Hurry up and Slow Down

Reflections at Sunrise, Oregon Coast

Have you ever endured a difficult time in your life and craved to know just simply WHY? Since my relocation, I’ve spent five of my six months in this new city with a continual pins/needles, numbness, atrophy and nerve pain down my right arm.  If you are a regular here, you read in my October blog entry I was hoping for  some relief with a nerve block. Much to everyone’s surprise,  it didn’t work.  Two days later I was sitting in a neurosurgeon’s office discussing surgical options.

I underwent a “Foraminotomy” at the end of November.  This procedure would drill a larger opening in my C5/C6 vertebrae, remove the spurring and herniation to allow more room for the nerve. 90% of patients see improvement immediately following surgery.  Unfortunately, I fall in the other 10% category. Ironically, I was given the same stat prior to the failed nerve block.

Sunrise over the Pacific

As a regularly physically active person, being out of commission for ongoing five months, has started to take its toll on me mentally.  For months I have felt the weight of two ton concrete boots slowing me down, when all I long to do is run. I’m in a new city, there are new things to explore and new people to meet.  However, the bulk of my life has not been making new friends or discovering new hideouts, but trying to find good health care practitioners and juggling my schedule trying to see each one of them.

When I try to think clearly about the answer to how and why I’ve ended up in the journey that I have been, a common thread of conversations surface. “Slow down and be patient”  My massage therapist said it, my doctor said it, husband said it, my personal trainer just said it yesterday. A whole stream of people in between have said it.  I’ve ignored them, until smack, those words have hit me deliberately across the face.

I realize I am not patient, I want everything yesterday. There is no doubt I am in a period of life change, just as I approach my 40th birthday. Perhaps this injury’s purpose is to strip everything that I know as normal routine in order to create a new and better me on the other side. I am unpatiently waiting to see who that person will be.

Fresh Find