How to Overcome Challenges
Imagine for a moment you are high on life because you have just received some amazing news. You continue to ride the high for about 3 months till one day, one very moment, the rug gets pulled out from under you. You are sick from the news, you feel as if it’s all a joke. You feel as if the last 3 months were just a dream you were living and now you feel embarrassed by sharing the news with so many around you.
Just like that! Bam! Gone….
Can you feel it? The high, the excitement, the pride, you are so proud and now it’s all GONE.
What do you do? How do you Overcome Challenges like this?
Well you have two choices as I see it. You can either crawl in a hole, wish that life would just stop for a moment for you to catch your breath, feel sorry for yourself, wonder why, why, why you, make excuses as to why you deserve to shut out the world, blame anyone 3 feet in front of you or you can choose to take the cards that were dealt and walk out even stronger than you were the day you found out the GREAT news.
Let’s be brutally honest here, tell me what would you do? How would you overcome challenges thrown your way? Think of something that would stop you dead in your tracks and ask yourself what would you do?
Well, Bill and I were just stopped dead in our tracks just 2 days ago. If you remember my previous post, Goals 2012, you will see quite a bit of the high that we were on during that post. You might have noticed too, that we were expecting. Yes, I just said we WERE expecting.
On Tuesday, we went to the doctor for what we thought would be a wonderful simple routine visit. As we were walking down the hall to the doctor’s office, a scene we have done quite often with smiles on our faces, we were talking about our plans with little Jr. We called him Jr. even though we still did not know what we were having. In fact, I got a lot of pampering from Bill, by saying, “But, Jr. wants more ice cream, it’s Jr. who is tired, Jr. really wanted to fly first class.” Lol….
But, this day was very different. As we sat in the office joking with the doctor about my mood swings, what I could and couldn’t do on our upcoming cruise and how I detested meat right now we had no idea what we were about to hear.
My doctor said, “OK let’s hear the heartbeat!” I laid back and our doctor stuck a device on my belly and moved it around slowly and said to us, “Well it is 11 weeks and I sometimes can’t hear with this thing, let’s go do an ultrasound.” At this point we really weren’t that concerned since I was clearly having all the symptoms of pregnancy.
In fact the thought of an ultra sound kind of excited us because we would be able to see the baby. So, he led us into the room and I laid down on the table for the nurse. She put this instrument on my belly and stopped immediately and said, “oh have you ever had an ultrasound?” We said “Yes.” She then said, “How many weeks were you when you had the ultrasound?” We told her, “6 weeks and 1 day.” She then got up and said, “Well, I need to enter some stuff in the computer in order to capture pictures for you guys.”
Okay now the concern was getting bigger as she left the room and brought the Doctor in. Back to the machine the nurse went and she put the instrument back on my stomach. At that very moment our doctor looked down at me and said, “Michelle, hold my hand. I don’t like what I am seeing.”
My heart dropped and tears filled up in my eyes. I could barely hear or process the doctor saying, “I’m sorry the baby’s heartbeat has stopped and it looks like it stopped about 3 weeks ago. Michelle, this isn’t your fault, you didn’t do anything. Most of these cases are genetic and it’s nature taking it’s course…….” I couldn’t hear much more after that even though he was still trying to comfort me. I could feel Bill’s head down on my shoulder and tears were flooding my eyes and rolling down my cheeks. All I could think about at that very moment was how our girls were going to react to the news. They were so excited to hear we were expecting a new baby in the family. Now….what in the world was I going to do now. Not to mention how was I going to tell my family, my friends, and how are we going to get through this.
All the excitement for the past 3 months and all the celebrations were just washed away at that very moment. Gone….
You see, life really sucks sometimes and we can’t control the cards we are dealt in life. I know for Bill and I we had two choices. We could be angry with the world. Blame everyone. Retreat to a small corner of life and shut out the world. But, we chose not too.
We both chose to do what we had to do and that was have surgery immediately the next day and pick ourselves up off the ground. Wipe away our tears and move forward.
Life didn’t stop for us and wait for us to recover. No, it kept going on and we had to decide if we were going with it. I bet you probably didn’t even notice that we had gone through such a tragedy because we were still showing our face on Facebook where we conduct our business. We were still emailing our list daily. We could of easily gave it a break and checked out for awhile but in this industry and quite frankly you might think we should have. But, we know if you want to succeed you have to rise above the challenges thrown your way and overcome challenges.
Even though Bill and I have grieved in our own way together and still are we are NOT letting a tragedy in our lives stop us from what we have set out to accomplish.
It’s all up to you on how you can Overcome Challenges
So I write this story to inspire you and hope that you walk away knowing that we are NOT invincible. Life happens to us too and it sucks sometimes. But, Bill and I have a big enough “Why” to know that no matter what cards are thrown our way we will overcome. Life does not stop for us and we know that. We refuse to let challenges break us and bring us down. It’s like the universe puts those challenges there to see if we are strong enough to handle them. They are there to break us but they can’t break the weak. We are strong! We are strong and we know that when challenges come our way it’s our opportunity to come out stronger and wiser. We take the lemons we are dealt and we make some damn good lemonade.
