An important lesson I recently learned

Wow so it’s been a while… but as promised I’m not abandoning my blog! Maybe I’ll write about school later, but for now I want to write something I learned over the summer.

For those of you that don’t know, my younger brother “Rick” has Hemophilia, a rare bleeding disorder where he gets these enormous bruises that take a long time to heal. Well, I was invited to a camp for teens who either have Hemophilia, Von Willabrands (more common in girls, Hemophilia is rare in girls) or have a sibling with one of these disorders (aka, me). The trip itself was lots of fun, mostly outdoor activities with a few learning sessions mixed in so that it was also educational.

One such learning session stood out to me, because a woman with hemophilia (which is incredibly rare might I add! There are only about fifteen women in the US with it) came and talked to us about her life living with her illness.

She grew up in the 60’s, when medicine for Hemophilia was available, but they didn’t screen blood. She learned too late that she, her brother, her dad, and ALL of her friends from her hemophilia camps she went to as a child (she was then a teen) were infected with

1. AIDS
2. Hepatitis A
3. Hepatitis C
4. A variety of other blood transferable illnesses that she didn’t go into, just mentioned.

One by one, her hemophilia associates passed away, starting with her brother and then her dad and friends. Today, she is the only one still alive from her original friends. She went on to say that she takes 17 pills. Can you believe that? 17 pills!! And she went on to say that’s only in the morning! She takes another 17 at night! And they are the big kind, not the little ones like allergy pills. She has aching joints all the time, cant have kids, has a lot of doctors appointments, some days its hard for her to get out of bed… the list goes on and on.

Then she went on “but despite all my problems, I have learned to live my life with absolutely complaints of the quality of it. I have three children, even if they may be adopted, and I have learned to accept that pain is part of my life. One day I just told myself I need to focus on what I CAN do instead of what I CANT do.”

Wow that hit me HARD. Ok so maybe there are times when I say to myself “Gosh I really messed up this time, I can’t fix this problem or this problem is so hard” and then mope because I have discovered a weakness in me. Well look at this woman, she has a thousand problems and she still has a perfect outlook on her life. She has all these huge problems, but that doesn’t stop her. Why should a little bump in my own life get me down?