I recently passed the second anniversary of the start of my stay in the hospital. A lot has happened since then and I’m just now (the last few months) making a real effort at getting my blog back to where it was (2 posts a week, every week, with at least 5 posts completed and in the backlog). I’m not quite there yet but I was looking through my drafts and came across this post. It was interesting looking back and certainly a different perspective than I have right now. Anyway, I thought I would go ahead and post it as is. Enjoy.

I’ve touched on perspective a while back when I talked about Who’s an expert but I recently had a rather sharp lesson on it. If you read my recent post What goes around comes around you’ll know that I got to spend some quality time in the hospital. Turns out that can really weaken you so I was sent from there to a rehab facility. On day two in rehab I “walked” into the physical therapy room. I say walked but I mean struggled to get there using a walker with someone walking with me ready to catch me if I fell. To be fair it was a rather long walk. Something like 100 feet. Needless to say I was feeling rather sorry for myself but the boss (my amazing wife) had told me to work hard so I was trying. I sat down in my wheel chair to catch my breath and watched a man missing half of one of his legs doing his workout. He was walking. Not easily, and with crutches but he was doing it. A few days later I’m lifting weights (3 lbs) and again, struggling when I see a woman struggling to pick up a child’s block. She dropped it a few seconds later. I could easily tell another half a dozen stories of people who were far worse off than I was.

I was at once easily the sickest person in the facility, and the healthiest. In 6 months this will mostly just be history for me. These other people will be affected their whole lives. Now, did that make me any less unhappy about my discomfort and exhaustion? Of course not. (Although I will say it certainly helped my motivation seeing how hard they were working.)