Remember

One pill left. Today is my last day on antibiotics. It is hard to believe that it's been two full weeks since I left the hospital. Almost three weeks since our worlds were turned upside down. I was told if I hadn't come into the hospital when I did I wouldn't have made it. One in five people die of sepsis. I survived.

I still have trouble sleeping at night. Scenes from the emergency room and the hospital play over and over again in my head. It is hard to process the concept of almost dying. As I attempt to resume normalcy, I have so many thoughts, realizations, epiphanies and "aha" moments flying through my mind. I was alone for most of my last day at the hospital. In my solitude, as I thanked the Lord for my lunch, I found myself starting to cry. Tears of gratitude that my children still have a mother, my parents still have a daughter, my husband still has a wife, and I still have a hall pass to participate in this life. I got dressed, traded my hospital gown for my Gap hoodie and LL Bean sweats, and took my final stroll around the floor. As I took in the scene from room to room, I asked God what my one take away should be from this whole ordeal. The word rang clear as a bell in my heart, "Remember." The grand pause that this was requires me to reconsider how I live my life. Several doctors and nurses asked me if I was run down or if I had a stressful job. They gave me Pneumovax, a vaccination against pneumonia that you typically get only if you are 65 or older. Now that I've had strep pneumonia, I am more susceptible to it. It remains a mystery how I got this sick at 36.

So, I feel a compelling need to simplify, to pare down and to let go. Gotta reboot. Gotta quell that voice in my head that keeps saying I'm not doing enough. Gotta start putting me first sometimes. As a working mom, I may never be able to eliminate the number of balls I juggle. But maybe, definitely, I don't have to throw them each so high. Remember.