Blog Post 4 - Are you in love with this me, or am I?

Welcome to the new, redefined you. Are they any better than the previous, uninjured version of you? Probably not yet, unfortunately. Of course, that depends on how long it has been! Who determines if this new version of you is any better?

After all, do you have an intact cognition that remembers that far back, or can even process the critical thinking and self-awareness involved in such an introspective determination such as this?

For me, I often longed to have my old life and body back. How could I not? While lying there most nights, feeling defeated, I couldn’t imagine why I was sentenced to, or deserved this cruel fate pr existence.

Along the way, some of my therapists and loved ones stressed that this was it now! What abilities I now possessed, they would likely remain that way or worse for the rest of my life.

I’ll always remember being sat down at the one-year mark post-injury to have a meeting/discussion about this with my team of therapists, who had all been working with me for months.

They broke it to me lightly, but this news still shackled itself to my ankles and traumatized brain for the years that followed. Still, I kept coming back to this devastating news when I needed a fresh dose of motivation to improve, recover, or further strengthen myself, all of which were crucial in working towards my ultimate goal of standing up from my wheelchair and walking away from it for the final time. I had always been the active, on-the-move guy while growing up! I couldn’t imagine or accept that this highly experienced and knowledgeable group of therapists could tell my fortune just like that, so conclusive and with complete disregard for my goals and dreams of achieving the impossible. I would walk again! My feet belonged on the ground walking or running, not propelling my wheelchair while my one strong arm pushed a wheel forward, a dynamic trio of hopeful limbs pushing me to my next destination.

So, how can you respect and love what you’ve become, even for as unrecognizable as that may be? It’s necessary to quickly find an answer to this troubling question, which unfortunately wasn’t stressed to me until three years after my injury. By that point, I had broken my body, mind and spirit in a desperate struggle to recover and regain a glimpse of my old life. Just a peek!

It felt important to form a semblance of love and respect for my new self, the broken and battered version of what I had once hailed as a thriving and successful young man who was rapidly approaching his peak. Now that I was here,, how could I ever regain any chance at that again? Every day after was incredibly defeating, as I woke up to familiar faces dressing my limp body, and the all-too-familiar wheelchair parked a few feet from my bed, ready for me to plop my body into it for the remainder of the day.

My daily schedule was now out of my control and had transformed into a packed agenda of therapy sessions, including speech, (since my body had lost the ability to speak clearly and swallow without choking) and physical therapy (a desperate attempt to get myself out of my hospital bed and restore function to a disappointing group of limp limbs), and occupational therapy (the hospital’s dire attempt to teach a traumatized brain and maligned body how to do normal, everyday tasks that I couldn’t imagine myself needing again anytime soon.

For now, I was resigned to laying in a hospital bed, breathing through a tube, and being fed through another tube jammed into my neck and above my bellybutton.

Experiencing all of this at once started to make me wonder, is this my life now, and what will I get back, if anything? Years later, it was stressed to me that I should just accept what happened, and also that my old life was never coming back. How could I love the blank slate laid before me? I hadn’t been ready or even desired for a new life before my injury! So, it was now my responsibility to rebuild everything that I had achieved, wanted and gained for this new life of mine, which would start in the middle of year 28, not at day one like my previous one. I now had to rely on the care, focus and encouragement of my therapists to develop new and crucial abilities, including speaking, swallowing, walking, moving the paralyzed left half of my body, and also loving and motivating this second version of me back into existence and society.

What will that journey, including the first year after, look like for you? That all depends on how you decide to take care of yourself, mentally, physically and emotionally.

This means that you need the fortitude to take whatever comes your way, embrace and accept it, and quickly adjust your life on the fly as needed to continue surviving.

For me, this started with my sudden seizures, which came on quickly into my life, and added more medication, anticipation, and worries of having one while standing and falling. That has only happened once, but I survived it, as I have everything else during this long detour that life threw my way.

Can I call it a detour? Just where is all of this leading me? How much of that is within, or outside of my control? Who will I be on the other side, and how in the hell will I know once I get there?