Blessed to be Skipped

Chapter 1

The Beginning

When walking through this journey called life, searching for its meaning and the point of being a part of this infinite universe, you encounter many ups and downs. I was always told that life is a rollercoaster back then. Frankly, I never thought about how it would be like to actually experience this ride, nor did I know that it would be one terrifying and devastating ride. I never knew that when this rollercoaster ride ends, your life ends too, until I lost my mother.

There are days in your life when you feel like you are in a garden where you have soft grass below your feet, beautiful flowers to pick from, and fresh air to breathe. You know, those days when you notice the bright, beautiful sky in the day and enjoy counting the stars when the sun goes down. However, there are days when you are afraid of the dark, you cannot wait for the night to go away, and the sun to finally rise. These are those days when you no longer enjoy counting the stars, you feel like the grass that felt smooth suddenly starts hurting your feet and you find it difficult to walk on it, you realize that the flowers that you picked have thorns and suddenly you find your fingers bleeding while the fresh air turns into a bad odor of fertilizers. While experiencing such days, I also learned that none of these days were permanent. There will be morning again, there will be happy days, and there will be sad days too but never a sad life.

During those days, when life is tough on you, that is when you learn your true strength and how much you can truly endure. No matter how hard it gets, do not lose hope in those days and keep believing that good days are on their way. You must always be grateful because you never know what life has in store for you.

Even though you experience things that challenge your faith and make you want to scream your lungs out, you can still be happy. Always remember that you are blessed to be alive, so no matter how difficult life gets, learn to appreciate little things. Gratitude can help you stay happy despite what you have been through, so always be grateful and learn to fall in love with life despite the hardships of life. There can be many things that could go wrong, but remember, you are blessed to be where you are.

Life is a blessing from God. If you have food to eat, a roof over your head, healthy parents, siblings you can share your entire day stories with, and people who care about you, you are blessed than millions and billions of people.

I am writing this book because I want people to realize how blessed they are to have the things that may be very tiny for them but could mean a world to someone else. Sometimes you may take certain things for granted, but what you don’t realize is they could be a huge blessing for someone else. My goal in this book is to inspire others to trust their timing.

Some days we wake up and feel that life is perfect, and it couldn’t be any better, but then all of a sudden, we get kicked out of that situation and start questioning why that happened. But believe me, when I say something even better is on its way, just do not lose hope.

In case you are wondering who I am, let me give a little background about myself. I live in the US, but I was born and raised in a different country. I was born in the Dominican Republic in the capital city of Santo Domingo. I grew up there until I was 15-years-old, and that’s when we moved to the US. I grew up blessed with both my parents. I was their second child, and at that time, my father worked for a great company as a Mechanical Engineer. We are three sisters, including me, and a brother who is the youngest. I recall my father and my mother were very young back then. My mother was a housewife while my father was a mechanical engineer. He went to Europe to continue his studies and to be better in the field. His job was to supervise threading mechanical machines. Everything was going smoothly, and we were living a happy life.

I used to spend most of my time with my mother. I shared everything with her about my day, and she listened very patiently. I remember when I was a child, my mother told me that I was born with a bad heart condition. I couldn’t breathe like a normal child, due to which I faced many problems.

Therefore, what she used to do was she would cover me in as little clothing as possible because she was scared that covering me in more clothes would suffocate me. She loved me a lot since I spent most of my time with her, and watching me having breathing issues was definitely something she would never take lightly. I had several checkups, and after running the tests, the doctors discovered that I had a hole in my heart. I was put on medications immediately when I was just a little child. The disease that I had is called heart murmur, and besides that, I had the main vein of my heart crossed; this condition is called transposition of valves. So, there had to be something done about it, and the doctors had to conduct surgery. My mother told me that when I was two-years-old, I became severely sick. My condition was so worse that I almost died. They had to rush me to the hospital immediately.

After the checkup, the doctors found out that the veins in my heart were jumbled, and they needed a transposition of my valves, which means they had to perform open-heart surgery on me. This wasn’t something ordinary around the 70s, doctors rarely do an open-heart surgery as its risky, but they had to conduct mine so I could breathe properly and my blood could circulate to the other parts of the body.

