Perspective

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 consider that a miracle in itself considering all of the stupid stuff that I did. Fast forward five years to 21-year-old Josh. I had mentioned a car accident a few post back when I first started this blog. I had been getting ready to go to an Army leadership school known as Ranger School. I had been in a Special Operations unit, Ranger Battalion, and it was my time to shine and go to this coveted school. Before I was supposed to leave, my brother and I were T-boned in a car accident and I had taken most of the impact. At first it felt like nothing but I had actually done some decent damage to my neck and shoulder. I messed around with a serious ankle sprain in my youth and payed the price so I knew not to do it with this. I took this injury very seriously (almost too carefully) and so did my doctor, Battalion physical therapist and my unit’s nurse case manager. Unfortunately my company leadership didn’t have the same mindset (I ended up burning some bridges there with some toxic leaders) and I ended up moving to a different company to focus on physical therapy. I was placed in the battalion staff room working with a lot of high-ranking officers and enlisted men. I did a lot of the grunt work for them as far as making sure their supplies were taken care of and I was placed in charge of maintaining 3 pickup trucks and vans and ensuring that they always had transportation ready. It was a shit job compared to the cool-guy stuff that I had been doing but I was treated like a grown man there with the full understanding that I was there to make all of my physical therapy appointments and get better, that way I could keep being a Ranger. After a full year of physical therapy, it was decided that I was not going to make it back to the point where I could jump out of planes again and because of that, I had two options. I could finish my Army contract doing mundane work or I could leave the unit and go to a non Special Operations unit. This was a blow to my ego but ultimately I wanted to finish my Army contract doing what I enlisted for. This leads me into where I am now.

Right now I am sitting on my iPad tapping away with a stylus, one letter at a time. I am trying to think about how this bit of background story can tie into the “perspective” that I want to hit on in this post. Truthfully, it just shows that each injury I’ve had in my life gives me a different perspective about my life. My sprained ankle gave me perspective about my neck injury which ultimately gave me perspective about being paralyzed. In the hospital, I met a plethora of injured veterans, especially in the paralyzed community. All of us being veterans meant that we didn’t hold back much about our injuries. I heard and met so many people with so many different stories and it really put into perspective what I have and what I  had lost in becoming paralyzed. Being paralyzed really put into perspective everything that I had taken for granted, which is why I actually started this blog. I wanted to show people that they should respect their bodies and what they do have. However, I realized shortly into this injury that I wasn’t respecting what I actually still have and am able to do. 

When I first woke up in the hospital, I was angry and crippled and had no idea how drastically changed my life now was. I don’t think that anyone did. I was so self indulged in the fact that I was now handicapped that I failed to notice the others around me who had it worse than I did. The first thing that I noticed was missing from my normal wardrobe (besides all of my clothing) was a black metal bracelet that most veterans can tell you about. I wear a bracelet in remembrance of a Ranger friend that was killed during a training event a few weeks before Christmas leave in 2015. Thinking about my old friend and his family somehow helped me to realize how ignorant I was being. Here I was bitching about my new life when I have friends that would give anything to be given a second chance, even if it meant being in a wheelchair. I decided then to live my life to it’s fullest because of those who can’t. 

Even though I had made the personal decision to live life to the fullest, I would still get very frustrated with setbacks. With the injured part of my spine being so high towards my brain, I have lost a significant amount of function in my body. Realistically, a C-4 Quadriplegic (where I am at on the ASIA scale (look it up)) should not have any wrist function and very limited diaphragm function. Granted I only have slight movement in my wrist and some trouble catching my breath sometimes, the fact that I am breathing on my own and not on a ventilator machine is an absolute gift from God. 

I absolutely hate being in a power wheelchair. I wish more than anything for the upper body strength and function to push myself in a smaller, much more practical manual chair. That being said, what puts this thought into perspective for me is that there are a lot of people in power chairs who cannot move a single muscle. Eventually I will be able to get into a different wheelchair but others will not. On top of that, most high level quadriplegics have to drive their wheelchair using a device called a sip-n-puff. Essentially it is a straw that powers the chair when the user uses different types of breaths. I am fortunate where that never needed to be a case with me, although I was damn close (just an inch higher).

Another circumstance that keeps my thoughts in line has to do with brain injury. I hear it all the time... “with the amount of blood that you lost, it’s a miracle that you don’t have any brain damage”. Maybe the secret is that I’ve always had a bit of brain damage? It is true though. It is an absolute miracle that my brain is still performing at its peak. I owe some praise to my brother for that one, even though he hates getting recognized more than anything. His CPR likely kept enough blood flowing to my brain to keep it from being damaged. I met a man with a TBI (traumatic brain injury) during my stay in the hospital. He had fallen down a set of stairs... It’s as easy as that. One man was simply getting a haircut when a construction crew next door shot a nail through the wall and into his neck. You just never know.

My point of this post is to keep everything into perspective. Most people, including myself get caught up in the day to day. My advice (coming from hindsight) is that none of the mundane bullshit really matters. Make the most out of your life and respect your body and all that it comes with. Life is extremely fragile and no matter how bad you think something is, chances are that someone has it worse. Respect that fact and keep your life in perspective.

God Bless.