Flash Forwards

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I’m boarding a train in a foreign country. As I scan my ticket to confirm my destination and its tricky spelling, I sling my backpack over my shoulder and step high up onto the train as it starts to rumble out of the station. 

I’m walking through my old San Francisco neighborhood towards the tall trees of Golden Gate Park swaying in the gentle but persistent coastal breeze. I see my old neighbor on his way to work and wave at him as he walks on by and greets me from across the street. “Been a WHILE since I seen you man! How ya doing?”

I swing open the door to the restaurant and hurry excitedly up the narrow stairs. I enter into the dining room and see my friends gathered towards the back, ready for the birthday celebration. I can’t help but notice the tantalizing cocktails neatly handwritten on the chalkboard behind the bar. I decide that after months and months of preserving my recuperating nerve cells by avoiding alcohol, it’s time to order a drink…

We all know what flashbacks are, memories from the past of a specific moment that we remember clearly that are brought back into present consciousness. Similar to flashbacks, I have “flash forwards” that I’m sharing here now. Much like flashbacks (which we remember for certain reasons), my flash forwards are complex, rich in detail and as vivid as any memory. Thinking of them places me in those exact moments, my senses come alive with what I’m surrounded with and I feel as though I am experiencing that moment in real time. My smell (the sense that is most linked with memory) is heightened with the scents that I take in and I can realize the absolute realness of my flash forward.

Having studied psychology in university and always being interested in how the brain functions, I have read a lot about the damage and difficulty of painful flashbacks for some people. With or without a trigger, someone may relive a particularly challenging memory and become traumatized by the larger impact of that flashback. It’s not to say that all flashbacks are negative memories, far from it in fact, but I suppose I just don’t hear of many people talking about their flashbacks of positive memories very often.

My flash forwards are incredibly helpful for me. They fuel my recovery, they give me something specific to work towards, and they represent a light at the end of the tunnel in some ways. They show me what life can look like when I’m not on the dark side. They provide specific details of situations that I can’t presently experience. They remind me of what is most important to me and why I’m fighting so hard everyday to regain the physical abilities that I lost in my accident. Instead of trapping these experiences into history and saying that they’re a part of a past that I won’t ever see, I place them in front of me, in my future, with the utmost intention of realizing these flash forwards.

They are NOT wishes, they are NOT dreams, they are NOT aspirations or hopes. For these reasons, I can’t tweak them and change them around as I see fit. Much like memories which are based on facts of how things happened, flash forwards are structured the same way, as inherent truths, based on facts of how things WILL happen. That’s why they come to me organically and vividly and I have little control of how I see them. I just choose to accept them and see them as a glimpse into a definite future.

I’ll leave you with one more flash forward. As I have mentioned on this blog, just three days before my accident, I had one of the most amazing experiences of my life on a backpacking trip in the mountains with friends. For months, I have struggled many times wondering if I will ever have an experience like that again, if I’ll ever feel the joy of carrying all of my material needs on my back and venturing into the beauty of the high mountains…

The weight of my backpack feels heavier than it used to on previous trips but here I am again slowly hiking up the narrow trail surrounded by the majestic Sierra Nevada mountains of Eastern California. I’m definitely putting more weight on my hiking poles than I was expecting but I’m still stepping up the gravel path in anticipation of the alpine lake at the top. My steps are a bit crooked as it becomes apparent by looking at my footsteps that my left leg is still a bit weaker than my right, but I feel strong nevertheless. The air two miles high is thin and cool and I’m panting regularly but the sun radiates through my entire body, warming me through from the inside. I’m enjoying each step I take in my rugged hiking boots and I smile and realize I never knew that this moment would come again.

Compounding challenges of a cold

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A cold is no fun for anyone. I recognize that. Who wants to have any portion of their day spent dealing with sniffling, sneezing, coughing, headaches, body aches, or joint aches? But living with a Spinal Cord Injury and having a cold just feels like a cruel joke from the universe. As if things aren’t challenging enough on a daily basis, having to deal with the added stress of even more physical obstacles is debilitating.

