of the car in excitement while my parents white-knuckled their way to Phoenix Children's from north Phoenix. It was an uneventful penny extraction. My dad called me his little piggy bank for a while after that episode. Around age seven, while crossing 51st avenue with my older siblings, a car cut around the stopped traffic we created. My sister Nora grabbed my hand at the last minute, pulling me up toward the sidewalk as my other sister was stricken by that vehicle. (She lived, albeit with a story to tell). I was unscathed. I managed to avoid near death experiences until 2013, when I became neutropenic with a viral infection, and was stuck in the hospital for 5 days. My white blood cell count was so low my life was endangered. I had no immunity to fight the infection, and simply had to wait it out. Eventually my white blood cell count rebounded, and I lived to tell the tale of how I got (the childhood illness) Croup at age 30. That brings us to now. I'm in the hospital again for neutropenia and sepsis. My white blood cells dropped, which opened me up for an e. coli infection, and my body responded with systemic vengeance. Normally, sepsis creates a situation where your immune system attacks your healthy tissues, leading to organ failure, shock, and death. In this instance, we caught it so early that I have no significant tissue or organ damage. As one of the doctors so eloquently said to me, "your body was in complete control." Nonexistence keeps coming at me, and I keep circumstantially evading it. And while I'm not about to make loud declarations about Life's Purpose or Meaning, it does make me feel wanted, even loved. I don't claim to understand the way the universe works. Maybe this is a beautiful, intended, and elaborate design. Maybe it's well organized chaos. I'm frankly not sure that matters. What matters is that I keep getting more time - another chance, another opportunity to enjoy life's pleasure. And for that I am infinitely grateful. Here's to dodging yet another bullet.
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