Seriously OMG WTF?

Do you ever have one of those experiences when so many things had to align for it to even happen?  I had one of these today on the tiny commuter bus that traipses around our little town: the Just Tram.  Sometimes I take this wee little shuttle up the big hills to get to the preschool to pick up Monkey Lou.  Sometimes I schlep up these big hills with my double stroller and grab another bus for the final stretch (it is very steep, and I don't like to get all sweaty...Spain is toasty in March).  But, today I opted for the JT.

The JT is full of retirees (jubilats, as they call them here), and rarely does one see someone under the age of 65 aboard.  But today, on the stop after mine, a woman boarded and asked the bus driver which stop she needed to get off at for the Escola Canigó (a local elementary school).  I recognized that she had an accent, and she looked to be an extranjer, like me, so I told her, in English, that I was also getting off at that stop, and I'd be happy to show her.  We chatted a bit, and I found out she was going for a job interview to teach English at the private Catalan school at the top of Sant Just, our town.  The conversation evolved somehow to how we plan to educate our own children, being of bilingual English-Catalan families, and I mentioned that Monkey has some language delay issues.  She responded that her daughter is also behind in language.  We realized that both of our daughters are about the same age, and then chatted about speech therapy.

We got off the bus, and I said something along the lines of the fact that Monkey's language delay is due to her epileptic issues.  She turned and looked at me, stating that her daughter also has epilepsy.  In fact, that she has a very similar, if not the same, type of epilepsy as Monkey Lou.

The strange bit of this is, and we were both a bit shell-shocked, is that their type of epilepsy is rare.  Very rare.  As in one in 150,000 rare.  As in, in the entire world, a population of 7 billion, only about 45,000 people have this kind of epilepsy.  As in, in the city of Barcelona, a population of 1.5 million, only about 10 people have this kind of epilepsy.

Now you see why I was freaking out a bit.  In this city, there is a little girl, about the same age as Monkey Lou, who has basically the same struggles as she does, and her mother speaks ENGLISH!!!!!!!!!

And had I not decided to be lazy and take the JT, and instead hauled myself up the hills today, I never would have met this woman.  Had she grabbed the JT twenty minutes earlier or twenty minutes later, we never would have crossed paths.

I got her email before she headed into her interview.  Are we destined to be great friends?  Who knows.  But I am hoping it will help my mental state somewhat to have someone to talk to (IN ENGLISH!!!!!) that has the vaguest idea of what I go through every day.

I'm not a big spiritual person (my poor, frustrated mother can attest heartily to this), but sometimes, something makes you believe that there are things on this Earth a workin' that are much bigger than your own small self.