Second chances are not a question, but a necessity. The world relies on second chances, and on thirds and fourths, to keep moving. For the 9-month-old brought from a Cambodia orphanage into a Southwest Ohio home. For the woman who suffered a heart attack before the age of thirty and survived to become a mother. For everyone who was, and is, and will be important to you or I or anyone. Because we make mistakes; we have regrets; we live, and love, and learn. Because we’re human.

My life was built on chances; My even being alive, it seems, was but a brilliant stroke of luck. I was born in 1993 to parents who had been trying for seven years to conceive a child. The woman who was to be my mother had nearly died of a diabetes-induced heart attack only a few years prior. The doctors did not even expect her to be able to carry me to term. She defied them. Against all odds, after seven years of missed chances, a daughter was finally born to them.

Five years later, a little boy comes into our home. A strange, dark-skinned infant, staring wide-eyed at our golden retrievers and still fighting the last days of salmonella contracted overseas. It seems that one good turn for my parents was unlikely to be repeated; they would not conceive another child. After spending three weeks with my grandmother while my parents were away, I came home to see this tiny child they were calling Douglas. For him, a second chance was everything; everything he needed to take him from the rundown orphanage in Phnom Phen, away from the poverty-stricken country to which he was born and the family that couldn’t keep him; everything that allowed him to start a better life in America.

My life with my parents and my adopted brother was relatively normal for the next few years, but that normalcy was not to last. At the age of twelve, the doctors told me I had scoliosis, and had to undergo a major corrective surgery. By my good childhood fortune, I had never had chickenpox or had my tonsils removed, nor had I ever had to wear braces on my teeth; Instead, I would have to wear a brace on my back for six months and relearn the art of walking after being bedridden for a week. Here, again, was I being offered another chance, regardless of how bitter its necessity.

That strange, untoward seventh grade year would not see the last of my hospital stays. By my sophomore year, I had become a successful high school student; involved in my school’s drama club and National Honor Society, an honors student, decently social. It was a Saturday night in June of 2009 when I began to feel the symptoms; sickness, thirst, frequent urination. In two days, it became impossible for me to keep down anything except water. By the time we reached the hospital, I was 85 lbs, completely dehydrated, and practically unconscious.

My mother knew the diagnosis before anything was said. As I lay in the emergency room, I was vaguely aware of nurses rushing around me, but I couldn’t see them, nor feel the needles jabbing into my skin, fruitlessly attempting to find a vein. All I could think of was a terrible thirst, but I was unable to speak and ask for water. Eventually an IV was able to be started somewhere in my leg, or so they tell me. It was hours later that I became aware of what was happening.

When I awoke in the ICU, they told me what I was already fearing myself; I had been diagnosed with type I diabetes. Before I could be moved to a normal room, I had to force dry, hospital-cafeteria chicken nuggets down a still-aching throat. Even this small task seemed enormous, in my state. I didn’t know what time of day it was; even the date was uncertain to me. Nurses came and went as I slipped in and out of sleep. At some point, they moved me to a room with windows.

The next few days were spent speaking to endocrinologists and nutritionists; being told what I could eat, learning how to inject myself. The worst part was the lab workers who came and went at all hours of the night, stabbing my fingers and arms with needles, drawing blood with no regard to pain. I know it was for the best, but it’s easier to see from the outside looking in.

I can’t justify or even begin to discern why I was allowed to stand up from that hospital bed. I don’t know if I am qualified to deem it any act of god, and I know I can’t attribute it to my own boundless determination; at that time, I don’t know if I had that. Since that day, I have been spiteful; I have been sad; I have been every emotion from angry to terrified to simply humble. Mostly I am grateful. The fact that I survived the ordeal, that I have been able to learn to cope with the disease, is why I believe in second chances.

Not only was the world willing to give me another chance, I’m willing to give the world another chance as well. I have been given so many seconds and thirds, so many innumerable chances at life and happiness, it’s only right for me to offer up the same. I have been given the chance to pursue my dreams at the University of Chicago; the chance to become more than my obstacles. To withhold second chances, or thirds, or fourths, from anyone else would be to scorn the good fortune with which I have been blessed. Everyone deserves another chance; whether it be the orphan on the street, or the girl with diabetes; or simply the soul lost in a dark wood on the road of life. Because all of us are human.