24 December 2014

decad3

Ahoy! I've been doing my best not to drag out cheap "this happened x years ago" random-anniversary posts, but I guess this one's unavoidable for at least a brief acknowledgement.

This 24th marks the passage of ten years since the event of my spinal cord injury. Ten - dix; ju; diez; zehn; dez. A whole decade. 3652±1 days. Loose bookends for The Colbert Report, even.

...an excessively long time. There have been ups - it was a fantastic adventure hurrying back to college (like an idiot) and trying to resume as much of my life as I could post-injury, and I've been fortunate to spend almost four years of those ten improving myself in physical therapy. Of course, though, there have been downs. Plenty of downs. Let's not kid around; across the whole spectrum from "forest" to "trees," it's been mostly downs. Surprise! Surely you weren't expecting me to claim that my life was vastly improved that night in 2004.

Speaking of not-positives, this time of year is a two-fer for now: three years plus a few days ago, I went in for the initial surgeries that stuck me in bed, then went awry and froze me here. It's a miserable reminder to me that "it'll be about 6-8 weeks" might really mean "it'll be a few years, and your life will be systematically destroyed." Optimism has no seed here, so I shan't dwell on it further.

Wheee... Aren't memories fun? I'd like to get off the ride now.