Drowning

February was a fiasco. It was like the time I went to Venice and it rained the entire time I was there. I actually thought that I might die due to drowning because of all the water. I am the sort of person who believes that things happen for a reason, and that we are only given as much as we can handle. Yet, last month was truly unbearable. I felt as if my life was a rollacoaster of emotional highs and lows, and worst of all it only left me with feelings of trepidation. It was as if someone had put me in the middle of the ocean and told me, the girl who can't swim, to find my way back to shore. I was tired of swimming, tired of trying to keeping afloat, and what I really needed was a buoy, a life jacket, or some strong handsome coastguard to come save me.

Yet, I think part of life is discovering how we respond to these types of situations. I have asked myself several times over the last month Why me? Why my family? Why now? I have come to grips with the fact that the struggles we endure through this life are the moments that define us. I have been gasping for air, struggling with the waves of life for the last couple of months and right when I thought I might sink down to the depths of despair, my friends jumped in and saved me.

I am the sort of person who never wants to be a burden to anyone. A person who entered a profession to help others, not to have someone help me. Yet, this past month I have learned the beauty and grace of friendship.

It was mid February and the worst day I had had all month. I was on a service at the hospital where the attendings hated me, I had just learned my father's cancer had progressed, and my mother informed me she needed to go back for further testing of a suspicious lesion in her breast. There is no other feeling to describe how I was feeling at this moment but numb. Scared, cold, and alone I just ended up calling one of my very best friends and crying in my car after work on the phone with her. I didn't really say anything comprehensible, I just cried. I just remember when I got home I heard a knock on the door. When I went to open it up there she was standing with her gorgeous smile and a beautiful orchid in her hands extending it to me. I remember I just hugged her and cried not only because of the nice gesture, but also because I knew I didn't have to be afraid of being alone. I learned that no matter how awful or terrible the month could be I had people around me who wanted to make it better. People who cared about me.

Perhaps this is why I like spring, because even though you feel like the earth is saturated with water and that the earth is drowning somehow the green grass sprouts up and the flowers bloom. I believe that we all have stormy seasons in life. Times when you literally need a boat to get out of the stormy weather, or a shelter to take cover. This past month my friends have truly been lifesavers they have carried me through some of the worst weather of my life and I am forever grateful.

The ebb and flow of life is unavoidable. It hits us when we least expect it. Yet, you just have to have faith that it will cease that the storm will stop. When it does you are left with the aftermath, a garden of blooming flowers.