Exhale

There are moments when a flood of memories rushes through your mind.

In the span of a single breath, your pulse quickens, your eyes stare blankly, and the pain or joy of many moments plays across your face.

Then comes the exhalation. The recognition of who or what you are staring at that triggered those memories. The realization of the life you are living now. The immense gratitude or sorrow that things are not the way you thought they would be when you were living out those memories.

All this, in a single breath.

My baby was the trigger and my reaction was joy. She is my miracle. She was only a shadow of a dream in my thoughts two years ago as I struggled with the effects of a medicine interaction gone terribly awry. Today, in the span of one breath, I felt the despair and panic all over again and remembered knowing that my life would never be the same.

And it isn’t.

But not in the way I had anticipated.