Stasibasiphobia

When I was younger, I watched a documentary about zoo keepers and how they train large wild animals. One thing that has always stuck with me is the story of how they raise baby elephants in captivity.

No, I haven't been watching too much Animal Planet, I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

As a baby, an elephant born in captivity is shackled by the ankle and chained to a large steel spike driven deep into the ground. The chain length is always the same and baby elephants don't yet have the weight or strength required to break free.

The young elephant will struggle against this tether every day in the yard until it learns that whenever a shackle is put around its ankle, it may only travel a particular distance.

Soon there's no struggle at all. It becomes accustomed to this "reality". Just seeing or feeling the shackle and chain is enough for the growing elephant to accept this limitation of its mobility as fact. The elephant's reality and subsequent actions have become a product of its environment.

As the elephant matures, zoo-keepers remove the heavy chains and replace them with a light rope and a movable wooden stake so they may show the elephant to crowds in multiple locations.

The fully grown adult elephant has more than enough power to pull free of the rope and peg but the programming of the ankle shackle is so absolute, so totally ingrained in its behaviour, that the elephant never bothers to try.

I find that sad.

For the past few months, my leg hasn't been fitting right. Not to worry, this is a normal part of the progression and they're building me a new one as we speak, but in the meantime, I've had a lot to put up with.

My old socket is HUGE on my leg, allowing my stump to bump and grind with each step. This causes me pain. I can generally fix that with a few extra socks for padding but throughout the day that changes, meaning more pain until I can get my "supplies" to sort it out.

Over the last few weeks, I've been limiting my walking and activities. I accepted the programming and allowed myself become fearful of standing and/or walking. I felt like my ill-fitting leg was a limitation that I couldn't control.

It's important to realize that most "limitations" are self-imposed. Sure, they have their foundations in past personal experience: a failed first attempt, a bad experience, a repeated put-down, etc, but for the most part, they are the product of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In my case, it was inconvenient to have to carry around extra supplies and to take the time needed to correct the problem so I wasn't taking care of the pain when it came on. Pain made me cranky. I stopped getting up because I knew it would hurt. I was even avoiding walking around at the office.

My limitation had nothing to do with my leg and everything to do with my attitude. I've since corrected my thinking and given myself a few good kicks to the head as punishment. Really I did -- it's easy when you have a detachable left leg!

We all have the power to change our situations rather than accept them. We need to recognize obstacles for their reality, not for what we perceive them to be.

Ask yourself: are you being held back by a bit of rope and a wooden peg?

Carving Out the Potential

I had a lot of time last week to think. When I think, I putter. Here's what I decided:

I think we often get so caught up in seeing things for what they are that we fail to see what they could be.

We're blinded so much by what we perceive that we fail to recognize the full potential of the thing.

If we can't get past that first obstacle, we can't form a vision of the possibilities or start clearing away the rubble to see what's under the surface.

If we can overcome that obstacle, we start ourselves down a path of enlightenment and potential. That vision becomes our obsession.

As we proceed, we may lose sight of that vision. Things aren't looking right and don't seem to be going the way we'd hoped or expected. We begin to think we've made a mistake or that we've been overly ambitious with what we've got. We must constantly redefine our expectations.

If we persist, we begin to see that the vision was never really lost. Instead, we come to recognize that there are other forces at play in shaping it.

It's in this realization that we recognize the true potential. By letting go of our preconceived notions and allowing things to progress as they're meant to, without force, we begin to see it take on a beauty of its own.

As we relax, things take shape. Our vision changes slightly and what it has become begins to exceed our expectations. Our vision becomes reality.

It would be easy to stop at this point but that's when the really hard work begins.

From here on out, the approach we take should be subtle but persistent. We need to smooth out the rough edges and take away the surface scars of the previous approach. Only through this effort does the work take on a new luster.

Gradually, as we polish away the debris left by such a radical transformation, the inner beauty of the thing is revealed to us. We're proud. We have achieved what we set out to achieve. We may choose to hide it away for ourselves, or we may put it on display for all the world to see. We sit back and admire our hard work.

But we're still not finished. Over time, dust collects on our effort, taking back the luster we have bestowed upon it. Everyday pressures may form small cracks or chips in the surface.

All of this happens for one reason: to remind us that we must take nothing for granted. Only with constant care and involvement will our hard work remain a thing of beauty.

We must treasure what we have created, else we lose it.

The beauty of life must be constantly rediscovered else we are blind to it.

Low Points: the Wheelchair Incident

Waiting for my leg, I hit several low points. These coloured my experience just as much as the high points, so I've decided to record a few of them here to serve as a reminder of how far I've come.

