Being Where I Am

 I've been thinking about a recent post at our website for people grappling with botched spinal surgery. (You can access this group at health.groups.yahoo.com/group/FeistyScolioFlatbackers)

The general topic of discussion was how we feel we're doing, individually, following massive revision surgery to remake our deformed, crippled spinal columns. Some of us are riding around on Harleys and planning skydiving expeditions. Others are doing well when we can get out of bed in the morning. It's important not to compare one's own progress with anyone else's, though inevitably some of us do.

Now, please bear with me for a prefatory comment before I quote directly from the post that stimulated my thinking. This blog -- the one you're currently reading or checking out -- is available to anyone on the Web who wants to view it.  In contrast, the content of the "Feisty Forum" is private, available only to those who have registered as members. This policy serves: (1) to facilitate the free expression of all kinds of tumultuous emotions we experience in the process of undergoing major spinal reconstruction, and (2) to protect the sensitivity of personal medical information. Because of our serious commitment to protecting privacy, I have chosen not to disclose the name of the member who posted these comments. I trust she will not mind being quoted briefly, albeit anonymously. She wrote:

Everyone's story is different and everyone's condition is personal so maybe their triumph is walking their dog or going shopping or not having to use their cane that day.

This is so true, and so insightful, and it really hit home with me.

Throughout the past difficult decade or so, I have made a concerted effort to focus on my blessings -- keeping my gratitude journal, for instance, has helped me enormously-- and the idea expressed here, the emphasis on "small triumphs," will help my little Positivity Campaign even more.  It's a matter of adopting a particular point of view: "Now I'm going to think about me for a minute -- myself, as distinct from everyone else, including anyone I might be tempted to compare myself with. OK, so I haven't gotten on a Colorado ski lift or a flight to Dublin; not yet, anyway -- in fact, I may never do those things -- but what have I done lately? What small, simple experience has brought me joy? What have I accomplished that I couldn't do before revision surgery straightened me out?"

I take the elevated train once in a while, making sure when possible that I can board or get off at a station designated "accessible." To qualify, the station must have an an elevator, so I don't have to get up and down a long stairway with my go-everywhere shopping cart (one of those handy box-shaped totes on wheels which folds up when you aren't using it -- although mine usually has just a few too many items in it for me to carry them comfortably in my arms or a backpack, should I have to fold up the cart). I live in Chicago, and I often debark at the Loyola University el station. This means transferring self and cart to a high, narrow platform between two tracks and walking some distance to the elevator (hoping that it's not out of service!). 

Talk about small strides and simple accomplishments! I remember when I was much more newly revised, barely out of my surgery but eager to avoid a completely homebound life -- and farther back, to when I had not yet had my surgery at all, when I was coping with daily physical agony, a grossly visible and intrusive deformity, and chronic, diffuse apprehension.  I would get off the el at this station and struggle with my balance, my memory of too many falls, my concern about any ice that had not yet been cleared completely, my whole baggage of fears and worries. Often I would teeter on the edge of a full-scale panic attack. I generally had a frightening recurrent fantasy of being bumped by someone else in a hurry and toppling over onto one of those much-too-close tracks to my left or right, possibly risking pulverization by  an oncoming train.

Mercifully those days are over, at least for now. I get off the train feeling confident and in control,  purposefully heading toward the elevator, with my mind on any number of things: a story I may want to write, or the next step of a collage in progress, or a possible reply to someone at the Feisty forum. I may be hoping that my connecting bus isn't too delayed or considering making a stop at the little newsstand tucked away on the ground floor. I am just another commuter on a schedule or with a simple itinerary, free of foreboding, enjoying a warm splash of sun on my face or wrapping my muffler a little more snugly against a chill wind off Lake Michigan. I am fully alive and so very glad to be right where I am, doing just what I am doing.

Recently I've been traveling a little further afield -- heading downtown to explore a bit more of Millennium Park or to see what new and interesting architecture may be under way -- or to window-shop at Water Tower Place, or visit one of the vast bookstores that so exceed what we have in my own neighborhood, or splurge on a small bunch of fragrant cut flowers from a favorite florist for my living room or bedroom. 

Recently I walked around a sector of the city that used to be one of my old stomping grounds years ago, when I was young and robust but had a bunch of seemingly earthshaking worries and insecurities I could belabor for hours to some exorbitant, long-suffering therapist on Michigan Avenue.  Back then I traversed these sidewalks dressed in my self-consciously chic and tasteful business duds complete with spindly-heeled Charles Jourdan pumps acquired -- during a quick break amidst a frenetically goal-directed business trip -- in the headier neighborhoods of Manhattan in my late twenties or early thirties.

This particular area -- the gentrified, upscale environs of North &