“We can always begin again.” It sounds vaguely like a political ad. Every morning, I get an email from “Inspiring Quotes.” According to them, the quote comes from Sharon Salzberg. If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know that I am a disabled veteran. It was about 16 years ago when my back started hurting, and I was getting shooting pains down the back of my legs. I just shrugged it off. I just thought I was getting older. I should expect my back to hurt after all of the stress I put it through.
I owned rental properties, and they were the source of my income. The night before Thanksgiving, I fell and broke my ankle. The orthopedic surgeon who installed a metal bracket and five screws in that ankle was a genuine person. I casually asked him about my back aches and pains. He told me that he did not do anything with backs, but he would take x-rays and see if he could find a cause for the backaches. He took one look at the x-rays and asked me when I had hurt my back.
It took me a couple of days to remember an incident in the Army just before being sent to Vietnam. It was the standard sort of training day, and we were running an obstacle course many times. It was the third time through, and I was climbing over a pile of logs on the course. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the base hospital with a group of people congregating around my feet. They were poking me with what looked like needles and asking me if I could feel the needles. I couldn’t. I started to panic, and then I thought I could begin to feel what they were doing. They explained when I fell, I had severely bruised my spinal cord. I was discharged from the hospital the same day and went back to my unit.
What they didn’t tell me was the bruise would start a process of growing more bone. That new growth was the source of my pain as it squeezed the nerves coming out of the spinal cord. It is called stenosis. I can say that the VA was great and sent me to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for surgery. After several operations and over 40 hours on the operating table, I realized it was time to not pursue that line any further. At this stage of medicine, the risk of doing more damage is extremely high. I know the surgeons tried their best, but it was clear I wasn’t going to get any better. In fact, the operations left me worse off than before them.
It was also clear that I could no longer own rental properties because of my limited mobility. I sold them, and that money provided enough support until my VA pension came through because I was a 100% disabled veteran, according to them. I had to think of a new way to earn a living.
You are reading this because it’s my way of “beginning again.” I have sold a couple of novels on Amazon. I have another one that’s coming out this November. This blog is part of the whole writing thing. It has been a slow start, but slowly I am living this saying, “We can always begin again.”
