I’ve focused a lot of my latest blog posts in the past year
on what I’ve been doing in life – mainly eating and traveling. It is easy to
forget that I’m only able to do those things because I’ve had two double lung
transplants. The mind has a way of hiding traumatic events deep inside—everyone
has as least one. But several times a day I think of the fact that I am
breathing through someone else’s lungs—a gift of life that two separate families
gave to me during their hardest moment. There are a lot of emotions that make
me think about this: sadness, happiness, pain, humility, fear, gratitude and so
on. It’s always good to have a center to bring you back to the world and mine just
happens to be that my lungs are not my own. It is a scary wonderful miracle of
a thing that helps me to move forward when I am stuck. Or helps me to be
thankful when I am not. I think there may be this perfection that when you beat
something (read: ANYTHING) that from the point of survival on you are always
joyful and happy and thankful. That is not so. I have hard days and easy days.
I have bright and dark—same as anyone. The point is there is always something
to bring you back to why you are here and why you are continuing to fight. I
heard this really great quote a few weeks ago: if you have a “why” you can get
through any “how”. And I believe that is the truth. Your how may not be waiting
for a lung transplant, but we all have something. And hopefully we all have a
why….
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