9/12/08

This was something I started typing last night at work. It is different writing on a blank word document and writing a post on my blog. I thought I'd post it though...

It has been awhile since I have just written to get my thoughts on paper. Since returning from the mission, I have written to organize specific thoughts on a specific topic that I have been pondering. While on my mission, I wrote often, for my mind was being exposed constantly to foreign ideas and liberal interpretations of lds doctrine that I didn’t know exactly how to handle.

July 24, 2008 I was with the family at the Sheffield cabin. It was a Thursday and we had just finished the second day of pouring cement for the basement floor the day previous. Most of us were at the beach waterskiing. I didn’t plan on skiing at all, for the week prior I had injured my ankle, knee and hip playing soccer for a team organized from active duty air force personnel from ellsworth (Today, September 11, the seven year anniversary of the terrorist attacks, my ankle still hurts quite obviously, and I am sure my knee is still tender). So, for reasons not prominent in my head right now, I decide to go skiing. I get a wetsuit on and jump in the water. Normal water temperature, normal warm, July day. As soon as I am about to pop out of the water, I feel my back tweak. My back has done this before, with similar pains.

Once, while in tech. school, I got up on a Sat. or Sun. after being horizontal on a crappy mattress for something like 12 plus hours and bent over to put my socks on and was hunched over like a 90 year old for a day and a half. But I recovered fully in 36 hours.

This was somehow different. I was optimistic that I would recover at the most after a week or so. The pain was so tremendous that I called the base clinic the Monday after to schedule an appt. if for anything else to at least get some pain medicine. That marked the beginning of a long journey, battling a slow system that habitually mistreats and misdiagnoses military personnel to get them back to work as quickly as possible. What is missed is often the fact that quick isn’t always best. In my case, I can see how small steps should be taken first, then have them lead to bigger steps if necessary. It is nonetheless unfortunate that it took 7 weeks for me to get a consultation with a neurosurgeon after having an MRI done to show that I had two slight bulging discs and a herniated disc in my lower back.

Before that, I had been back to the base clinic three different times for the same problem, and downtown to a physical therapist where I was given electric message therapy and traction therapy. The traction therapy actually set my slow recovery back tenfold. Never before with this injury had I felt such horrifying pain and agony than what I felt immediately after undergoing traction therapy, where a series of belts are placed around your torso and upper legs and arms, you lay on a bed, get connected to a pulley and the pulley is connected to a machine that applies tremendous stretching to the spine, in an attempt to relieve pressure on the discs. Apparently it is effective for others….I on the other hand would have them burned for being a form of torture.

I do not blame or resent Dr. Karl Kirsch for that experience. It is unfortunate it happened, but my anger I have been more or less able to keep under wraps when directed outwardly. For that matter, inwardly as well. My anger seems to have been smothered during this whole experience by the pain. Something that all of my emotions have experienced.

As I contemplate my pathetic existence, I am always finding myself feeling guilty for putting my experience before that of others in my thoughts. Bryan has been suffering tremendously and they have yet to give his ailment a definitive root cause. My dad suffers of course constantly, yet always is able to make it worse by falling, being made to suffer by trying to stay mobile. Not even active or busy, just mobile. Bryan is in a huge transition where they are renovating their new house – grandma skelton’s corner house that she bought. Alex has a baby coming – their first, and is trying to get back into the student lifestyle, knocking out classes while paying off debt. Marne’ is still going to school at byu-idaho. She went on a history tour back east, visiting church sites and u.s. history sites. Mom struggles financially to support her and dad as well as Marne’. Andy seems well put together right now. I pray his knee stays strong as he finds great therapy on his bike. I feel another small storm may be brewing for him as he is about to enter the bishopric as a counselor.

As I ponder how horrible my life is and as my thoughts lead to others such as these, I remember my blessings. I wouldn’t trade my healthy children and wife for the world on a silver platter. Yes things come up, but they are mentally and physically sound, they have all their senses, and so far, they aren’t allergic to anything major. I don’t mean to rub it in for anyone who doesn’t enjoy these blessings, all I mean to say is that my life is awesome just for that fact alone. Yet, I think I learned that early in another position in this perspective. My parents have experienced all sons going on successful missions, all sons being married in the temple, and all children going to college. Marne’ is young still, but she seems more on track than any of the boys. So a 100% success rate isn’t bad at all. Not even the prophets in the Bible or BoM can boast that, yet my father, whether giving him the credit or not, has enjoyed a righteous posterity thus far. He will pass this mortal state with this righteous line. Some grandchildren may or may not stray, but his success, partly, comes from this awesome blessing.

Another thought leads me into an altogether different vein. I was thinking about how Christ has a unique experience that is quite advantageous when He becomes a god. He perfectly relates to all pain and suffering. According to some interpretations of what Joseph Smith said, God the Father also suffered as Jesus did on another world. Whether He did or not, I think it is generally agreed that God perfectly relates to all mortal experience and knows the pain we go through as a Father knows the pains of a child as the child grows and experiences the different stages of life, for, not only has the father been there and done that, but he is his father, and as such feels the pain immediately upon knowing of the child’s suffering. This leads to the question of our experiences. Will there be multiple mortal experiences so we can come back and experience all suffering as Jesus did, or will the mortal experiences we have here and now be sufficient? For, in this perspective, I think my father has quite an upper hand when it comes to relating to others’ pain - I am jealous in a way. Not only will he be more apt to relate, but his victory over death will be that much sweeter when it comes compared to a mortal who had the luxury of skating through will nary a scratch. But this is just a pondering for now.

So I may be standing at that last station in the subway tunnel, where you can see the light at the end, but you can’t go down the tunnel until the subway comes. My subway operator is the neurosurgeon and the subway I am boarding is either going to be the cortisone steroid shot or surgery. The cortisone subway is scheduled to be there first, but if I don’t like it, I wait for the next subway to lead me to the light at the end of the tunnel.