Like is pretty darn good!

 Last week, peddling home from a ramble up Greenfield way, I realized about 20 months had passed since I was bumped off the road and onto my head by a car. In a further attempt to translate that to some vague sort of anniversary, it was a year and a half I'd been cleared to once again ride a bike, with two broken vertebrae in my neck fused of their own doing. Bodies can do some pretty amazing repair work, given the chance.

And given the chance to keep living this life, that's what I've happily received. If I had not survived June 18th of 2022, I still would've lived an amazingly fortunate life. Was is perfect? Did I achieve everything I'd hoped? Heck no, but the opportunities and experiences I had were truly amazing. I've had the luck to live a very full life already, and now I have bonus time!

In those 20 months, I started relearning to walk again after about two and a half weeks of laying in a hospital bed being quizzed on my name and what year it was. Sound awful? I can't give an opinion as a having had a memory with roughly two minutes duration means I am largely spared from living with that experience. I won't say "hooray!" for traumatic brain injury, but it does have a few advantages.

But despite dreading walking maybe 100 feet through the hospital ward, with an invalid's walker and spotters, as shatteringly difficult, it happened, and I still remember the nurses at the nearby station, where I'd previously been bedded, cheering me as my entourage and I shambled past. A week later in the recovery facility, at my first group physical therapy session, after watching one of my peers walk a lap with a spotter but no walker, I asked if I could try the same.

Yup, bodies can do some amazing things, and I did walk under my own power and balance with only two bits of feedback. One, the therapist said I didn't have to walk that fast, and two, my left foot felt like it didn't take the load quite as stably as the right, and a week later I learned that was probably because of the broken metatarsal that the hospital missed with everything else I gave them to attend.

After a month in hospital and rehab, I was out, and a few days later I was authorized to ditch the kindly loaned walker and ambulate with ski poles as protection against a fall that could leave me paralyzed if I landed wrong, again. Within a week, I'd hiked seven miles with a visiting friend and trail runner, and while I very much intended continued improvement, I'd already attained a mode of living I could emotionally sustain. Everything else beyond that has been gravy, much appreciated gravy.

I continued to recover, and while I quip that, "Brain injuries are forever," I have it on expert authority that my degree of recovery has been "unbelievable". I'll take it!  And with it, I've lived, shared life with others, celebrated three solstice outings including hoofing my first dark observation of the longest night, and befriended some amazing individuals, and again, simply lived, happy to do so. No, life and our world are not perfect, but there's reason people will endure hardship. Life is pretty darn good!

Addendum: For example, I ran in the rain today on what would be the last day of February on a non leap year. It was a warm rain in the 50s, what with the climate changing and all that, so I managed to finish my run warm enough to culminate with a fully submerged dip in the brook behind my house, my first of the year!

In 2022, I'd set the goal of being completely immersed in the brook every month of the year, and I almost did it, with the exception of possibly the warmest month, July! Neck brace had to stay dry. No, it was not a bummer. Being me, I actually kind of enjoy the twist that I was fully submerged every month EXCEPT the warmest! As the saying says, that's life, and what a darn fine thing it is!