"When life hands you lemons..."

Don't you just love cliches? I do, for the most part anyways.

But, then again, I had so many lemons handed to me in this lifetime, which probably isn't quite half way over with yet, the cliche gets a bit tiring after a while.

At birth, I had fluid on my right lung, an esophugus that was basically torn in two, was a 'preemie' by 1976's standards and weighed only four whole pounds.

Oh, did I mention that that fluid severely collapsed my lung? So... Off to Santa Clara Medical I was flown by chopper. The staff told my father to not even expect me to survive the flight, let alone the surgery....Then to not expect me to live past the first 24 for 48 hours after that...And so on. 

Get the picture here?

Move it along to when I was just shy by a couple of months basically of turning the big 1-3. My mother suffered a traumatic stroke on October 1st, 1989. In the early morning hours, not long after midnight, on October 29th, not quite a whole month later, my mother passed away from the complications she incurred. 

Then, it was just me and my father, living life to the best of our ability, on our own (so to speak).

Almost twenty years later, I start getting strange infections in my left eye. Of course, it was all the signs of Pink Eye. But instead another kind of infection. So we treat it through my Opthomologist. 


Just over a year later, I get another "attack", so I gear up to see the good doctor again, to get more medicine. But, I also like an idiot, poked myself in the bad eye while scratching my eyebrow. 


After being sent to a Specialist, I find out that I perforated the eaten-away Cornea (window on the outside that keeps outside infections...out). So off to North Carolina's Duke University Medical Center I go.


They tried "gluing" the hole shut, in hopes that it repaired its self at best. Or at worst, hold it shut for the infection to go, as to do a Corneal Transplant.


Of course!...My luck had it that three days later, I get to go back to Duke for an emergency Corneal Transplant.


As fate would also have it, the surgery was done exactly 20 years later, to the day, that my mother had passed away.


She taught me, as did life its self that we all will have those sour lemon moments in our lives. At different intervals, there will be trials. We will at times be defeated. But mostly, we will defeat them! 


It's just all in how you use those lemons. Make that sweet lemonade. Or, use them to be a sour-soul.