Park and Ani

Here's comes the hard part

Nurse Gabriela was right about one thing.

I would both love her and hate her.

True to her word, the very day after I first woke up marked the first day of my post-op therapy. Imagine being woken up at the ass crack of dawn, slightly over exaggerating it was nine o'clock but I was tired, and being forced to sit up on your own and make efforts to stand. Any other day this would've been a regular mindless task, but for a 17-year-old girl fresh from brain surgery, this was quite possibly the worst thing I've ever had to do.

Ironic that it's not the first time I've had to deal this process, not many have this issue, but I can't say that I'm not blessed that I made it to two of these post-op therapies.

I get it God. You have some big plans for me. You can stop slamming me with such intense reminders.

Though I wanted to strangle her while she made me stand from my bed, her later gifts of ice cream made the feeling of my brain spilling out of my body a bit better.

The sound of my room door opening and closing wakes me from my nap and I grimace when nurse Gabriela walks into the room. She chuckles at my obvious disdain before checking my IV drip bag.

"Arm out missy," she playfully orders before wrapping the blood pressure cuff around my arm.

I'm distracted from her routine check when the door to my room opens for the second time and my friends all pile into the room. Just like that, my annoyance was wiped clean and I can already feel my smile growing. People always say that some people are in your life for a reason, season, and a lifetime, and if this experience has shown me anything it's shown me that these are the people I'm going to have around for my whole life.

"Ani baby! You're looking simply stunning!" Liza jokes in her awful British impersonation.

I let out a laugh before rolling my eyes at her light-hearted jab. Along with my physical therapy, I've been going through a brief amount of speech therapy, just so they can make sure that my speech comes back unaffected. On the third day of this speech therapy, my mind decided that I was now going to be British because I couldn't stop talking in a sudden perfect British accent, much to my friends' entertainment. While I was busy freaking out over my over pronunciation of 'R's', they were clutching their stomachs shouting out how close to pissing themselves they were.

Little assholes.

Thankfully after a couple of hours, my mind got the memo that I'm a regular American and dropped the accent. However, Liza must not have gotten this memo.

"Very funny Liza." I deadpan, with a slight lisp.

Some words still don't come out right and feel strange on my tongue, but the doctor reassured me that my speech will come around eventually if I continue working at it.

She smiles in return before skipping over to her favorite seat near the window and plopping down into the cushions. Blake, Ryder, Chandler, Wes, and Khalil all file in right after her, each of them giving a quick hello to my nurse before sitting down in their self-claimed seats.

"Alright Imani. You ready?"

Her expression is encouraging and supportive as she slowly pulls down the side railing of my bed. If I'm being honest, I'm not ready for physical therapy, but I told her this morning I didn't want to do today's therapy until my friends got here. I wanted them to see that I'm getting better, so that they could stop being worried and sad all the time, because whether they know I know it or not. I can see on each of their expressions that they're all scared I'm not going to come back the same.