Before my accident, I almost didn’t know the meaning of getting sick. I might get a sniffle or two here and there but I can confidently say I pretty much never got sick. The last time I had the flu I was a 6th grader. Fevers were a long forgotten memory from childhood, when there was a bittersweet thrill in staying home from school, drinking endless glasses of orange juice and eating my mother’s home remedies of vegetable soup. Strep throat, mono, bronchitis, and anything that would have had me bedridden for more than a couple hours were completely foreign to me. To be honest, I was a bit unsympathetic towards people who were consistently missing large chunks of time from school or work due to minor sickness. Well, what a difference a traumatic accident makes…

Since I got out of the hospital, I’ve made a huge effort to be as healthy as I always was, if not more, so as to avoid getting sick and compounding my daily challenges with new ones. Thanks to those efforts I’ve been fortunate to avoid any illness despite the fact that I’m constantly working with different people who are around a lot of other sick people. The streak ended yesterday when I came home exhausted, achy and nursing a stubborn cough. Today was the first day of therapy in over eight months that I missed and it’s incredibly frustrating to think that even one day of rehab and exercise has to be compromised from my recovery due to something that’s out of my control. I take my rehab very seriously, and as anyone who knows me should recall, I don’t do anything that I care about half-assed.

So why is it especially challenging to deal with illness with a SCI? I’ll provide just a couple examples. My lung capacity is much less than it used to be before my accident. I remember one night in the hospital just days after my accident when I did not sleep the entire night because I had a tiny bit of phlegm in my chest but I was too weak to cough it up. I’ve gotten some of that lung capacity back but now I have a tiny scratch in my throat and I cough and cough and can’t clear it up. So I have to do the impossible, accept it and just deal with it. The other example is just how hard it is to do anything when my shoulders are achy and sore. I use my shoulders and arms for everything so even shifting positions in bed feels like a monumental task when my shoulders feel like heavy, painful clubs hanging off of my torso.

I realize that everyone gets sick and that my pseudo invincible previous self has to swallow his pride and accept that it’s ok to be under the weather a bit and that it’s temporary. But it doesn’t relieve my frustrations at having to deal with even more obstacles in an already challenging daily life.

Cupping Therapy and Body Muffins

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Cupping therapy, known by Dr. Zhu as “muffins”

“Look, look at the muffins on your back!” exclaimed Dr. Zhu, my acupuncturist and master healing guru, as the suctioned cups on my body swelled up and turned my back into a collection of red, circular, muffin-sized lumps. Ok, I know to a lot of people it may seem kinda gross to refer to collections of blood flowing to my skin as muffins, but hey, that’s his type of humor and it doesn’t bother me one bit. In fact I snickered as Dr. Zhu said that he wouldn’t need breakfast the next day since I had provided so many muffins.

Cupping can mean a few things (get your heads out of the gutter you dirty-minded people…) but in this context, it refers to an ancient form of treatment that has been used for thousands of years in Egypt, China and the Middle East. Western/conventional medicine doesn’t officially recognize the benefits of cupping (this is a theme I’ll be coming back to frequently) but many people have enjoyed the relaxation and healing that comes with it. I was lucky enough to meet one of China’s foremost cupping experts last week as she was visiting Dr. Zhu’s office and she decided to give me a substantial treatment that she said would improve my blood circulation and relax my overused and constantly tired shoulder and back muscles. After identifying which areas had poor or obstructed bloodflow (the redder and darker, the more stagnant the blood), Dr. Wong pricked those areas with a needle, squeezed out the black, clotted blood, then put on new cups to suction and suck out more of the unhealthy blood.

Much like the acupuncture treatment I receive at Dr. Zhu, cupping is meant to work with the meridians and flow of chi in the same way as the needles used in acupuncture. The result is a painless, deeply relaxing experience that comes with red circles on your back for a few days. All hail the muffins!!