I wish that I could say that this post has nothing to do with the ever so present Coronavirus but unfortunately it does. More specifically, I want to write about my experiences on a ventilator. If we thought about each ventilator as a human life and not some low balled statistic we hear almost daily on the news then maybe more people would take this pandemic seriously. If there is one thing that I can attest to, it is that being on a vent is an absolute nightmare. I feel like when people hear about strangers getting the coronavirus and being placed on a ventilator or respirator to survive, they don’t really understand what that whole situation looks like. It’s a pretty morbid thought process but most people assume things like this are a survival of the fittest scenario. You hear all about the nursing homes being ravished, but I think people need to understand the true horror of what can happen with a respiratory complication.  I was 23 years old. I could run half marathons and swim...

No, I’m not talking about the TV show. This post may come off a little insensitive so I’ll apologize ahead of time. After a traumatic incident you’re faced with two options. You can fight back and push, or you can fold like a lawn chair. You can be a survivor or a victim. Part of me navigating this injury has been finding support groups. My faith. My family. My friends. My doctor. My psychologist. My town. Hell, even my puppy. Social media can be a great tool to find like minded groups of people but it also opens a window into some of the ugliness out there. I’ve seen some pretty shitty people in my relatively short stint in the Army so some of my expectations of people can be pretty low, but somehow someone comes along and sets a new and improved standard. Some of the most toxic people that I’ve had the displeasure of witnessing, unfortunately have been members of a spinal cord injury support page with tens of thousands of “like minded” people on Facebook.  I throw quotations arou...

The dreaded date has once again arrived. February11th. Technically it’s tomorrow. Will it ever becomes just another day? That’s certainly been the goal. But I don’t know if that’s ever going to be possible. It will always be the day that I died. Do I hate it or celebrate it as the day that I persevered above death? I got my chance to look that bitch in the face and tell it to piss off. Maybe I should just ignore it? After all, 3 years is a long time. My scars are fading and my life is improving almost daily. There’s true beauty in the struggle and I’ve been grinding daily since February 11th, 2017. I guess that only time will tell... but it certainly feels like a fog is in the air every year around this day.  However, all of this isn’t even my point for this blog post. Today, I want to focus on how quickly life can change and how delicate it actually is.  February 10th, 2017. Just another Friday. I woke up to my alarm on my $10 Walmart watch. It was 4:45 am so I hit snooze. Th...

Social media is a great tool to use these days for so many different applications. With all of the free time that I have now, I find myself more and more absorbed into it. To be honest, if I didn’t have the blog then I think that I would probably delete my personal Facebook account. It just has it’s claws in me too deeply. The tricky thing about running a blog account is trying to maintain transparency. Is it deceiving if I only post my milestones and good events? What about the days that suck? The days that start and I instantly want to try again the next day? What about those days? The lenses of social media certainly make that pretty tough. Most of what you see on my Facebook and Instagram accounts are my personal leaps and bounds in my recovery process, pictures of my beautiful girlfriend Kass and also a plethora of pictures of my dog Kona. I’ll often post pictures of myself out with friends and family. But what I don’t post enough of, if ever, are the bad days... and believe me th...

Driving Resources:  https://liferollson365.blogspot.com/p/sci-resources.html There’s nothing that quite compares to having one hand on the steering wheel and one hand out the window with the music blaring and a cool cross breeze flowing through a vehicle. Or weaving around backroads on your motorcycle taking in all of the sights and smells while twisting the throttle and hearing the roar of your exhaust pipes echo around. The road was really where I found myself. I spent countless hours cruising without a destination on my Harley or in my truck. I also prided myself in maintaining them both even though one was usually broken down at any given time. I considered myself a wanderer and an explorer. So you can imagine that the prospect of never operating a vehicle on my own again was a pretty hard blow.  I still remember my first time being in a vehicle after my injury. I was still in patient at the hospital and I was having some inflammation around one of my molars. That meant a ...

“There’s no place like home.” I left for the Army right after the 2012 holidays. I rang in the new year (2013) and shipped off to Georgia for basic training. I was so grateful that my ship-off date gave me the chance to celebrate one more holiday season back home. Nothing really compares to being home with family and loved ones after all, right?  I was fortunate enough to be able to come home for the majority of the Christmases while I was away. It always worked out that I had leave days saved up and had the opportunity to come back to New Hampshire. Sometimes it took hinting to my parents that I would need help paying for a plane ticket because I was “Army broke” but we made it work. Dating Kass long distance gave me a new found longing for coming home for the holidays and it was now a necessity. Facebook’s memories always remind me of each year’s holidays because my social media runs rampant this time of year. I came home in 2016 and spent my vacation learning Kass’s family tradi...

