I hope that by better understanding her illness, I will be able There are many lessons to be taken away from reading The Center Cannot Hold. The lesson that I found most important was the importance of your experiences with your health care…
I cried as she retold her stories of being in and out of the hospital. I thought to myself how could a young girl at such a young age endure all this pain and suffering. Questions arose and my perception of the world changed. How can the world have people who are so cruel? As my tears rolled down my chin…
Journalist: Why do you think people come here? Joey: When people think of the local music store, they think of the past. Our society has moved so much towards an online presence to where people click buttons and have stuff delivered to them. I think that the average customer has a yearning to participate in a local community, a store that is somewhat connected to the arts.…
In small-town Mississippi, I was always taught that being Conservative was the only way to be and that thinking any other way would go completely against my religion. That being said for the majority of my life I believed I was a Republican until I turned 16 and realized that I agree with very little of what Conservatives do. I now consider myself to be an Independent who leans liberal and the thought of changing my views is pretty unfathomable at this point. However, if I really had to contemplate doing that I would have to consider my few objections to the typical view of Liberals, and that would mostly have to deal with my thoughts on abortion.…
After a long seven-hour car ride, we were finally here, in the Upper Peninsula. Looking out the window of our truck, I knew it was truly different than the big city I grew up in. Not many kids get to experience what happened to me the summer before my second-grade year, but it definitely changed my life for the better. When we first pulled into our new driveway, I could not believe what I was seeing. I can remember seeing a little farm house with about five horses in our backyard.…
Have you ever felt that life is literally too short or that every event in your life went by so quickly? My seventh grade year was like that. Back in fifth grade, I was always nervous about going to the other side of the school building. Whether it was the snicky sock smell of the hallways, the height of the eighth grade boys, or just scary bumping into one of the teachers, that was scary. At the end of sixth grade, I was terrified about what was coming.…
In my childhood, I went to Nerd Camp at Northwestern during the summer. While I was there, I fell in love with Northwestern’s environment, especially the city of Evanston. I knew that I wanted to apply there in the future. Of course, a few three-week long stays at Northwestern wasn’t enough for me to learn what being an undergraduate student there is like, but during my transition from Nerd Camp Student to High School Student, and now to College Student, I’ve also realized the academic benefits Northwestern offers.…
In the United States each year 55,227 people die of pneumonia. 1 In February of 2015 my mother became part of that statistic. There came a time while she was in the hospital where a decision to stop the machines that were keeping her alive had to be made. Having to make such a choice changed who I was.…
When I was younger I done so many things that I totally regret. I’ve done some illegal things that I expected to never do. It was my eighth grade year during winter when I was at my friends house. We both were just chilling then out of nowhere, he took out a bag with a pill bottle inside it. Now I know I am not supposed to speak about this since it’s illegal, but this was a one time thing.…
I vividly remember the first day of sixth grade; I looked at my schedule just “knowing” I would switch out of the “Odyssey of the Mind” class, especially since I had never even heard of it before. I had no idea that exactly two years later I would be the one standing in the middle of the Iowa University stadium, performing in front of hundreds of other passionate competitors from over a hundred countries around the world. I have always been good at painting, drawing, and coming up with witty answers to teacher's questions. However, only a few other students understood what I was saying. I was never able to put my creative skills to good use, besides the rare once-a-quarter projects we would have.…
I was traveling with Catherine, Jingbo, Coco, and Coco’s mom—people I had only met the week before; Dongzhou, Randing, and Luosang were our guides. Initially, our sole intention was to spread environmental awareness to the Yushu area. However, during our tree-hugging mission, we were also able to observe the local culture and lifestyle, and somewhere along the line, the strangers I explored Yushu with became my friends. The vehicle encountered every bump in the road as we drove into the mountains.…
The entire experience was so extraordinary and made me feel uncomfortable the whole time. I noted that Giovanna was nervous and that made me anxious with me not knowing what was going to take place. When getting on an elevator I’m not accustom to having my back exposed to the forward-facing view of the elevator plus being in front of people I don’t know. I like to know who’s getting on the elevator etc. This is something I would typically not do on an elevator, especially with it being a closed space.…
I cannot recall one singular day of my seventeen years of life in which my family has not had to worry about finances. We have never lived in a house, rather we have had to drift from apartment to apartment, never planting any roots. The longest period I have ever lived in one location was five years, which means not even one-third of my life has been spent in a consistent home. Regardless of not knowing if I would have a place to sleep every night, I still tried my very best at school. I always saw education as a sort of reprieve from daily life, because even though we might not have enough money for food at home, learning was always free.…
Imagine yourself, biking through flat, green farmland, with windmills scattered along the canals. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing and you see cows, eating the grass in the fields. The smell of cow is real and sometimes a little strong. This is where I found myself in August of 2015, when my family and I were on a vacation in Europe. My dad really wanted to bike through Holland, so here we were, panniers on the back of our bikes, on day two of biking from The Hague to Utrecht, a distance of about seventy-five kilometers.…
Janene Carey’s mother was battling a terminal illness that had spread through her whole body. Janene took care of her mother as she slowly deteriorated at the hands of cancer. As time went on the cancer got more aggressive and eventually her mother was unable to talk, eat on her own, walk, and was bedridden (Northern Daily Leader, 2014). This is not a life; this is patiently waiting for the inevitable to happen, all while a person slowly loses themselves. Unfortunately, the terminally ill are forced to live their lives out no matter how long this painful process may take.…