Today is not Tomorrow

Actual copy of my latest x-rays (sort of...)

That’s my new mantra, “today is not tomorrow”. It’s kinda like that disclaimer you see on stock broker ads, “past performance is not indicative of future performance”. Only for me, and many other SCI folks we are trying to avoid what happened today or yesterday or last week, we want tomorrow to be better.

It’s a game of waiting and hoping for outcomes that for the most part are completely beyond your control. Getting a nerve to wake up is not something you can do; they do what they will whenever they decide to do so, if at all. Nerve pain is ever-present, and plays on your optimism by leading you to believe that it’s a good sign, that something is going on. Sometimes they wake up half-way and you get a a whole day’s worth of on/off pain when they misfire and fool you into hoping that once the nerve gets its act together you’ll have a new muscle to work on.

If you’re lucky the pain was worth it and a new muscle innervates and then you get to spend hours trying to get it to anything resembling movement. When you are rewarded with that you get a great feeling that yes, I might walk again. Later you realize it’s one of several dozen muscles that you need, and why aren’t those doing anything? You fall back down to earth and remember that there are a lot of folks out there with only partial recovery, often of no use to them at all. Like trying to play Scrabble but all the vowels are missing. Works if you’re from the Czech Republic, otherwise extremely frustrating.

So you tell yourself that what it looks like today isn’t what it could look like tomorrow. You try to build up hope, that hope that all your friends tell you not to lose but despite their best intentions and efforts, only you can actually do the refill when the “hope” tank runs low. So you dig, some days deeper than others.

Same with your bowel and bladder. Maybe tomorrow you’ll get it right and not have an accident. Same with a number of things that you never thought you’d ever have to deal with before you became injured. I’m a guy, I’ve never in my life worried about bladder infections, now I need to worry about them every day. How messed up is that?

You don’t want to let yourself down, don’t want to let down your friends and family. You know you’re a strong person, you’ve handled some really heavy loads before. You can handle anything that gets thrown at you. But somehow this is different, because there’s no end to it, no light at the end of the tunnel, no guarantees that if you stay strong and you put in 100% effort your life will look like it did before. In fact most likely you’ll be dealing with the same nonsense for the rest of your life. The uncertainty slowly unraveled the threads that hold your resolve together.

Some days you wonder what’s the point. To be or not to be, that is the question. Does this situation qualify as outrageous fortune? Can I get a waiver for the rest of my life and just check out? No one around with sufficient authority to ask, oh well, if it’s a good idea today it will be a better idea tomorrow. Remember today is not tomorrow, right? Whatever, is it dinner yet? Maybe it’s taco night, that would be worth staying alive for another day.

A lua esta bailando na Quintana dos mortos. But so far still dancing alone. ($10 if you know where that came from ;-).

You start listening to songs that remind you of better times, you start to lose yourself in the past, (a past that sometimes is better in the remembering than the reality) and then catch yourself thinking that your future will never be as good as your past. It’s another mind-trap that is all too easy to fall into.

So in the end, you keep plugging away and hanging onto that one simple phrase, “today is not tomorrow”. Had a bad day today, that’s ok because tomorrow will hopefully be different. Keep swinging, never give up. I must have watched “Cool Hand Luke” one time too many. ;-)

I’m up to 15 lb dumbbells and asking for 20 pounders, they’re afraid I’ll drop them on my head but I told them I’ll drop them on their heads if I don’t get them. Gotta keep moving forward. I seem to be making more muscles twitch, makes more nerve pain when I do it but the results are promising. Maybe…

We just finished the Friday wound measurement and we've hit the 2 cm mark, so now I get to start sitting up finally and even should be able to hop into a chair. Far Out.

Take care everyone and stay tuned, this might get interesting…