What a difference a good nights sleep makes. I think I might have achieved R.E.M. last night. And my back pain was brutal, but Physio helped figure it out. If your broken, it sure is good to have people around who know how to fix things.
I’m happy to inform those of you who are still following my journey here that I will be out for this entire weekend, and only in for a few more assessments and follow up exercise instructions next week. I am walking and talking well enough that those things aren’t a concern for my team. The weakness on my left side is disappearing and will get better over time. Training my brain to do the things it did before my injury is going to be hard work over the next year or so. I am so thankful that I was injured much less than I could have. There are so many people here that fight memory issues, basic thinking process, massive loss of body function, and many other things. My one roommate who has been keeping me awake at night because no one seems to understand him and what he needs seems to have come to a sobering realization the other day. As they have done assessments, they have revealed to him his lack of ability in many areas. Memory is gone, speech is scrambled so yes means no sometimes, and half his body is asleep.
Then there is the lady suffering from lability, and if I’ve spelled the word correctly, it’s when you lose control of your emotions after a stroke. Not just from the profound loss, but because it often affects that control system in the brain. Anyways, she has been on permanent meltdown since she got here. That kind of emotional instability doesn’t have widespread acceptance anywhere, but thankfully almost everyone here knows what’s going on and does their best to support.
I look at my imminent freedom as a really wonderful gift. This stroke has heightened my sense of gratitude to amazing levels. Although I’m grateful to all of you, the one who deserves the most out of this is the amazing woman, Sharon, who has taken the situation so amazingly.
This journey continues in a new stage, where I transition more to the outside world where the pace of life grinds on at a speed that I may not be able to keep up to as well. Although you can bet your bottom dollar I’m going to do everything I can to keep up. I have lots of thoughts and have run into interesting challenges already. You may be interested in those. I know they’ve opened my eyes.
I’m on the edge of familiar territory. I look back at the piece of territory I just came through. The “experts”around me have seen people go through this many times before. It’s obvious to me that some of the “science” that they know about the brain is not much more than a glorified version of wearing your lucky socks to the game so your team wins. The hard core believers in scientism are not willing to see the folly of their ways, but there are a few realists. The longer I’m here, the more it becomes clear that we know what we don’t know. Those who are confronted by this information sometimes get as upset as ultra conservative religious people being told that God is a joke. Because modern science has done some amazing things, it has become almost orthodox to believe that not only will science some day solve all our problems, but it is wrong to think that there is anything beyond physics and chemistry (matter plus time plus chance).
I don’t disrespect science at all, and it is well worth learning as much as we can in order to heal the sick, care for the suffering, and make life as livable as possible. Don’t give up faith because modern science seems to have all the answers. They don’t! I can tell you first hand that there is still not only room, but total necessity to know that God exists, that He provides every breath, that He loves every single one of us as His creation, that He desires intimate relationship with Him, He wants us to be whole but even as this broken world breaks us, He will walk with us on our broken path and has felt our pain and worse. He not only knows what we know, He knows everything we don’t know.
As I was doing therapy the other day, my taskmaster (she really is a knowledgeable and lovely lady) told me that I needed to think of a song to keep a tempo and use that to govern my pace. I guess I looked like an old rocker because she recommended anything by AC/DC. I thought about it for a little bit and remembered the song one of you recommended when I first got here. I’ve been using it to meditate, but it seemed appropriate, so I brought it up on my phone, hit play and took off.
Not only is it good for relearning walking, it is my new metaphor. I encourage each of you to walk into your life, living the words out and remembering each day that it is life giving to make God a part of your everyday life, and SEE His handiwork and creative/recreative presence in everything. Walk with God.
https://youtu.be/1spkhp41ig4