Lonely as a Clud ;)

            White hospital walls:  I know them too well.

            I just never thought I’d be the one in the hospital bed. 

            I’ve spent far too much of my life in hospitals.  My grandmother got sick when I was sixteen, and I’ve spent nearly every day in the last four years by her bedside, the only change being the hospital room as she’s constantly shipped from specialist to specialist.  I’ve been staring at those same white walls in some capacity in over ten hospitals in the past four years alone.

            But since I came to college, I had been the one having the health problems.  Weight up and down—mostly down—to a point where I couldn’t control my body and I was weak all the time.  After several fainting spells over the next two years, my mom finally caught on and forced me to see a doctor.

            When my weight got down to 104 lbs., they decided to do some tests.  I barely felt the needle in my arm; I didn’t feel much of anything because my body went numb.  I just remember nurses rushing into the room as my body became paralyzed and curled in on itself. 

The last thing I remember as I slipped from consciousness was the poster on the hospital ceiling.

            It was one of those inspirational posters, with a puppy saying, “You can do it! Be brave!”  I remember I wanted to tell that puppy to stuff it as I lost control of my body.

            Needless to say, it was the scariest moment of my entire life.

            To this day the doctor’s don’t know what was wrong with my body.  I’ve finally gotten back up to a healthy weight after a year, but it’s been a struggle, filled with the blackouts and fainting spells that have become the norm in my life now.  All I’ve got to do is keep going, take it day by day. 

I don’t think I’ll ever know what’s really wrong with me.  I don’t think I’ll ever find out what made me so sick.  The sheer amount of things that I don’t know scare me to this day as I just wait for the next bad thing to happen. 

But I do know that I’m determined to do everything within my power to keep it from happening again.

            Everything changed in me that day:  I learned that you never know what’s going to happen.  Now I know that I have to take advantage of every moment in life and live it to the fullest; that’s exactly what I intend to do.  From now on, nothing is going to stand in m way.