It’s weird, I had thought about it for over an hour. I was pretty sure I could get a shower with no help. In a way, it seemed like a pretty good challenge and at the very least it was occupying my time from a somewhat rough day. The first two weeks of recovery from my ankle reconstruction went better than expected. This week was starting to wear on me. My mind is ready to go but my body is telling me it’s not quite time yet. The planning was done, and now it was time to execute.
The Shower Challenge!
I got up out of the chair, standing on one leg I took one hop to my crutches. I was getting good at navigating around the house with them. The next job was to get a kitchen trash bag to waterproof my leg with the cast. But, before I could do that I needed to grab the athletic tape out of the storage container for my running supplies. I grabbed the tape and put it in my right pocket then hobbled over to the pantry to grab the bag that I crumpled up into my left pocket. As I made my way to the staircase, I realized there was already a hole in my plan. I left my phone in the office so I had to hobble back to the beginning, grab my phone, toss it in my pocket, and head back to the staircase.
Over the past three weeks I had mastered the stairs like a champ. I laid the crutches on the stairs, pivoted around on my good foot, sat down on the third step, and then threaded my hand through the top part of both crutches. My arms and my good leg lifted me up stair by stair as my crutches dragged along side for the ride. Within seconds I was at the top. I learned to stay down one step so it was easier to flip my body back around as I gave the crutches a toss in front of me. One hop and I was back upright with crutches in hand and supplies in my pockets. Perfect.
I made my way to the bathroom and pulled the bathmat down that was hanging over the frame of the door then gave it a toss to the floor and it landed perfectly in front of the shower. Now it was time to get the bag on. I propped my crutches up against the wall and slowly lowered myself onto the toilet. After about three tries I was able to catch my cast into the kitchen bag and pull it up around my knee.
I tied the ends of the bag as tightly as I could just below my knee. I grabbed the tape out of my pocket and began winding the tape round and round until it had completely sealed the bag to my leg. Perfect. I knew it was airtight because the bag looked like a big balloon around my foot. Now it’s time to get undressed. I’ll spare ya’ll the details but this is where things went south.
I stood up on my weight bearing leg to drop my shorts. They stopped right above the inflated bag. Dang, now what? There was no way that giant bag was going to fit through the leg of my shorts. I slowly lowered myself back down to the toilet. Do I cut a hole in the bag and let the air out destroying the waterproof seal I had so carefully made? I actually thought about cutting my shorts but I started working the shorts around and moving the air up to the top of the bag as I moved the bag closer to the floor. Eventually the shorts hit the floor and I was able to toss them in the laundry hamper.
I lifted myself back up on my leg, grabbed the crutches, and made my way to the shower door. Crap, forgot to take my shirt off. I attempted it by balancing on one leg but it was pointless and I was going to fall. Back over to the toilet, slowly lowered down to the seated position, prop the crutches on the wall, and finally shed the shirt. Lifted myself back up, grabbed the crutches and back over to the shower. As I looked down to see the ledge I was going to hop over I noticed that I had never taken off my sock. Back to the toilet I went, by now my quad was on fire from all the slow controlled lifting and lowering.
I won’t waste any more time with the “play-by-play” description of my shower because there really is a point to all this nonsense. The “shower challenge” certainly did not get any easier but after what seemed like an eternity I did end up back on the toilet with the soaking wet garbage bag still attached to my leg. I started to take the tape off, along with most of my leg hair, and then I basically had to shred the top of the bag to get it to pass over my cast. I was frustrated, aggravated, and felt a hint of helplessness as I gave that stupid bag a toss in front of the shower. For a moment, I stared at the nasty looking wet bag on the floor and something happened to me that I hadn’t notice happen in years.
Looking Forward
I started counting how many days I had left to put a freaking bag around my leg to shower. Then I reminded myself that in a few months the other ankle was having the same procedure and this entire process would begin again. Then the former Fat Man came back to cook up a big batch of bitterness. He put this entire thing into perspective. The surgeries, the bags, the crutches, and all the work and struggle that came along with them was just a giant waste of time anyway. The doctor already said that these surgeries were basically to prolong ankle fusion for 5 years. “Better get used to it, pal, some people just ain’t lucky.” “That five years will be here before ya know it.” I guess I do have the right to complain, maybe. I mean this does kinda suck. And just like that it seemed like I had a choice, the proverbial fork in the road. This time I was drawn to the road I would typically run from…… but why?
