SOMETHING UNEXPECTED

Often things surprise us or turn out to be not exactly what we had expected.

A thunderstorm rumbled around us yesterday with much thunder, lightening, and wind, but left us without so much as a drop of much needed rain. I hurried out to get some cloud pictures and it was only when I downloaded them that I saw I had captured this lightening bolt. Many times I have tried to photograph lightening without success, and this time without trying, I did it!

Sometimes life is like that.

When one of my clients spit in my face during a counseling session, it was just another day in the life of a mental health worker, until a few months later he died unexpectedly from TB. That’s when my life changed ever so drastically.

Thankfully, I have never developed TB, but as my body's immune system struggled to contain it, I was plunged with a full menu of other illnesses. For example, asthma. Having never had an asthma attack in my fifty-year life, I was suddenly in and out of the hospital and ER weekly. The heavy douses of steroids used to control the asthma, brought on diabetes and hypertension and aggravated the rheumatoid arthritis I have had since having rheumatic fever as a two-year-old child.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when I had to retire at fifty-five. If it were not for the two grandchildren my mother and I were raising at the time, I would have retired from life as well.
However, fate was not through with me yet. The long absent father of my grandchildren won custody and took them away from me. Still there was an upside...I threw myself into writing again. It became my salvation.

When Mother became very ill and was in the hospital a great deal, I simply moved into her room with her. I could not have done this if I had been working or if the grandchildren were still with us. The unexpected became something good...sort of. We weathered a very bad year or two, and now we enjoy each day as it comes...the good, the bad, and the unexpected