Nearly a year ago, one of my oldest friends experienced a severe health crisis, which I blogged about here.
Because of her penchant for privacy, I never wrote a follow up post about her...until now.
Seeing my friend unconscious and hooked up to tubes and monitors was shocking. Hearing the prognosis for her recovery was frightening. Her situation scared me right into signing up for a weight loss program. I lost 56 pounds in seven months and today, I eat a lot better, work out regularly and feel pretty good.
And I'm happy to say, my friend is feeling good, too.
She came out of that crisis and embarked upon a regimen of painful and difficult therapy. She remained in the hospital for several months. I visited her a few times, ran some errands, and chatted. At the time, she was using a walker to get around.
And then school started, along with my daughter's gymnastics schedule. I'm ashamed to say, I did not keep in touch. It was difficult; during her first few weeks in the hospital, I learned that using the telephone didn't work; I could not reach her and my messages did not get to her, either. The only way to do it was to show up at the hospital and hope she wasn't in therapy or having a meal, and this became very hard to do when summer was over.
Did I feel guilty? Uh, yeah. But this post isn't about that.
A couple of months ago, my friend emailed me to let me know she had been living back in her home and making enormous progress in her therapy. We made a date for coffee.
I did not know what to expect when I arrived at her condo. I was definitely not prepared to see her walk confidently out her door without a walker or a cane. This is a woman who suffered a stroke and then had the misfortune of contracting a nasty infection while in the hospital. She has been to the brink and back...
...and she walks. She talks. Her brain has been rewired and is back to normal (or pretty much normal - after all, like me, she is turning 52 in a couple of weeks and we are both prone to some short term memory lapses. But hers are about the same as mine).
I was very near tears several times that afternoon. My friend is the poster woman for the power of a positive attitude. She has NEVER wavered, NEVER lost faith, has always been confident of a wonderful future. And her life had been good.
On that day, she talked about her illness and subsequent stroke and other problems as an "incredible opportunity to learn how to live again." And she truly BELIEVES this.
She said she had no idea that her situation had been so dire; this is something that she realized over time. She also did not know that I seen her during this period. I did not tell her that I was certain we had lost her.
Before all of this occurred, she and I and our mutual friend (the one I wrote about in that old post) would get together every few months for dinner at P.F. Chang's in Burbank. We decided it would be great to resume this habit -- and last night, that's what we did. We sat, we laughed, we reminisced about our younger, crazy (and more alcohol tolerant) selves. And we made plans to do it again.
She also informed us that she's giving herself a birthday party, as she'd missed her birthday last year. "Yeah, I was lying unconscious on my kitchen floor," she laughed.
She's been certified to test for a new driver's license and plans to go back to work over the summer.
Life can be good. You just have to see the good in it.
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