The Upside to Brain Tumors
The past 4 months have been the hardest 4 months of my life. I should preface this by stating that no, I did not nor do I now have a brain tumor. I quit my job. I quit my job in the midst of a recession.
After about a month, I realized I had to do something, so I sold the majority of my living room furniture to pay the bills (although to be quite honest, I really haven’t noticed). Then, I put on a big girl face and dealt with rejection after rejection with a brave face. Ok, sometimes it was a sad crying face, but it was still my face.
Now I have a job. I have a good job. And with that, I am somehow able to write again. This past Monday, after my most recent discouraging job interview, I went to my parents’ house and started to cry. My mom shoved a Victor Frankl passage under my running nose about a jobless woman who published an ad poking fun at her employment availability. I pushed the book aside, laid my head down, and sobbed over the fact that not only was I jobless, but I was past finding humor in myself.
Now that I have a job, I can say with much more conviction that everything happens for a reason. It is much easier to say that when things are reasonable. But today I met someone who truly put my optimism to shame.
My mother, who is 5’5″ and 100 pounds, fell about three and a half weeks ago. She broke her wrist and bruised her pelvis. Today she went to the doctor, who was concerned at the pain still present in her hip area. She was sent to get an MRI. I drove her because she (as am I) is claustrophobic and needed to be medicated for the tube. In the waiting room, an old man struck up a conversation with me while his wife was having an MRI.
“She has a brain tumor,” he tells me. How do you respond to that? Well, luckily, I didn’t have to. ”I keep telling her the upside to all of this,” he continued. ”The good things is, five years ago she would have been dead. But now, they have the technology to keep her alive. So really, it’s a good thing!”
I have never met someone who was so good at making lemonade out of lemons. Hell, he made lemonade out of a brain tumor.
After we found out that my mom’s hip was actually broken (yes, the same hip she had been walking around on for three and a half weeks), we went to get her a walker. As my mom nearly broke down into tears at the sight of an enormous walker her doctor had prescribed her (no kidding, this was the biggest walker I’ve ever seen), I decided to follow this older gentlemen’s advice and make some lemonade. So, I sat myself down quite easily on the electric chair for people who can’t sit down or stand up on their own, and laughed at my mom.
Next time I’ve assured her I’ll be able to laugh at myself as well.
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