Therefore, I was hospitalized in order to proceed with the surgery. My mother told me that when I came out of the hospital after the surgery and everything went well, she received a phone call from the doctors. They thanked us for hanging on so gratefully as well as they appreciated that I woke up, and everything was successful; however, I had to be on medication for the rest of my life. My uncle, at the time, was a medical student. He told his family that he was becoming a cardiac surgeon. He had a lot of connections, so he connected my mother and my father. He was a great part of the performance of my surgery and would explain to my parents how they were able to perform my surgery.

This happened back in 1978. During that time, not many people knew about this disease. Back in the Dominican Republic, which is a third world country, I was the first child to have open heart surgery in my family, and this was a huge piece of news for everyone, and they were all going crazy. As a result, oftentimes, my room would be full of people coming to see me.

At the end of the day, everything went well, and I was saved from death, but it left a huge scar on my back. The scar that I still carry with myself today, beginning from the middle of my back, it runs all the way up and connects with my left breast.

I still recall my mom telling me that she used to leave the back of my clothes open because she didn’t want me to feel that it is something that should be hidden and be embarrassed about. She wanted me to embrace it so nobody would have the guts to say anything about it. However, most importantly, she did it mainly because she did not want me to feel uncomfortable or ashamed. She wanted me to feel confident regardless of the scar.

That is something I appreciate about my mother the most that she created so much comfort for me that I was able to show my back freely despite the scar.

She always made me feel that I was blessed to be able to survive. Though there were times I used to feel embarrassed about the scar when people used to ask me about it. I would always remain blank and quiet because I would never know how to answer that question.

I remember one day I was so done that I ran to my mom, put my arms around her, and cried a river. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her how people always made fun of me. They asked me what is it that I have on my back and what happened to me, and I would always remain silent. My mother’s older sister was also there, witnessing all this, she said to me that tell them you are blessed, tell them the mark that you have on your back is a blessing from God.

Her words somehow encouraged me, and I started feeling confident about it. So, whenever anyone asked me about it, that’s what I used to tell them. I would proudly tell people that it is a blessing from God. The reason behind them not telling me what it was, was because my mother never wanted to go in details of what really happened. Therefore, I did not know much about what had happened to me at the time.

My mother always treated me like I was some sort of fragile princess. I could never imagine my life without her, but life had a lesson to teach me. When I was just five-years-old, my mother became very sick. Being a child who was very close to her mother, this was no less than a nightmare. I became numb, and the fear of losing my mother took birth inside me.

I had no one to share how I felt about my mother’s sickness, so I used to write them down in a diary. This was the only way I was able to cope with myself, I had to vent my feelings out in order to feel lighter, so I used to write them down. As a result, I continued doing that as I grew up; whatever happened in my life, I used to write it down on a piece of paper.

Hence, this book is something I always wanted to write since I was a child.

When you are little, I don’t know if it’s the culture of the country you are living in or some other reason, sometimes you cannot go and talk to an adult. At least for me, that’s how it was. I couldn’t express my anxiety, my anger, and my sadness of seeing my mother sick to anyone in my family. I was very little for all that I was experiencing, so I used to write in order to refrain from all those feelings.

My mother was going through pregnancy and knew nothing about the disease that had taken birth inside her. The time had come, and they rushed my mother to the hospital. No one knew about my mother’s sickness until she gave birth to my little brother. That’s when she had surgery, and that’s when doctors discovered my mother was very sick.

My mother faced lots of difficulties while giving birth to my little brother. The doctors had to undertake an emergency C-section in order to save both the lives. When they opened my mother’s womb, they noticed that her womb was full of tumors, but they did not know what to exactly do at the moment, so they took the baby out and closed the womb again. My mother did not know what was going on. The doctors had only informed my father about it, and my father informed my mother’s sister and his brother, who was a doctor, that my mother was sick and there was nothing at the moment they could do for her. We were only three sisters, and our little brother was just born. I remember at that time we used to live in a really nice neighborhood and a very beautiful home. I recall that day, and I remember how excited my father was that my mother was going to give birth to another baby. Everybody was happy and excited about the newborn baby.

My brother was the first male child in the family, so everyone was excited. My father threw a huge party to welcome my brother into the house. He did not say anything to my mother because we all were so happy to have a little addition to our family. He didn’t want to ruin things for my mother. At that time, I was only five-years-old, so I did not really know what was going on, but I knew there was something that my family was keeping from me.

