WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS

The old saying “when it rains, it pours” sums up the past few months for me. It all began going downhill when a family member’s alcoholism nearly drove us insane. It isn’t enough that she stays inebriated all of the time. She’s hell bent and determined to make our lives miserable too. Draining can after can of beer, she succeeded. Not only were her children’s lives turned into a living nightmare from verbal abuse, but mine as well when I tried intervening on their behalf.


We pleaded for her to get help, but she flatly refused even after I offered to stay with her until the detoxification process was over and she had fully recovered. Having already raised her first two children, I now know I’ll be raising her eleven year old son too. I can’t bear the suffering he’s endured, or the tears in his eyes when she passes out in a drunken stupor on the floor.


Several weeks after these recurring incidents, I was rushed to the Emergency Room due to a numbness felt in my left arm and a non-stop tingling in my head. I was diagnosed with an elevated blood pressure of almost three hundred over two hundred and twenty. I was admitted to the hospital because the doctors said I was perilously close to a heart attack and/or stroke. I was terrified! What could I do to help anyone here in the hospital? Who would take care of my family if I died? Would I ever see my loved ones again?


Fortunately, with numerous medications and plenty of much needed rest, I was released from the hospital three days later, the doctors firmly telling me that my stress test was extremely high and that I was to turn my back on anything that might add to my condition. I told them that was highly unlikely, but was warned I would die if I failed to heed the warnings.


Eight days after my release, my daughter’s car was struck by an uninsured motorist. Thankfully she, her husband, their son, and her unborn child weren’t badly injured. My daughter’s ankle was badly sprained, but no injury was done to the others. Being as her insurance only covered ten thousand dollars for the car that had been totaled and she was financially unable to help herself, I bought her a new Caliber, thankful that I hadn’t lost my loved ones.

The downpour didn’t stop there. Due to immense stress, I was hospitalized three times within the following six weeks for high blood pressure. Again I was warned that the stress I was under was going to kill me if it wasn’t controlled, and again I was fearful.

My father and most of my family and friends are doing all they can to help alleviate the stress, which in some way increases it, for it makes me worry they’ll suffer similar fates in their concern for me.

I can’t say all of the rain that’s fallen has been bad though, for within the next three years six more of my novels and poetry books are going to be published, proving there’s a beautiful rainbow behind the dark clouds. So when the rain seems never-ending, strive to look past the darkness and search for your own rainbow. I’ve found mine in family, my sisters and friends at WDC, and faith in God Almighty. Storms never last if that faith is kept alive.

*577 word count*