It's not being "brave" or "tough", but a matter of perspective...

     I opened a Facebook account after a friend of mine asked me to take a look at something on his FB page and found out that you can’t look at anyone’s FB page unless you’ve also got an account.  I just put very basic information on my page, the only picture I have of myself, (my dog and I on the beach in Puerto Rico taken by a friend out there,) and after looking at his page and seeing what he’d wanted me to see, kind of forgot about it.  I’d entered an email address I use for places I suspect I’ll get spam from, and rarely check, and when I did check it after it had quite a few messages in it’s inbox, found out that a bunch of people I’d known going all the way back to high school were wanting to “friend” me on there.

     I’d lost touch with most of them not long after school, so even the ones who did know me when I was paralyzed didn’t know anything about the various health issues I’ve had to deal with, or the VA’s repeated screw ups that made problems worse rather than better.  My starting this blog is the first most of them have heard about this stuff, and of course, right now I’m dealing with a pretty major situation.

     What’s interesting is that even the people I have kept in touch with, and maybe especially since they’ve been there for all the 30 years of that wonderful government health care provided through the VA, I’ve had a good number of them tell me that they think I’m “tough”, or “brave”, and so on.  The problem is that I’m really not.

     I didn’t choose to have the problems I’ve had to deal with.  Life’s not fair, and I was just dealt the hand I’ve got.  It doesn’t take courage to deal with hardships in life that just happen to get thrown your way and make the best of whatever your situation ends up being.  It just takes a certain way of looking at life, or perspective.

     I don’t have to look very far to see people who are dealing with far greater difficulties than I have, or am at the moment.  There are a number of quadriplegics on the ward here at the Spinal Cord Injury unit at this VA, and I’ve got good use of my hands and arms.  One fellow that has become a friend is dealing with not only being paralyzed, but terminal cancer.  Another, who gets on my nerves, came in for surgery on his shoulder because using your arms for everything isn’t what our shoulder’s are designed for, and it’s very common for the rotator cuff to wear out, but he was admitted four days before his surgery, and even though he’s a paraplegic and can take care of his own bowel care, (the term for digging the shit out of your body,) he just decided it’s pretty gross, and cheerfully had the aids do it for him, so I have to wonder where his self respect is, as well as be amazed at his selfishness in foisting what IS truly a disgusting task off on others, even if it is their job to do this for those who are unable to take care of that on their own.

     Another fellow who only became a quadriplegic a couple of years ago has recently been discharged and is now living in a nursing home out in Arizona.  (He does HIS own bowel care, even though he has very limited use of his hands and arms, as does everyone else in here who is able.)  He needed people to help him smoke, since he doesn’t have the find hand and arm control needed to smoke a cigarette, and so he’d snag another patient who smokes to get the cigarette out of his pack, put it into his mouth, light it for him, and then flick the ash off every so often.  I met him when I came in at the very end of 2009 for the six month stay last year that ended with the docs finally doing four surgeries on my leg to repair that bedsore that wouldn’t heal up, and can’t recall a single time he complained about his having broken his neck, (car accident,) or his limitations, but instead working as hard as he could on his rehabilitation.  He can stand and walk short distances, (spinal cord injuries to the neck can be weird that way, where the arms and hands end up more disabled than one’s feet and legs,) and hopefully he’ll continue to get more return while his spinal cord continues to regenerate.  (The spinal cord will try to regenerate the nerve connections for about three years before one’s recovery, assuming the cord isn’t cut, stops.)

     There’s one guy who’s very bitter about his situation, even though he’s been a quadriplegic for about 17 years, and many times, takes his anger out on the people around him, even those who help him on a daily basis.  He got mad at me several times because Marines have a fraternal relationship with each other than the other branches of the service don’t have, and greet each other with a “Semper Fi!”  He was in the Army, and the fact we don’t give that greeting to those from the other branches just wasn’t nice, in his mind.  I just told him that he’d just have to deal with it because he joined the wrong club.  LOL…  I have yet to meet anyone who knows what the Army motto is, if they even have one to begin with.  All he does with his life is get high on pot.

     Contrast that with another quadriplegic with the same level of injury who has his Master SCUBA license, and travels to various great places to scuba dive.

