These past few days have been quite ‘sudden’ as I would put it. I was in the hospital for three days and I couldn’t do anything. One minute I was fine, and the next I had some chest pain and trouble breathing. After school  I went to a clinic, then went to the emergency, then got a minor surgery, and then and then! It goes on, but the doctor told me I had pneumothorax and there wasn’t really any cause for it, sometimes it just happens spontaneously in tall and skinny teenagers when they’re doing vigorous exercise…. So on the way to the emergency room I was beginning to let things go… I felt my breathing slow down as pain erupted in my right side every time I inhaled..

Often life comes in jagged fragments, sometimes your living the moment and others life is just passing you by. But sometimes when you start to lose your breath, and breathing comes in short bursts and sharp drabs of pain, you begin to realize am I dying? Right now, I’m having trouble breathing and my minds blank. I’m thinking about when it might start to feel like suffocation. When will it feel like I’m breathing in my own water and struggling to climb to the top but never breaking the surface. Drowning in what could have beens and regrets. Drowsy with exhaustion and yet a bit of relief. 

What will  become of me, what will become of those around me? Will life go on or does it freeze?

Those were the thoughts I had… I didn’t appreciate my healthy body before and now it was taken before my eyes. Even though I’m recovering now, I can’t believe the pain I went through and even that pain compared to many others is nothing. Now my breathing has gone back to normal, but I”ll never forget those 60 hours of pain, every time I breathed in, it would be like a knife stabbing through my chest. Excruciating! But I can only imagine, that some people live like that every day of their lives, every breathing second. Some are born with problems in their lungs, and me, I didn’t even thank every single living moment I had before. I kept looking at others who had it better than me, but did I not realize that I have so many things that others want. 

Now I will never take anything for granted because life is too damn short. You never know when it’s going to happen. I really thought I might die that day, and I didn’t even have time to grieve because the whole time I was thinking, what was I thinking?

So right now, if you’re reading this, it means that your breathing, your heart’s beating, you can see, and you can read. Those four things, a lot of people can do, but a lot people can’t do them at all. So appreciate! Stop looking at the small unimportant things, and focus on the small things we overlook, like our hearts beating, our eyes seeing, our ears hearing, our lungs breathing, because there might come a day when your body fails you, but if you lived in the moment, you won’t regret anything.