From Calamity to Opportunity

The other day I had quite an eye-opening conversation with an acquaintance of mine. She's actually my supervisor at the hospital and she was telling me about her med school experiences. So, what happened was that she was in her 5th year of med school in Ecuador and she went up to the mountains for a day trip. Upon her descent, she felt her throat start hurting and once she got to the bottom of the mountain, she could no longer speak... all that came out of her mouth when she tried was a wheezing sound. The next day, she went to class and she was called to the front of the classroom to present a powerpoint. She got to the front, looked at her professor, looked at the slide, opened her mouth to speak, and no sound came out. She got pretty teary-eyed while telling me this... I can only imagine how traumatizing that must have been.

So, she came to America, met with doctors, and found out that she had paralyzed her right vocal cord. After extensive physical therapy, she learned how to use just one vocal cord to speak, and until this day, her voice has not completely recovered. Her year-long stay in the US made her reluctant to return to med school in Ecuador, and she ended up staying in NY, getting a psychology degree (psyD.), getting married, raising a family, and working in a pediatric psych ward. And she feels blessed for the path to which God led her, giving her the ability to dedicate time to building both her family and her career, and giving her a life in which she appreciates every blessing she has, from her voice to her vision.

This reminded me of something that I learned while taking The Rays of Faith, taught by Shaykh Waleed Basyouni (an Islamic seminar about the pillars of faith)-- how no matter how terrible something may seem, there is ALWAYS more good in it than bad. And that we must always have faith in God's wisdom, never questioning it, but rather being sure of the good to come. May we all be able to implement this concept into our lives when a positive outlook seems like an impossibility in the face of an apparent calamity.