If I talk about myself, I am naturally very curious, and I pay a lot of attention to my surroundings. So, I always tried to listen to what was going on around the house. As I said earlier, I was attached to my mother, so I had this feeling that there was something wrong with her. This was driving me crazy, but I was so young that I could not help her. I felt helpless. A few days later, my mother was rushed to the hospital again because she was not feeling well. The doctors immediately took her in the operation theatre and again opened her womb to see whether they could do something about it. I remember my father and my aunt talking that there was nothing they could do to save my mother from the disease. My mother was very sick. She had cancer. So, they opened my mom’s womb only to close it back in dismay.

My mother still did not know what was going on. Back in the 1980s, the doctors used to hide from the patients what their condition was. They always used to tell their family, so only my father knew what was exactly going on with my mom. My mother only knew that she was sick; she had no clue how severe her sickness was. My father loved my mother a lot. He always used to tell her not to worry and that they will do everything possible to help her.

All of this reminded me of how my mother never told me what had happened to me when I was just a little child and how she always encouraged me. A year later, when I was six-years-old, I witnessed my mom becoming very different than how she was just a year before she got sick. She was even sicker now and continuously running to hospitals. She would make it to the hospital, but again, they would send her back home without being able to do anything. I started noticing that there was something really wrong with her. Besides everything, my mother was a very strong woman. I never saw her crying or complaining. She was surviving through a deadly disease; still, she never made any of us feel that she was weak. She didn't want us to feel pity for her.

My father was flowing all his savings like water while paying for household expenses back in the Dominican Republic. Paying for the expenses of such a severe disease was like a luxury back in the ’80s, it was not everyone’s cup of tea. We were not a very rich family to be able to provide for so many expenses, but my father always managed everything without saying a word.

She was so sick that going through the radiations and all the chemotherapies they performed barely had any positive impact on her health, and it perforated her colon. Due to the severe condition, they had to remove a part of her colon, and she had a colostomy bag.

So, imagine you are as young as six-years-old, and you are supposed to have a normal body, and you see that your mother has to put on a bag on her stomach. That left a huge impact on me. When you witness somebody close to you getting a transformation like that, it leaves you stunned and confused. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I knew for sure that my mother was very sick.

It made me feel so bad that I never wanted to leave her alone in the hospital. Every time she was admitted, I would go to her room and hide myself somewhere so my father couldn’t see me and take me back home. I did this just so that I could stay with my mom a little more.

My mom used to tell my father and my youngest aunt not to worry. But I was not going anywhere. I wanted to stay with my mom because I did not know for how long she was going to stay there, and I did not know for how long I would be able to see her breathing. Thinking she was not going to be there anymore scared me to death, therefore I wanted to give her all the time that I had.

One of the doctors would always tell me that it was not safe for me to stay there, and I should go home, but I was persistent. I used to even skip school so that I could stay with my mom at the hospital. I loved learning new things, and I believe I was gifted this by my mother. She loved learning new things and was always involved in learning art and crafts. She used to sew clothes herself, and because of that, she made our clothes herself along with curtains, blankets, and other things. As a matter of fact, she even used to decorate our house, all thanks to her creativity.

Other than that, she was a great dancer. She loved dancing, and salsa was her favorite dance form. She looked beautiful and elegant whenever she danced with my father. I used to love watching them dance. I always describe her as an amazing person and the most talented mother. My younger years with her were the best years of my life, even though she was sick at that time.

My mother was very much attached to her family, so she used to visit her siblings regularly. She had four siblings, three sisters, and one brother. Her parents died during mid-ages when they were young in their ‘60s or ‘70s. From her father's side, she had more brothers and sisters; therefore, she loved to go and pay them a visit.

I remember when I was a child, we used to get dressed and meet her side of the family. She loved it whenever she saw her complete family together. The neighborhood we lived in was quite far from where our family members lived, and so we always used to be accompanied by my aunt because the school that my sisters and I went to was close to my aunt’s house. Thus, every day after school, we would go to our aunt’s house, and my mother used to pick us up. As soon as my brother was born, we moved to another neighborhood for some reason. I still don’t know what reason, but this new place proved to be even worse for us.

Few years after moving to this new neighborhood, my older sister was kidnapped when she was only 14-years-old by a guy who was in his 20s. It was another night of tragedy for the family. I recall that night was horrible for all of us. My mother didn’t know how to tell my father about it. I was eight years old at the time. I recall my mother asked my youngest sister and me to look for her everywhere, but we were not able to find her.

My mother started panicking, and she didn’t know what to do. She asked me to go and look for my sister. At this point, my mother’s body was weak because of so many tumors in her body,