Something more about my perception of life.

Life is full of surprises. Who would have thought that after I lost all my contacts last year thanks to my phone breaking down one night, because I didn't take the necessary precautions, I would later be included in a group with the 25 colleagues with whom I studied the last year of my career. In other words, the 25 medical colleagues and friends with whom I worked in the rural internships so I could obtain my degree.

Right now I am recovering all the lost contacts and I have recovered many that I didn’t even have before.

But that's the way life goes, nothing we plan unfolds as well as life itself does. It takes its time, weaves events together, brings people together and then throws out events that we can call happenstance or as a good friend of mine tells you, the “Godstuff” happens.

Life is made up of a myriad of situations and experiences that help us to see life better or worse. It all depends on our perspective on how we can see the things that happen to us. There will be people who categorize their situations in life as bad luck, as moments of catastrophe that don’t happen to anyone else, even going so far as to say that such things don't happen to anyone else. But if we listen to other people we realize that there are many of them who are smiling and go through life giving a lot of their love and when they tell you about their personal situations in life you learn a lot from them, because their life is a tragedy that they learned to live with in the best way possible.

We realize that many more people have worse things happen to them than what we consider bad.

Once, when I was going to radiation therapy appointments, one of the few times I didn't feel bad enough to hear others talking, when I wasn’t suffering from nausea, vomits or dizziness, hallucinations, and other symptoms from having chemotherapy alongside radiation therapy, I heard from another 26 year old patient that he was on his third time having cancer and receiving treatment. The second to last time was when he was 17 years old and now it was his third time.

I could see that everyone there was talking a lot about their personal situations and I couldn’t talk because the sound was tormenting my ears. And they were just like me, all with cancer, all receiving treatment for their different and peculiar types of cancer. But what was different was that I was getting the craziest symptoms and when I would come in they would all ask me... and what's new with you today? And I would tell them and they would help me through it.

 When I heard this sweet, smiling 26 year old young man say that this was his third time, I was so impressed. I thought to myself... Dear God, would I be able to endure all these symptoms a second time? I don't know. But since then I ask God a lot that his will be done over me but it would be very difficult for me to have and endure all that again.

Life is how we face it. How we decide we will live it. Complaining or learning to live with what we have.

Life has given me many years of life, after that disease. I was cured, it was worth all that suffering. I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but only God knows what will happen to me in the turns I take.

I learned to give thanks for everything. Within all the bad there are better things. Let's learn to listen to others when they face their difficult situations because that helps us to overcome and cope with our own situations.

Because we will always see worse things happen to other people than what happens to me. Sometimes I think that if those things happen to me I don't know how I could handle them, but God gives everyone their own experiences and at the same time gives them the tools so that they can or we can take them to a better situation.

Let's live life, let's live through good and bad things, let's learn to be tolerant and tolerate each other as best we can, and what we can't solve… let's leave it be, because that thing called time and God will know what to do with it.