Dum spiro, spero. While I breathe, I hope.

One year ago to this day, I had the last of two surgeries to implant a spinal cord stimulator in my lumbar spine to treat RSD/CRPS in my left leg. Less than two weeks later, I had quit my teaching position in Phoenix, Az and was moving back home to live with my parents in Forth Worth, Texas. As the one year anniversary of my surgery and move to Texas approached, it was hard to not look back over the last year without a sense of disappointment. It was with the same nostalgic feeling that people get near New Year's when they are reflecting on their accomplishments and failures in the past year, but my reflections tended towards all the days I had spent in bed because of pain. So many days wasted, so many days that blur together because there was nothing memorable about them. What proved even more difficult was remembering to keep a positive attitude in spite of everything. It's so very easy to become discouraged when life doesn't go the way you wanted or expected it would- but then I guess that's life, uh? 
I've toyed around with the idea of starting a blog several times in the past year but lacked the inspiration and concept to keep me driven -until recently. Unlike Phoenix, DFW lacks any real community for RSD/CRPS suffers and I've had real difficulty finding other chronic pain support groups as well. I frequently attended symposiums and other groups raising awareness about peripheral neuropathies after being diagnosed with RSD in Decemeber 2009 but I've had trouble finding much of anything since I moved to DFW last summer. Chronic pain is already an isolating condition with being able to meet with others who have the same condition, let alone not having any empathetic support. And so my purpose for starting this blog is two fold:
  1) to reach out to others: I want to inspire and support others while spreading information about RSD/CRPS and other neuropathies.  
  2) to learn to control the parts of my life that I have control over and to learn to let go of the parts that I have no control over: I don't want to spend another day focusing on how my life has changed for the worse and focusing on all the things I had planned that at the moment are not possible to accomplish. There is still so much I can do and I should be focusing on that fact! As long as I am alive and breathing, I should have hope!
And so starting today, for one whole year, I will post at least one thing a day- whether it be a photograph I've taken or a painting I've made, an article I found inspiring or an obstacle that needs overcoming, I will post it to this blog so that next July 20th, 2012 I will not have let another year be taken away from me. Instead I will be able to look back and point to all that I've accomplished and learned... and God willing I will inspire others in the process.