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How are you
today? Everything is fine and your mood is perfect. Well, so
don’t read this page, please. If you had a hard day with a
lot of troubles and problems, so this essay written by F.
Alexander Brejcha is just for you. It isn’t important what
disease you have got (if you haven’t any, you also have
right to read it), just think about the attitude towards
life. One of my main problems is the bad memory : I always
forget about good things and see only black part of the life
mosaic. Alex’s tell has helped me to open my eyes and to see
what a happy |
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person I am.
Others people’s opinion and circumstances don’t have
influence on our moods (or rather shouldn’t do) there is
only the inner feeling that determine everything.
Anyone with M.S. knows that first part well and has to really dig sometimes to
see the latter. Right now I was close to edging towards losing sight of the
latter due to an overwhelming doses of the former.
To paraphrase Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning “How am I frustrated? Let
me count the ways…”: I am paraplegic due to M.S.; My wife had to go back to
Russia for a couple of months to see her ailing grandmother and change her
passport (there is no more USSR); My notebook computer with vital e-mails and
several projects underway crashed (physically) and I am awaiting word on if it
can be fixed (I know: I should have been better with backing up); My mother’s
Alzheimer’s is worse; My wife’s and my own M.S. have gotten worse; Our
apartment rent has been upped from$765/month to $1,010/month; I’ve been forced
to pay $40/month for a storage locker since our apartment is not big enough for
two people with disabilities; Oh, and I am sitting here at work smelling like…
excrement, because my bowels let loose without warning a couple of hours ago
and there I was sitting in my wheelchair with my pants full of… well, pinch
your nose and you get the picture (and I work alone with no relief .possible
for several hours!).
Did I mention blessings?
Let me again “count the ways”. I have a full-time job where the wheelchair is
irrelevant (and guarantees me a free parking spot most of the time); My wife
uses her computer to call my phone every day (4 cents a minute instead of the
still cheap 19 cents it costs if I call her), and I have made new friends
online who keep me company; My computer has a very good warranty and may be
fixed or replaced and if the latter, I know a good technician who can probably
retrieve my data from the old hard drive at a reasonable price; My mom is in a
superb nursing home my late stepfather left enough money to pay for; The M.S.
is rough, but we both work harder with exercising we’ll manage; It has taken a
LONG time, but thanks to Habitat for Humanity of Chester County and a generous
grant from Open Hearth a new house will be built to accommodate us with a
mortgage we can afford - and for a year while waiting to find land, Open Hearth
helped us with a percentage of our rent; the local chapter of the National M.S.
Society just gave us a grant to cover the storage locker until the house is
done; Oh, and I work at a hospital, and some nurses came down, transferred me
to a bedside commode, cleaned me and the wheelchair as much as possible and
brought me a scrub suit from the operating room to wear home (bagging up my
dirty clothes) and then put me back in the wheelchair (a little awkward to keep
answering the phone, but I managed).
It can be difficult at times, but with a little effort (sometimes a little
more), I can usually remind myself of how much I have to be grateful for. It’s
something I try to push whenever I do peer counseling and I think I’ve written
about this for MS Musings before, but it bears repeating because M.S. gives us
all a lot of opportunities and reasons to climb onto the self-pity wagon (funny
how that seems to be a very wheelchair accessible vehicle).
Don’t go there. Dig, stretch, grasp, whatever: find the positives! I can
always find –
MANY
– more reasons to whine… but there are also
MANY
reasons to be grateful! (by Alex Abrejcha
2002) |
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