Being Paralyzed

It is 1:18 AM. I should be asleep, BUT I know Jesus wants this piece written and He wants it written as soon as possible. I am sure HE has a purpose.

I have limited movement in my left arm and leg, so I am not 100% paralyzed, but close. As with all my lessons, this content is only here to provide insight into my experiences, there is no attempt or desire for pity. Being paralyzed is about independence and what you can do for yourself. It is not about what you used to be able to do, but cannot do anymore. I have no time to grieve over those things. I focus on things I can do and how I can do more things independently. For example, I can go to the bathroom by myself. A very, very important thing I can do. Safety is always a concern. I have to be very careful not to fall. Every time I decide to do something like change locations, I have to weigh the risk of falling vs. the benefit of doing what I want to do. Some decisions are easy, for example, I always risk going to the bathroom. Other decisions require more judgment; getting a drink of water in the middle of the night requires a trip to the kitchen, a fall in there could be very serious because of the hard tile floors. To risk falling to get a drink of water or juice in the middle of the night requires that I be very thirsty because a trip to the kitchen is required.. Another example, Wiener dog food is also in the kitchen. If Wiener dog scratches on my bed to be fed early in the morning, it is never worth the risk to feed her.

Pre-setting up my environment before bed can help, but it adds another set of tasks to do before bed which can cause increased stress, both doing the tasks and remembering everything. Each task ends up with a priority. For example, how important is having a drink of water handy? If 3 tasks have been done before bed and water was not one of them, going and getting the water can be a stress point, even to the point where the water gets skipped that night. Once you have reached a level of independence and you are comfortable, there can always be a setback and you get to start over. It takes great courage to start over once you have reached a comfortable level. It becomes easy to justify a set of ill logic to just give up. My recent setback from necrosis is full of blessings, the use of HBO2 and understanding the importance of exercise are just two.

I didn’t realize this the first time, but there can be a lot of physical pain in being paralyzed. Unless you exercise your shoulder there is fluid (tone) that can lock your muscles. At night these muscles ache horribly. The first time, the only way I could sleep at night was to use an electronic device on my arm to block the ache. Tone can be broken up with exercise; I exercise at least one-hour every morning and evening on my shoulder to break up the tone. Now, I do not need the pain blocker. When the tone breaks from a muscle there is a pop. It is the most wonderful sound I have ever heard. So you can see how understanding the importance of exercise has made this RIN setback a blessing for me, every way I turn Jesus is there taking care of me. Is it not amazing?

Many times when I write down one of these lesson I have learned, I have to reread it carefully to see what I wrote. Now it is almost 3 AM. I get up at 6 AM TO exercise and get ready for another HBO2 treatment. Perhaps Jesus will let me sleep now since I have finished this lesson.