Personal Narrative Essay

This is a personal narrative essay I wrote for my freshman English class in college. I received a perfect score on the essay, so I thought I'd share it here for anyone who's interested in reading it. The formatting is going to be a little messed up, because steemit doesn't support double-spacing / indentation.

Joshua Monk
English 1101 Online
02-03-2019
Adventures of a First-time Home Buyer

Four years ago, I drove down to St. Joseph’s Emory Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, for an appointment with the cardiologist, Dr. Emmet. He listened to my heart through the stethoscope for a few minutes before delivering his fateful diagnosis. He informed me that I needed a procedure called mitral valve repair, a type of open heart surgery, to rebuild a bad valve flap in my heart. He recommended that I get it done by the eminent cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Douglas Murphy at the same hospital.

I was only twenty-nine years old, and I wasn’t prepared for the news. I walked out of the hospital in shock that day, and for several days thereafter, I was overwhelmed by fear and doubt. Since the surgery was going to cost nearly one hundred thousand dollars, and I was worried that my insurance wouldn’t cover it, or that they would force me to have it done at a lower-rate facility. As it turned out, all of my fears were unjustified. I successfully scheduled the surgery in no time, and four months later, I drove down to the hospital again for the most important appointment of my life. I got the best medical care in the world under Dr. Murphy, and the surgery was a total success.

It was more than a life-saving operation; it changed my entire outlook on life. My wife, Ashley, and I started looking at houses together a few months into my recovery. At first we were just looking for fun, but after I secured financing through a local lender, we began to take the house hunt seriously.

There was less than a thousand dollars in our bank account, and by all traditional financial advice, we were not ready or capable of buying our first home yet. However, that didn’t stop us from exploring our options. We wanted to see what was out there, and we refused to take no for an answer.

We searched a wide radius, from Jasper in the east, to Cave Spring in the west. After diligently searching the internet listings for a few weeks, we found a place in Bremen that we thought could work for us and put an offer on it. This was our first official offer, and we were excited when they conditionally accepted it. The house was a fixer-upper, therefore we decided to have a professional inspector come out and look it over. The inspection turned up far too many problems, and I was forced to back out of the deal.

Ashley was upset about this, because she loved the place, and I made the final call without her. We were out three hundred dollars from paying for the inspection and beginning to feel out of options. There were only so many places for sale in the radius we were searching that met our criteria, and we already knew about all of them.

We spent the whole weekend looking at all the house listings we saved, but none of them were going to work for us. Finally, when we were on the verge of giving up hope that Sunday evening, only two days after we backed out of the deal in Bremen, we remembered a listing that we found the previous week. We scratched it off the list initially because the asking price was one hundred and fifty-nine thousand, which was right at the upper limit of what I could borrow. We decided to give it a second look now. We didn’t have anything to lose.

It was a quaint four-bedroom farmhouse in Cave Spring, which is a small town twenty miles south of the city of Rome. The house was on a dead-end street, surrounded by woods. The three-acre yard was flat, full of tall, old oaks and pines, with clear views of the river nearby. It looked like an ideal place to raise a family, and all of the kids loved it when we showed them the listing. I called my agent, Jessica, that night, and got her to put an offer on it without even looking at it in person first.

The owner, Wilma, got back to us that same night and accepted our offer. I couldn’t believe it. We didn’t know it at the time, but someone had just backed out of an offer on the place earlier that day. As fate would have it, it looked as though we had found our dream home.

After three long months of stressful haggling with the lender, that I couldn’t have navigated without Ashley’s brilliant guidance, we finally closed on the place and started the next chapter of our lives. I still recall the utter disbelief I felt when I was first handed the keys. Just a short while ago, I was lying on a hospital bed, not sure if I would live or die. Now I was standing in my dream home, not entirely sure how I got there.