Today is my 24th birthday, whew feels weird to say. Where does the time go?!

Exactly one year ago today, to the hour in fact, I was sitting in the emergency room at Forsyth Hospital being pumped full of benadryl and steroids to stop my throat from closing. Isaac took me to a nice dinner at a steak house in town and two sips into my pomegranate martini, I knew something was very wrong. The restaurant had used egg white in the sour mix. Off to the hospital we went and I spent my 23rd birthday laying in stained, itchy, hospital sheets trying to concentrate on each and every breath. I still have the hospital bracelet for sentimental reasons. Courtney R Peterson DOB: 3/22/87 Date: 3/22/10.

Almost exactly eight years ago, I laid in the ER in Fairfax, Virginia. The clothes were cut from my body and I was receiving CPR from a doctor who was about to give up and use a defibrillator to restore my heartbeat to a normal rate.

There have been countless “close calls” between each incident, so needless to say, I am beyond thankful for  another year of life. All morning while getting ready from work, I couldn’t stop smiling and thinking of all the memories I have made and experiences I have been blessed enough to have. High school (as traumatic as it was), college, SCUBA diving, working with dolphins, getting a broken heart, falling in love, buying my first car, catching up with old friends, watching my little sisters grow up, watching my older sisters belly swell with my first nephew! How lucky am I to know the joy and pain that life can bring.  I feel immensely grateful for every single breath I have been given because I know how quickly it can be taken away.

The following is from a documentary I watched earlier today. What perspective it provides!

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

– Richard Dawkins