Shoved to Them
I spent this past weekend in Houston at a CrossFit seminar for coaches who train adaptive (handicapped) athletes. It was an amazing chance to learn about how others function in a world which isn’t necessarily designed for them, and how to best help them with their ability to function within their own lives…and to do CrossFit because we love it and it’s fun.
Saturday morning, I sat down at a breakfast table where two of the lecturers were deep in conversation about prosthetic limbs. Both guys work with and are wounded veterans, and one of them is an amazing athlete who happens to have a prosthetic leg. It was a compelling discussion on the functionality of different types of legs, and how the size of the stump determines the kind of prosthetic, and very often the user’s end mobility. (I learned that amputees prefer to call it a stump and not a residual limb. It feels weird to me to, but if that’s what they prefer I’m going with it.) It seemed to be a common frustration between them in getting the guys they work with to opt for mobility when they were making decisions about amputation.
Wounded vets often arrive back in this country needing surgery to “clean up” what was done during emergency medical procedures in the field, and they or their families have to make gut wrenching decisions about where to take off the damaged or diseased parts of limbs.
“If I could just get these guys to understand that sometimes they’ve got to just let go of a little bit more in order to have a better life, but they don’t listen.”
“Nope. They will fight like hell to keep knees that don’t bend, stumps that aren’t the ideal functional lengths, you name it. They’ll scream in your face about how you’re not taking another inch that belongs to them. They act like we’re trying to steal something precious away from them, and we’re really trying to give them the best possible outcome.”
“I know it. There are so many cases where I see these guys, and if they’d let them take the knee they’d be fully functional in life, and they just don’t care. It means the difference between life with a nasty limp and a cane, and being able to run.”
“You can’t tell them though. They’ll celebrate like it’s a gigantic victory when you let them keep those extra three inches, and it won’t be until years later that they realize the mistake they made in holding onto them because of pride, or fear, or whatever. We can maybe fix it then, but it’s so much harder than if they’d let it go in the beginning.”
The whole thing just got me thinking about how much of life is just that way. How much of it is spent hanging onto the diseased, twisted, and corrupting because they’re “mine”, and “I’ve already lost so much, they’re not taking an inch more” when letting that be taken from us, albeit painfully, would be the difference between limping along and being able to fly?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In