t4rdy

Hey there! I'm admittedly a few days late, but check it out, it's been a whopping four years since I had my stem cell self-transplant to help out with this whole spinal cord injury thing. Awesome. It's been grand. No sarcasm there, either.

Four years later, I still run across folks on occasion who try to project or implicate feelings of guilt, regret, disappointment, bitterness, etc., upon me about undergoing this procedure. I'm not running marathons or typing a million words a minute, so why did I even bother?

For these trolls brilliant chums, let's just cover one of the fundamental forces affecting my reality: gravity. Quadriplegia isn't a mosquito bite, a scraped knee, or even a broken arm. This is pretty huge. Huge, as in, on the bizarre rainbow arcing between "dead" and "alive and well," I was awfully close to the rigor mortis end. If we're going with the marathon analogy, I could barely stumble across the starting line.

That was pre-surge. After the stem cell surgery, a ton of therapy/rehabilitation, and simply the passage of time post-op, well, wow. Waaay more has improved in these four years than in those first three[ish] years pre-Portugal. Note that that's backwards: as time passes, progress is supposed to slow, such that I should have been seeing less improvement, not more. So, I may not be 110% "alive and well," but I'm much closer to that pot of gold than I would have been by now sans-op. According to our clumsy abstract marathon analogy, I can at least run the first mile thanks to surgical magic. That's not so disappointing after all.