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Vicki Monroe's SpiritBlog Archive November 30, 2006 This got me thinking. Just as I do everyday, as does the rest of the world, I get up, work out, have some coffee, shower and go to work. I like my routine, it's basic, it's comfortable, and it flows. "Flows," if we stop and think on that word, it can be such a refreshing and uncomplicated thing. To allow things to flow as you want them to. What I have found though, through being a parent of three college students and a daughter in her junior year at high school, that anything in the blink of an eye can change that flow. This year has been tumulous at best, with one son ending his college years, graduating as a history teacher, and another in his junior college year changing his major from Marine Biology to Enviromental Studies, to my youngest son venturing out into college life himself. But I would have to say the biggest change I have had, and serious in nature is that of which my daughter went through this year. Life changed for her, and she will never be physically the same. Emotionally, her life was altered, but the mind is powerful, and her's is a very determined spirit that no matter the loss she has taken, she will over come this. Being seventeen and a very good athlete was her life, grades not so much, and the love of her life, have to admit on this one, I love her boyfriend to. I say this all the time to people, things happen for a reason, I am not sure why this happened to my daughter, but this young man being an exceptional person was there for her, every step of the way, they have dated for over a year now, and well, who knows where that will go when gradution for him comes this spring. Life is planned so no matter the outcome then, if they are meant to be, they will. Perhaps with a few of life's lessons under their belts. Back to out of the flow. My daughter was in school late in September, her school being very old and on the National Historic District Register, has windows that must weigh (and I am guessing here) 150 pounds or more. She was walking towards the window just like any other day to her desk, tripping over a back pack, not in the norm, and her hand hit the railing on the window, causing the window to come crashing down, thus severing the top of her thumb down to the joint. Bleeding and in a lot of pain, she ran from the room and to the nurses station. The flow of her blood on her clothes now. She was immediately taken to the hospitol where she was in shock and told that she would need plastic surgery. Not to reattach the thumb, it was so badly crushed there was nothing to put on there. She would need skin graphs to rebuild it. Her shock and the surgeries that followed had not hit home until that night, when looking at her homecoming dress, and the enormous bulb bandage and pain pills running through her system, causing her to feel ill, did she realize that her life as an all-star cheerleader, a job she took very seriously for the past three years, was over, her high school cheering was done, and she would spend the year seeing surgeons and sitting on the sidelines. Then she mourned. I know that people lose limbs everyday, and my daughter was fortunate it wasn't her entire hand, or even more serious. But things happen so fast in life, and as we are dealing with them, we are not thinking about the next days or few hours. We are only dealing with what we know we must at that moment. She did go to her homecoming, not allowed to dance, having to keep her hand elevated, but she went. Pictures taken, her boyfriend right there beside her. Her family behind her. I guess the point here is that losses come both large and small, and how we look at them is how we can proceed on with our lives. Big or small, significant to others or not, we do lose in life, but what we gain can be even more valuable. A perspective that at any moment we can lose something we took for granted, a person we loved, a friend we hadn't spoken to in a while, or a thumb that sidelined us our junior year in high school. Either way, a loss is a loss, but life will go on, and the way it will proceed is up to you, live it, or exist in it. My daughter chose to deal and live with it. The flow changed this year, and she is stronger for it. In Light, Vicki This website and text copyright © 2007, 2008 Vicki Monroe. All rights reserved.

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