Polaroid Heart
Submitted by Jacqueline DainFour days post-surgery. Benign polyps, out. Unintentionally along with it, parts of my insides also ripped out and 2 litres of my blood due to complications from stitching also siphoned from my body.

In life, we are given these pearls called reminders. A wake-up call that we are indeed alive. This weekend, I was given a big fat reminder. A gem of an opportunity that pulped me over my head and sideways, awakening me to the wider view of one's timeline on this planet.

We take things for granted every day. Every time we bemoan the little things - the weather, the laundry, the rain, the pain, the mud, the blood, the light, the dark - we are doing a disservice to the counter-balance of the chemistry, the biology, the history, the probability, the philosophy, the love the joy, godliness or otherwise, which surged together in an instant Polaroid of a moment that formed our current mortal coil.

We are here by such a glorious edification of events. We have one duty only on this earth. And that is to marvel at that past moment as well as every other moment that comes afterwards, as and when those moments unfold. Like the blood that slowly drained away from my veins, we rarely get a chance to get it back. In another instant, this life that we so often bemoan, can slip away from the pincers and the instruments, and the clamps and the tubes, and the bed and the bedpan, and the masks and the monitors. Our last breath can be cut off from our lungs in a split second and all that we bemoan will be lost.

I instinctively cried when I woke up from the anaesthesia, not having yet known that a 20-minute operation had turned into a 3 hour life-saving ordeal. I cried and took breaths quickly and greedily, gasping for air, water, anything. I cried for my consciousness of the surroundings, which however tense and urgent, I loved and wanted to drink in and swallow down. There was no better moment in all of my life as that. The moment that I actively became part of that recovering team's efforts. I demanded to have my oxygen mask taken off so that I could communicate the pain. To which an immediate response of morphine was given. I was then injected with an antibiotic, which a few seconds later made me itch and I signaled a welt that was forming on my right arm. To which, the response of antihistamine was given.

Most pressingly, I asked the nurse to tell my husband who must have been worried and waiting, to call the nanny to pick up the kids from school.

In a moment of calm, I asked the room, 'Hey, I must have bled, huh?'

'Yes you did. But we are getting you more now’ came the voice.

More now. More for now.

We are all just drops away from our last bag. Live it now. Down to the very last drop.

http://www.values.com/your-inspirational-stories/2932-polaroid-heart