Waiting Rooms

I never thought that at 29, I’d be in a Vanderbilt waiting room with someone I love dearly for a third time.

Yet here I am in yet another waiting room.

The first Vanderbilt waiting room was with my mom, before she had surgery for sarcoma, caused by her radiation treatment when she had breast cancer. We were miraculously blessed in these waiting rooms; the surgery that had only a 20% chance of success was successful, and my mom just walked in the Race For The Cure, celebrating 10 years since her battles with cancer began.

The second Vandebilt waiting room was with my college newspaper family, as we waited to hear news of our good friend Jamie who had been in a terrible car accident. About a week after the accident, Jamie was taken off life support and passed away. I was actually at the hospital in a waiting room with his grandparents when the doctor came out to tell us he had died.

This third Vanderbilt waiting room is with my husband, in the neurology wing, as we wait to talk to a neurosurgeon about brain surgery for my husband’s second cerebral hemorrhage of his life.

In this waiting room right now, thinking of the past waiting rooms and the waiting rooms I will be in in the coming months with my husband‘s surgery, I feel some kind of heaviness and exhaustion I didn’t expect to feel at 29.

Someone once told me that I had the most optimistic personality they had ever met, and they wondered if there was anything I couldn’t put a positive spin on. I think about this person saying this to me a lot in moments like this. I do like to think I’m a positive person, at least out loud. I do have a tendency to force a smile even when I sure as hell don’t want to, at least for a lot of people around me in my daily life.

But in this waiting room on this day at this hour, I have a hard time faking a smile because I really just want to break down and scream that it’s not fair, that I paid my dues already, that spending hours and days in waiting rooms with my mom and with Jamie was enough.

But that’s not what happened. I stepped away to go to the bathroom and as I was washing my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror and was startled by what I saw.

I didn’t see a girl about to break, or a girl who is exhauste, or a girl who can’t handle this third waiting room, like I thought I would see.

I saw someone who is strong enough for this third waiting room. I saw a fierceness this time that maybe I didn’t have the two times before this, or maybe the two other waiting rooms grew and pushed this fierceness out. I saw someone who is sure of herself this time around, who is sure not only of who she is as a person, but who she is in Christ.

I didn’t see timidity or whining or despair. I saw boldness and determination and hope. I was proud of that face.

Three waiting rooms is three too many. But I loved and love each of the three people I have been in these rooms for enough to be in these rooms.

I’m grateful for the relationships that brought me into these waiting rooms. I’m grateful for the exhaustion I feel right now because it means I‘ve loved often and I’ve loved hard.

I am still utterly exhausted - mentally, physicall, and honestly spiritually - and probably will be for a while, until my husband has recovered from his brain surgery.

But I can handle that.