A Horrible Experience I Don’t Regret

illustration by Maria Tapia

“Everything happens for a reason.” I’ve never understood this maxim. It’s vague and confusing. It feels like a half-assed proverb someone made up just to make themselves feel better. Even when I was a kid bouncing (or sleeping) in the pews at church, when I heard this saying, it frustrated me. Six-year-old me wanted answers, concrete explanations to life, and I found myself at nineteen pining over the desire to find the same knowledge. 

When I was 12, I bent down and touched my toes in a my pediatrician's office, the doctor, who didn’t get angry when I puked on her shoes during my first bout with the stomach flu or coaxed me when I had a misplaced panic attack over contracting swine flu, informed me of a curvature in my spine. Checking one more time, she brought my mother’s hands to trace my back, to feel how the body she created was beginning to deteriorate right underneath her flesh and there was little for her to do to stop it. “It’s good we caught it early, you won’t need to get a spinal fusion.” The YouTube videos that still make my stomach turn to this day would reveal this meant a series of rods and screws would be affixed to my spine. There was little I could do or even little my childhood hero, my pediatrician, could do besides leave me with a referral to an orthopedist. I don’t remember much from this period of time, but as I walked back to the car that day with my mother and sister, my sister put her hand knowingly on my shoulder. I crumpled in that parking lot, uncertain of the future rocking my body. I think my logic rested upon the fact that if I cried hard enough, if I hyperventilated just right, the shock alone would reset my bones.

But that wasn’t the case. When middle school was supposed to usher in an age of pure awkwardness, I bounced from doctor to doctor, hearing only fragments of my ailments. Following my scoliosis diagnosis, I immediately began wearing a back brace that, at least, was blue and promptly became plastered with emoji stickers to reaffirm my inherent swagger at the age of 13. There were nights that the brace took a toll on me and I swear I could feel it beg my bones to shift, bargaining and willing my body to mold into something it could never be, leaving only patches of raw skin in its wake. There were whispers of a 32 degree curve turning into a 56 degree one (since I’m an overachiever at heart) between doctors and parents, leading to the dreaded spinal fusion surgery. 

Again, I don’t remember much from these two years that stretched out so I experienced every second for the excruciating potential it had because I think in a surprising turn of events my body didn’t want to fail me completely and allot me the space to just…forget. I do, however, remember the anesthesiologist’s clammy hands that haphazardly held mine when she put me under to place metal in my bones. I remember the nurse wiping the tears off my cheeks. I remember the doctor telling me to count backwards from 10 and then it would all go dark. Just before I was about to fade into nothingness, a dreamless slumber, the nurse bent down and whispered: “Everything happens for a reason.”

And when I woke up, I remembered this promised proverb and couldn’t understand it. What was the lesson in relearning to walk again? What was the value in waking up, screaming in pain, pressing a red button for temporary release? What was the lesson in the pity saturating my visitors’ eyes besides receiving an ungodly amount of flowers? I grew more confused, and loopy due to a concoction of medication that did little to mitigate the agony in my body, and I once again found myself searching for answers. 

At the time, I was a, although terrible, dedicated athlete, pushing my body to physical confinements in the name of bettering my skills. This, of course, shifted in light of my surgeries and lying in the hospital bed, I found myself not missing the early mornings, protein bars, and jerseys. I felt nothing towards a sport that once meant everything. I turned to my sense of humor because it was the only aspect of my life that formed any semblance of sense and I found the story ideas riddling my Notes apps forming lives in notebooks. I figured that I couldn’t understand the state of my body, something I was slowly losing control of due to a consistent losing battle to chronic pain. I thought I could formulate meditations on the world around me in an attempt to find reasoning behind it all.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I won't find that. I didn’t find it laying in a hospital bed or on car rides to the Emergency Room when I couldn’t walk, and I am insecure in my ability to find it now. Because in spite of it all, I do believe it now. I do believe everything happens for a reason. I don’t know what omniscient force up in the sky, or whatever you chose to believe, pulls the strings to make life fall in a way that can hurt in all the right ways yet also in a profound sense, seem to align in such a manner. But without those long nights in the hospital, I wouldn’t be who I am now or where I am now. “Everything happens for a reason,” makes more sense in my brain than spending hours searching for concrete meaning, because when we’re all spinning on a floating rock in space, is there any answer better than that?