Here's to Life!

Thanks for the comment! I could not agree more with your last statement about making the most of each day we are blessed with. I had an incident that happened yesterday that made me chuckle the entire time until I was in the car (you'll see). It was a rather ordinary "lemon" beginning experience, but definitely a "lemonade" ending one!

Yesterday afternoon, I brought my 86 1/2 year old grandmother to her daily radiation treatment (she has cervical cancer) that is located on the ground level of the hospital. Afterwards, I needed to bring her to the second floor to get the nurses to dress her surgery site from the PCN tube procedure that was done last Friday. Since she has trouble walking long distances, I asked her if she wanted to be in a wheelchair so that I could transport her to the second floor. She agreed and I quickly walked us to the nearest elevator, which was 4 minutes away. Before getting to the elevators, I have to first get through a set of automatic doors. Thankfully, the doors were open already so I whizzed through and headed for the elevators. Upon reaching the elevators, I pressed the up arrow button and suddenly got shocked! The spark was both surprising and slightly painful. (If there is one thing that I try to avoid in life, it would be getting shocked from friction action!) I then looked at the wheelchair unable to figure out why I was getting shocked. The part of the wheel that was touching the ground was rubber and so was the handle. In any case, I was going to do anything to try to avoid touching metal while I pushed the wheelchair.

After being shocked, I played it cool and just waited for the elevator to open and once it did, I wheeled Grandma into it and off we went to the second floor. After we met with the nurses to get her surgery site dressed with more tape and cloth, the inevitable was upon us. We had to go back to the ground level by taking the elevators down and walking back through the automatic double doors. Oh how I dreaded it! So here we were again, walking towards the elevators only now I was not going to touch the arrow button. I did the unthinkable. I asked Grandma to do it. She asked me why I didn't want to do it and I told her the reason and so she willingly went over to press the button. From the moment her fingers touched the metal button, she got a major shock. The shock was so intense for her that she threw her body back quickly away from the buttons. While she did this, all I could do was laugh out loud and uncontrollably! The shock happened so fast and strong that she nevereven got to press the down button hard enough to fetch us an elevator. Now what were we going to do? Well, Grandma had this brilliant idea to use her small handbag to press the button. She took the edge of the bag and directed it towards the down button and pressed on it. It took about four tries before she was able to press the button hard enough with her bag. All the while, I was still there laughing hard.

We boarded the elevator and made it to the ground level. Now I was thinking about our next major obstacle---the automatic double doors ( At this point, I still hadn't recovered from the hilarious moment on the second floor). You see, in order for the doors to open, you have to press a six inch square button, and yes, it was metal. As we walked through the long corridor and towards the double doors, I was hoping that someone would either be on the other side of the doors trying to get through or that someone would be slightly ahead of us to press the button. Unfortunately, there was no one doing either. Again, Grandma and I refused to touch the button. She instead applied the handbag technique on this big button. She again held the edge of her handbag and held it up to the button. Only this time, the handbag technique didn't work. I guess the handbag was too soft. Now what?! Well, as she sat and I stood there cracking up, a gentleman was walking into a set of doors just to the side of the double doors. He noticed that we were stuck there trying to figure out this button dilemma (he probably thought it was our first time using these doors). He then asked if we needed help and I said giggling and almost too much that I had to collect myself to say desperately, "Oh yes, please. My grandmother and I don't want to get shocked again and so we don't want to directly press the open button." Forget embarrassment, I was almost in tears from laughing at how silly all this was and how silly we must have looked! Phew!

Yesterday was such a great day! It was a great day because I was able to be in the moment and laugh at something that seemed so silly and trivial without caring who was around and what others thought. I was grateful for such a moment. Wow, I wonder if God was laughing as well...