I kneeled beside my lit­tle brother, hold­ing his bloody hand and watch­ing as the white towel pressed against his head quickly turned crimson.

“Please don’t take him, please don’t take him,” I repeated over and over in my head.

Moments before, my brother Andrew had been struck in the head at close range by a metal dis­cus weigh­ing almost four pounds. He was hit, stag­gered back­ward, and then col­lapsed to the ground.

Blood was lit­er­ally flow­ing from a four inch long gap on his fore­head; luck­ily, my brother remained conscious.

An ambu­lance arrived and took Andrew to the hos­pi­tal. I sat cry­ing in the wait­ing room while a doc­tor ban­daged his head. I went in and stood next to my dad at my brother’s bed­side. I couldn’t stop cry­ing, even when the brain sur­geon entered the room to explain what was going to happen.

Small pieces of Andrew’s skull were lodged in his brain. The sur­geon made two inci­sions to remove the shards and insert a tita­nium mesh plate. After that, a pedi­atric plas­tic sur­geon worked on the sur­gi­cal site to decrease the promi­nence of the scars.

The oper­a­tion went smoothly. I sat next to Andrew’s bed as he lay sleep­ing with 42 new stitches in his head.

What the sur­geon told us after the oper­a­tion, about where on the head my brother was hit, shook me to my core: “Two cen­time­ters lower and he would have been dead. Two cen­time­ters to the right and he would have been dead.”

This made me really think about life. It’s strange to think in terms of its fragility. We’re all two cen­time­ters from death; we are close to death every moment we’re breathing.

We, as col­lege stu­dents, are at a point in our lives when our brains tell us we are invin­ci­ble, so that’s exactly the way we live our lives. We drink too exces­sively, drive too fast, smoke too much, neglect our bod­ies’ needs too often and expect no consequences.

With an unknown amount of time left on earth, why not take advan­tage of the moments we still do have? It’s impor­tant to live life to the fullest, but also to under­stand bound­aries and that you could lose every­thing in the blink of an eye. This sounds so cliché, but it’s true. Yet liv­ing life to the fullest doesn’t involve just being happy all the time and tak­ing adven­tures; it also involves being con­tem­pla­tive and reflec­tive of your life.

Every time I see the scar across Andrew’s fore­head, I am reminded that life is a pre­cious gift that is all too often taken for granted.