If you know my story, you know that one of the first tools that helped me dig out of my hole was gratitude. Finding gratitude changed everything about me. It gave me a completely new outlook on life and opened my eyes to an entirely new world. I became obsessed with being grateful even to the point of tattooing the word on my leg. My gratitude was never a front or façade either, it was the real deal and still is. Every day when I wake up I thank the Lord for my second chance and a new day to experience all the wonderful things life has to offer. But how could a “master of gratitude” such as myself even think about compiling a list of things that sucked about a stupid shower instead of a list of all the things that he is blessed with? It hit me this morning, which is the only reason I wrote this entire post. Maybe it’s impossible to become a “master of gratitude,” maybe there is no such thing as a heart full of the purest gratitude and maybe that’s ok. Maybe it’s ok to be working as an “apprentice of gratitude” as long as you are striving for mastery that may or may not be possible.
My point is this:
I don’t think I will ever have gratitude “in the bag.” But I am committed to constantly honing my skills to search and focus on the good things around me so the not-so-good things become blurry. I want to strive to keep getting better at finding things to be grateful for in the least likely of places. Places like a wet garbage bag. This morning as I am sitting back in my chair I have had some time to play out last night’s scenario with a little twist. For some, it seems like a pointless exercise. For me, it is what I need to do to make sure my compass is calibrated when I come to my next fork.
I got up out of my chair, not a cold hospital chair, my chair, my warm and comfy chair and grabbed my new crutches. Ya want to know why they were new? I had a set of crutches in the attic that I had use so many times in the past. I pulled them out and they had sat up there so long that the padding material had disintegrated into powder. That’s pretty cool if you ask me. I reached into the storage container to grab some athletic tape from my running supplies. Running supplies, how about that? Ehlers Danlos (EDS) was supposed to have me in a wheelchair and not only do I have a few storage containers of running supplies but that was the same tape I had packed with me on my 50 mile ultra-marathon just 363 days earlier. I had to turn around to go back for my phone. My phone that is the top of the line mini supercomputer. A phone that 10 years ago would have been impossible to afford but we have been blessed enough that we have one for everyone in the house and a couple extra just in case we need one. I sat on the stairs and lifted myself almost effortlessly from stair to stair using my arms. For about 20 years I had almost no mobility from a botched shoulder surgery. The shoulder was deemed useless. That same shoulder, now with almost full range of motion is as strong as it has ever been. I lowered myself onto the toilet with a slow and controlled movement. A few years ago there was no lowering. My 400 pound body got close to the toilet and did a controlled drop. In fact, we had replaced the studs that hold the toilet into the floor on more than one occasion. I lifted myself up. I used on leg and it was a very slow and controlled lift that was perfectly balanced and stable. The old me had to get a “rocking start” to get out of a chair. And even that wouldn’t happen unless I had some sort of handle to push down on. Just the idea of getting the bag over my foot should have been enough for me to think back to a time where that would have not even been a consideration. Then I started to dig a bit deeper into this whole mess. All those things are about me and my perspective. What about someone else? I started to think of all the people who had no hope of ever washing their hair using two hands, all the folks that saw the daily challenge of the often neglected privilege of taking a shower. And then that one question hit me between the eyes just like a similar question had hit me many years ago as I had begun my journey.
Many people took a shower today as they balanced on one leg. How many of them would give almost anything to have another leg to wrap some tape around and how many would see my perceived trashed leg as a priceless treasure?
It’s pretty easy to complain about that bag and what is in that bag but it’s also pretty easy to be thankful that I have a leg for that bag to be attached to. And the beautiful thing is that it’s just a choice, not always easy, but always that simple.
Until next time,
Tim
“Eat plants and move your body, all ya gotta do is a little more than you did yesterday.”