After the final decision was made, I started doing chin-ups in the hospital bed using the old traction rack that my leg used to be tied up to. I managed to get outside into the sun for the first time in 8 weeks the day before my last surgery and within two days after it. I was feeling healthier already. Things were never going to be as bad as they'd gotten again so every day was a good day.

I hit a bit of a low point several weeks later on December 18th. I was a month out of the hospital and finally getting to go in for my assessment at the amputee clinic. This was the day they would check over my stump and tell me if I would be selected for a prosthesis or not. Up to that point, I didn't know there was any risk that I might not get one. This was a frightening day for me but I wasn't overly worried.

I was taking every precaution and being safe so I took the wheelchair that day instead of the crutches. I rolled myself out of the parking lot near the hospital and down a little sidewalk ramp at a crosswalk to cross the road. When the chair hit the road at the bottom of the ramp, it bottomed out on my foot peg, throwing me face first onto the pavement in front of a car with tremendous sling-shot action.

I landed HARD on my stump. Yep, my freshly amputated limb broke my fall.

Imagine kicking your big toe, barefoot, into a brick wall as hard as you can and you're only part of the way to landing on a freshly amputated leg with all your weight on pavement.

To add insult to my injury, the wheelchair folded up and toppled over behind me, leaving me with nothing to pull myself up off the ground with. It was flat as a pancake. The car driver didn't move, he just waited patiently for me to come back out of my fog of extreme excruciating pain into consciousness, push myself up off the pavement with sore arms and stand up on my one good leg.

Several people passed in cars or on foot a few meters away but none stopped to help. I got up on my own, then had to hop over, bend down (one leg, not easy), pick up my useless wheelchair, unfold it and set it back up for sitting in. I was bleeding and very sore but my pride was really bruised.

I sat back into the chair, utterly demoralized. The very thing that was supposed to keep me from hurting myself (the chair) had just hurt me, badly, 20 minutes before I was to be inspected for suitability of a prosthetic and not a single person stopped to help me up.

I limped my chair across the intersection only to find that I had to climb a very steep hill on the other side. The thought of climbing that with bleeding hands was all starting to be too much. I was feeling defeated in that moment. It didn't last long.

I have no idea where this next one came from, but I started singing "Eye of the Tiger" in my head right then. Wow, I'm so freakin' lame. What's up with that? Have I ever even *seen* the Rocky movies? I need to update my iPod.

Either way, it sparked something inside. Feeling very battered but with renewed strength, I started climbing the hill with a little fire. My pain turned into anger and anger into adrenaline. I was moving at a huge pace. I felt strong again.

The hill to the clinic gets much steeper than the hill to the main entrance. If you take the road, like I did, you find out quickly that it's not meant for wheelchairs. The angle eventually became too steep. I was far too stubborn to go back for the main entrance.

With each push, the chair made about a centimeter worth of progress until it couldn't go any further. Pushing hard on the wheel rims just resulted in a wheelie instead of forward motion.

On top of everything, I didn't want to fall backwards and crack my head open on the pavement. To keep from losing control all together, I had to put both brakes on fully and stop dead in my tracks. Another moment of "what's next" self-sorrow swept over me. That didn't last either.

I was only half way up and I had ten minutes left to get inside. The chair was heavy and trying to hurt me, again. No help there. What would MacGyver do? Eye of the Tiger!

I stood up, went behind the chair, leaned over it putting my hands on the arm rests to center my weight and I started to push it the way one would push a grocery cart if they were riding it. I got some momentum up and pushed the chair the rest of the way up the hill, on one leg. So much for safely sitting in that one.

It was pretty fun, I think I even started smiling when I got the speed up enough. I was up the hill in no time flat. I even passed a car on the way!

When I got inside, I was taken in to meet the team right away. Ironically, they complemented me for using the "safety of the chair" instead of "risking the crutches". Up to that point, I'd never had a single fall on the crutches.

That was a very rough December day but I learned a lot about having some grit and soldiering on in spite of myself.

What I took from that experience:

1) You won't get help unless you ask for it so don't complain if you didn't. People are often afraid of offending you by offering it up. People LOVE to help, they just need to know it's alright to give it.

2) Problem solve: take advantage of the disadvantage. Make it work for you, not against you.

3) Listen to old 80's fight-movie soundtracks. Knowing the words might save your life one day! Or at least, your schedule?

Lucky for me, I had someone back at home to kiss my bruises and listen to me belly-ache about how rough I had it. Poor girl, she's the real champ in all this.

It's easy to be the one who's injured/sick/etc and much harder to be the care giver. I'm very lucky to have Lisa.