Miracles
I am not supposed to be here.
At 13, going into sudden cardiac arrest was a pretty difficult and scary event and the road to recovery has been a long and challenging one. I went from being a normal healthy teenager, active in three sports, to a teenager with a pacemaker/defibrillator and only being able to sit in school for an hour a day. It took years of rehabilitation for my brain and my body. No teenager should have to endure hours upon hours of learning how to learn again.
The countless trips to hospitals and specialists and poking and prodding have made me realize how important it is to be happy, even throughout the rough times. Through it all I have learned to be grateful for many things that most people take for granted. What I'm most grateful for is being able to play the sport that I am most passionate about, volleyball. After my illness all the doctors told me that I would never be able to play volleyball again. I told them I would play again and prove them wrong.
When I went into cardiac arrest I died for almost three minutes and suffered a brain injury from it. 90 percent of people don't live to tell that story. My mom believes in miracles and I know today that I am a miracle. When I died, my mom walked into the McDonalds and saw the first responders working on my lifeless body and she yelled at everyone in McDonalds to get around me and pray. My mom knew it wasn't my time and so did God.
Today I am grateful for people who believe in miracles. Even if you don't believe, I'm living proof that they do exist in some capacity. Never give up on believing that anything is too big to overcome, because when it's your time to shine, nothing will stop you.