     Years ago, I met and tried to befriend another paraplegic, (paralyzed from the waist down,) who treated his wife like crap, demanding that she wait on him hand and foot, refused to learn the skills needed to be independent, (such as driving a car,) and any time she’d get fed up with it and start to walk out on him, he’d pull a pity routine about how he couldn’t survive without her doing pretty much everything for him, and then blame her for being a very selfish person for complaining about helping him.  He’d intentionally made himself helpless as a passive/aggressive method of control over her, and knew just which buttons to push to keep her around as something barely above his personal slave.

     Very soon after I was injured, while I was still at the VA hospital in Long Beach, I met a paraplegic who seemed normal enough until I noticed he was missing his little toe, with a scab where his toe should have been.  His injury was “complete”, meaning the spinal cord was cut, so he had no movement or sensation below his injury.  He got bored one day and decided to cut his toe off… WITH FINGERNAIL CLIPPERS!!!  That explained to me why he was on the psych ward of the seven spinal cord injury wards at the Long Beach VA.

     I can look at any one of these guys, and thank God that He gave me parents who instilled in me a pride in my independence, a stubborn streak in my personality that makes me keep trying to figure out a way to get this or that done for myself rather than depending on others until and unless it becomes obvious that it’s physically impossible for me, and my having learned the lesson of the pity pot that I can quickly find other’s who have problems far greater than what I have to deal with, including people who are “able bodied” and don’t have the health and physical problems I deal with.

     One friend, who now lives in Texas in a group home, has severe paranoid schizophrenia, and though we ended up parting ways many years ago, I saw him a couple of years back, and he’s gotten much worse than when I knew him and would get a call from him in the middle of the night because he thought “the KGB and PLO sympathizers,” were after him, and could he sleep at my place.  (For some reason, he’d decided that my house was safe and they couldn’t get him there.)  He’d frequently end up in the lockup psych ward at a psych hospital that used to be here in town, and I’d get a call from him every so often when he was out there, telling me he and another mental patient friend of his had escaped, and could I go pick them up.  I’d go get them and just drive around for a few hours talking him and his friend into returning to the hospital, and then deliver them back to that lockup ward.

     “Courage“, in my book, is when one voluntarily puts him or her self in a dangerous situation in order to protect or help others, not when one deals with the problems that life throws and them, and let’s face it, we ALL have life toss us a problem now and again.  Being “tough” is being faced with some hardship life throws at you, and never letting it get to you or complaining about it, but just accepting it and continuing to move on with life, and while I try not to complain too much, I do have my moments where I get very frustrated with the way things are going and do my share of complaining, (this blog being a perfect example of that, although I also want it to serve the purpose of showing just how our government screws over veterans who’ve been injured in their service to our country.)  When I’m having a bad day, I usually just find a place where I can be alone and try to get my attitude back on track.

       I also believe very firmly that happiness is a choice.  We’ve all heard people who have pretty much everything anyone could want complaining about how hard their lives are, (especially the Hollywood crowd these days,) and go on and on about how unhappy they are.  Then you have people who have next to nothing, (or literally nothing as with one homeless fellow I knew in Puerto Rico,) who never complain about the negatives they deal with, but always focus on the positives in their life.  For some reason, it seems from what I’ve seen through my life, that it’s the people who have more that complain the most about what they don’t have.

      So no, I don’t see myself as either especially “brave” or “tough”.  I just retreat into my privacy when I’m in a mode where I’d have to find a five gallon bucket and paint it up as a “Pity Pot”, and force people to sit there and listen to me whine.  I also have the advantage of having died for some short period of time after I was shot, having met God, and having this weird, inexplicable connection with Him so that I can feel when I am acting in a way that he approves, or behaving in a manner that disappoints, and a great many times when I have a need that gets filled in very unusual ways; so many in fact, that I can not doubt that, for whatever reason, God likes me and watches out for and takes care of me to the point where I don’t worry about many of the issues most people will start to worry about because I KNOW that He will not let me fall, (or at least fall very hard,) if I just relax and do my part in trying to live my life right and trust that He will ALWAYS be there for me, and that over and over and over in my life, I’ve seen how hardships I’ve had to endure end up providing a much greater good for either myself or others than any of the bad I may be dealing with at the moment.

     As I said, it’s a matter of perspective, and as I said, I look at my life and situation, and I don’t have to look very far at all to find someone where I can say with all sincerity and gratitude, “There but for the Grace of God go I.”