Mid-September of sixth grade is a time most people remember for new notebooks, awkward relationships and the excitement of settling into another school year. For me, it’s the month when everything I understood about being alive was suddenly, sharply rewritten. I had gone to school that morning thinking only about surviving the day. By lunchtime, I was already home, curled up with a headache so fierce it felt like my skull was shrinking around my brain. I figured it was a migraine, maybe a fever. Nothing more than that. But within minutes of lying down, the world went dark.

The seizure itself is a blank space in my memory, I was unconscious for a couple days. I only know what happened because other people told me. I woke up days later in the ICU. Wires, tubes, the steady beeping of machines filled the room, all of it. My mom and stepdad were there. Their faces rightfully worried but happy. They told me I had three seizures – one at home, two more while unconscious. I didn’t know how to feel. They said the doctors believed a simple rhinovirus, the kind that usually just gives you a runny nose, had somehow ambushed my system and nearly won.

What struck me hardest was that I had slept through the danger. While everyone else had been terrified, while doctors worked to stabilize me, while my parents stood helplessly by my bed, I had been getting my beauty sleep. And when I woke up, I was the weight of other people’s fear. The world had kept turning without me, but the version I returned to felt slightly tilted, as if something had shifted.

Before that week, I thought invincibility was a default of childhood. I had always thought, “Bad things happened to other people,” or “This would never happen to me.” After the ICU, that illusion didn’t return. I became suddenly aware of how fragile the body is—how a microscopic virus, something I couldn’t see or fight or even feel until it was too late, could nearly erase me. But the experience didn’t just make me relieved that I was okay. It woke me up.

I started paying attention in a way I hadn’t before. To my health, yes, but also to my time. I realized how easily days blur together when you assume you’ll get endless chances. Lying in that hospital bed, I kept thinking about things I hadn’t done, conversations I’d avoided, moments I’d wasted. When you’re 12, you don’t usually think about how long you’re going to live for. And maybe I didn’t fully grasp it then, but I felt it. It continues to remind me that life is something you notice or you lose.

In the years since, I’ve tried to live with a little more intention. I try to appreciate the ordinary – the fun days we’d have in school, the sound of my friends laughing, even the hum of a classroom on a regular school day. I’m not always successful but the memory of that hospital room pushes me to try. Because once you’ve almost not been here, being here feels a bit like a miracle.