Relearning and Reclaiming


How do you live your life? You learn how to live your life a certain way from the moment that you are born. I don’t mean that you learn to be nice or to respect others, but that you learn to breathe, walk and move. You learn how to associate certain muscles with other muscles to make a movement. There are over 650 muscles in the human body and they all work together and are controlled by nerves. So you can imagine that my muscles are pretty messed up. 


During my time in the hospital, I met an older Vietnam War veteran named Eric and I was blown away by his optimism. He was in the same boat (or wheelchair) as I was but his injury wasn’t as severe. One day we were sitting in the day room and he said something that I really took to heart. He asked me “how many people get the chance to relearn everything? To truly rediscover their own bodies?”. He said it as if we were the lucky ones and I was pretty taken aback. 

At the time, I could pretty much do next to nothing for myself. I either had my mom, dad or girlfriend by my side and they would help me with everything. They would feed me because I couldn’t lift my hand to my face without losing balance and falling over. They would scroll through Facebook and Instagram for me because I couldn’t figure out how to use the touchscreen (funny because I am now writing my own blog now right?). They would stay in my room with me and wake up at random ungodly hours of the night to pull up my blanket or turn on my fan. These are just a few things that I can think of but my point is that between my loved ones and the nurses, I was essentially having everything done for me. A lot of it was (and still is the case with some things) due to my new fear of trying something and failing.

What I needed was confidence which was new for me. I was extremely confident before my injury. Almost to a cockiness. Now I was scared to lean forward in my wheelchair because I would fall and get stuck with my chest to my knees. 

Essentially I had to think about everything from a whole new mindset. If I wanted to pick something up, I now had to pinch it with the palms of my two hands. If I wanted to move my pillow in bed, I now had to bite it and twist my head to move it. I text with the knuckle of my pinky finger. I use the tip of my nose to work my Apple Watch. As I progress with this injury I learn different tricks to help with my day to day living. I had to start reclaiming my life and here is what helped me (other than trial and error).

A few of the best things that have helped me “relive” my life have been simple, yet powerful additions. The first thing that helped me get back to a norm was to develop a lenient day to day schedule. Just having a set time for certain things instead of a hectic, sporadic life of hospital living gave me a great morale boost. The second jump back to normalcy for me was getting my pet dog. Having something to take care of and watch after that wasn’t myself was and is incredible. Kona (my puppy) really breaks up the mundaneness of the day and taking her for walks (I call them rolls) helps me feel like I’ve regained some independence. The third thing is therapy. You can imagine that I have a lot of therapy associated with this injury and just performing any physical activity makes me feel great. After I use the arm bike once I feel like a macho man that has to walk sideways through doorways and can take naps on my traps. The fourth thing that has helped me return to normalcy is this blog. Typing out my thoughts is very therapeutic for me and hopefully reading my thoughts has been therapeutic for all of you as well. Another, simple tool that has helped me is my E-Reader. Personally I never wanted to conform to an electronic book but my current circumstances dictate some change. Getting lost in books has helped fill a lot of gaps in my day. I am sure that other things will help me soon, such as work and school but these are currently what got me back on my feet (not literally 😑).

This post is more of a crash course in what has helped me return to a tranquil life. My point here is that “life rolls on”. How you handle change and challenges is up to you but life will always keep moving forward. There is always an after. Everyone will have a different list of what helps them day to day but I hope that my small list will help in some way. 

God Bless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

The Day It All Changed

Image
It was a Saturday morning. I woke up in my brother’s apartment and rolled my sore body off of his couch (AKA my bed). I opened my shattered iPhone 5 to send a good morning text to Kass. It was already 1:30 on the East Coast so I felt like a real jerk for sleeping in. Goodness, I was sleeping well though. I got up and started on a cup of coffee and filled Jake’s (pet cat) bowl with wet food. Hannah (Zach’s wife and my sister-in-law) must have heard Jake. Either that or her ridiculous coffee senses were tingling because she zombied her way into her kitchen to start on her coffee. We heard the roar of Zach finding consciousness from the bedroom and he worked his way into the kitchen to greet us. We started brainstorming what we were going to do on our day off. My brother and our friends had just gotten back from Afghanistan so whatever we did needed to include them.  Why not go to the shooting range? This “range” was an abandoned hillside-turned-shooting-range about an hour from the apa
Read more

Family Friday - Kass

Image
Happy Friday everyone! I have to admit that the idea of doing a Fam Friday post intimidates the heck out of me. I avoid stirring up old emotions as much as I can because it can be a dangerous hole to fall into. That being said, after seeing how therapeutic this blog is for Joshua, I think I can handle one little post 😉   I’m assuming most readers are familiar with our story. Joshua and I crushed long distance for 2 years on opposite sides of the country. We made the most of every phone call, face time and text message. We lived for every visit we had, whether that was in NH with family or him spoiling me on adventures and nonstop dates in Washington. One month before he was supposed to come home to me, I got news that sent our lives into a bazillion different directions. The night of February 11, 2017 was the most horrifying, heart-wrenching, traumatizing night of my life. The time between finding out Josh was shot and in critical condition to actually landing at SEATAC the nex
Read more

Perspective

Image
I’ll start this one out by talking about small injury I had in my sophomore year in high school. I had just made the junior varsity baseball team and we were getting ready for a stadium game that we played once a year. About a month prior I had sprained my ankle and tore two of the three ligaments that hold that sucker together. It was a pretty serious sprain but I downplayed it a lot in order to stay on the team as their starting first baseman. Because I had downplayed it so much, I had done some actual permanent damage and would have to deal with ankle pain and random joint clicks for the rest of my adult life. This injury and my actions in dealing with it would really put into perspective my next serious injury. At the time the only thing that seemed important was high school baseball. 16-year-old Josh didn’t really think much about the future. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake the next time I had an injury. I had always been fortunate enough to avoid any serious injuries. I c
Read more