It’s not really a secret that winter and I have never really been best friends. Probably a bit of a shock since I grew up in NH where you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a few annual snow storms and a freezing winter season. I was too clumsy for skiing and snowboarding so I stuck to basketball and swimming for winter sports. Mostly to keep indoors, but regardless I’ve generally disliked being cold.   My disdain for the cold has definitely amplified since becoming paralyzed. I’ve hit on temperature regulation in past blog posts but in case you’re new to my blog, a fairly common secondary condition to having a spinal cord injury is difficulty in temperature regulation. My body can no longer sweat or shiver and my blood pressure runs much lower now so I naturally feel cold, especially in my extremities. On top of that, nerve pain and AD can often be mistaken for a cold feeling. If something is aggravating a part of my body that I can’t feel, then my body has a natural response of go...

  Giving Tuesday - a global generosity movement. If you are ever looking to donate our volunteer, please continue in this post to read about some of the non profits that went above and beyond to improve my life.  As a veteran or an active-duty service member it can be very hard to accept help or admit that you may need some assistance with something. It’s also a very present human attribute. Accepting help is hard. This was a huge hurdle for me because of my stubborn attitude and fierce independence. It is very important to remember that people want to help. There are so many nonprofits that were started to help others and it’s as simple as reaching out when you need it. Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride. I am a living testament to this. The Fisher House was a get-away for me while I was inpatient at the hospital but it was so much more than a tranquil place to go. It was a home for my family and a small light in a very dark time. The VA campus in West Roxbury was...

Life is nothing but highs and lows. In the words of Ol’ Blue Eyes “you’re flying high in April, and you’re shot down in May”. But hey, that’s life. And if you don’t know Frank Sinatra then I suggest you listen to his classics. My point is that everybody goes through the ebbs and flows of life. Some Monday’s are great and some absolutely suck... much like today did for me. Kass and I made lodging arrangements for the week so that I could go to a drivers rehab program at the VA to learn how to use hand controls to drive again. We (mostly my hardworking girlfriend) loaded up into the van with a week’s worth of stuff to prep for our hotel stay only to get all the way to the VA and find out that the van is broken down and the rehab was canceled. Typical VA bull shit... but what nobody ever seems to think about is how complex it is for me to stay somewhere outside the comfort of home. The logistics that are required are very stressful, luckily I have a very persistent woman in my life. ❤️ Th...

On February 11th, 2017 Kass got an open invite into the club that no one ever wants to join. She didn’t know it, but she became a WAG of SCI (Wives and Girlfriends of Spinal Cord Injury) the second that .45 hollow point met that bony son-of-a-bitch known as my spine.  I’ve already talked in length about my recovery in the hospital so I won’t hit on everything that Kass and I went through while I was in-patient. What I will talk about is how much we learned and grew during that time. It was extremely trying, especially on Kass who now faced the prospect of redefining her life to help me with mine. What Kass found while in the hospital was a community of extremely helpful, loving and quite frankly, bad-ass women to help her grieve, learn and grow. The importance of a community formed to educate & empower others who have been sucked into a situation as overwhelming as SCI is unrivaled. When Kass & I meet others facing the task of navigating an inter-abled relationship, the f...

“Let me tell ya ‘bout my best friend” Seriously though, what would life be like without dogs? And to appease any of my followers who are cat lovers I’ll say cats too... really just pets in general. I am here to tell you about the benefits of pet therapy. Before my injury, I saw pets as something to cuddle and play with. Growing up, I always had cats (thanks mom). Then in the army, I stayed with my friend who had a beautiful yellow lab / husky mix named Dixie. I would crash on the couch all the time and she would always sleep with me the whole night while I rubbed her tummy. That is where my love for dogs flourished.  While Kass and I were doing long-distance, we would discuss different breeds of dogs and talk about getting one when we lived together. We both agreed that we loved Australian Shepherd‘s and we picked  the name Kona based off of my favorite beer. I wasn’t sure when it would happen, but planning for the future was fun while I prepare to get out of the military. The...

Do you want to know what is incredibly boring? Sitting in a hospital room for a year and a half, that’s what. The first thing that I got back into to kill time in the hospital was gaming on my iPad. It all started years ago. Before I left for the Army, this little mobile game called Clash of Clans came out. I enjoyed it for the fact that I was broke and on my own so I could game on my phone. iPad / iPhone (mobile gaming): My Army buddies gave me hell, and rightfully so. I was too impatient with the app and would actually spend money on it. No F2P here… My Ranger Platoon had a “clan” together. At first it was a cool little way to build some camaraderie and it broke up some of the monotony of the slow days. We would mess around with it during down time but it quickly died off like most apps. But I still play to this day. Supercell created the game and my interests in mobile gaming really caught wind through them. My iPad was a godsend when I was bored in the hospital. It took a lot of...