Category: Uncategorized

So it has been about ten weeks since my accident that resulted my injury, and cessation of normal life for a while. It might be a few more weeks until I am walking again. The past month or so, I have been working on my physical rehabilitation with the goal of walking by mid-March. The weather has been so nice that it has been driving me crazy to be stuck inside and not able to go hiking. I have been spending some time outside a little in the wheelchair, watching the kids or brushing the dogs, just enjoying the outdoors. (I even tried to take it around the block for a spin, but that proved much more difficult than I anticipated).
I’ve also spent quite a bit of time reflecting on what happened, why, and what I can take away from this. These are the ways I have grown and the things I have learned from this experience the past couple of months:

) The world has much more good in it than bad: sometimes it is easy to dwell on the scary stories we see in the news, and we lose sight of the fact that human nature is inherently good. You might start to believe that all human beings operate in their own self-interest without consideration for what is fair or right. However, if you actually interact with people while you are on crutches or in a wheelchair or otherwise injured, you will see, through the actions of others, that humans are overwhelmingly good. I have been amazed at how many people go out of their way to open doors, carry things, help me get situated. Complete strangers show compassion in unexpected places. My friends have made extraordinary gestures. If the 80/20 rule applies in this situation, I would say that 80% of people go out of their way to help another person in need, and that is truly touching to see.

2) Compassion for the ill and wounded: I am hoping that if nothing else, this experience has taught me how to better care for other people, maybe someone in this same situation or a situation with similar conditions. Maybe this is the primary lesson – maybe I would need this empathy to help a loved one later on in life through a debilitating illness or injury.

For about five weeks, I could hardly get around besides moving from the bed to the couch to the bathroom and back again. I was bored out of my mind. I truly appreciated just having someone spend some time with me. There were simple pleasures, like sweet treats brought or sent to me by friends and family, a particular lotion or comfortable outfit, some new movies to watch. The fact that my little family unit here at the house suddenly had to cook for me, to bring me food and drink, to help me with pillows and blankets was something I appreciated. What if I didn’t have these people? J was amazing as my nurse and aid – helping me get cleaned using a shower chair, making sure I had what I needed at hand, helping me get dressed, cleaning my wounds and changing my bandages – I really had to rely on him and maybe someday he will rely on me in the same way, and I hope I can be as calm and patient of a caregiver as he was.

3) Understanding of what it is like to be handicapped: I think I am going to look at the world in a different way now. It is so easy to kind of look past people with handicaps without really dwelling on how hard their life can be, in terms of dealing with just even the day to day challenges of getting cleaned, dressed, toiletry and bathing, cooking and eating – the basic aspects of life as a human. Getting around, participating in the same activities of life as other people presents even greater challenges. While I was out of work, they built a handicapped ramp to get into my building, and installing rails in my bathroom there. Thank God, that would have been impossible to navigate without. Dealing with bathrooms in restaurants, getting in and out of other buildings, enjoying the outdoors in the same ways I used to have all presented their own challenges.

4) Virtues of online shopping: this last one is one Jason probably wishes I didn’t figure out. He probably didn’t mind that I did all the Christmas shopping this way, and he hardly had to get out to the stores to get anything. There were additional temptations, though. I realized through this process that if I wanted something, it was only a click of a button away, and it made it so much easier for me to spend money on it. Also, because this door had been opened (the “Christmas Gift Gateway?”), online ads were suddenly more compelling to me. On the other hand, though, I learned the dark side of online ordering, which actually probably worked in our financial favor. I learned that it is probably better to try on clothes at the store than buy them online, that having a product in hand is probably better than having it delayed or get lost in shipment, and that you can’t judge the quality of a product from its picture online. Three dresses, three books, and three delayed gifts is all it took to teach me these lessons, which now act as a sort of vaccine against making more online purchases. However, I did get exposure to some awfully interesting sites, like Amazon and Etsy, that I have gotten a little obsessed with.

5) Take the time while you have it: because you never know what might happen.  In some ways I thought I had been being good about this, but as I lay in my bed weeping about the things I wanted to do with my children that I couldn’t now, I realized I wasn’t soaking it all in.  I think I am better than some at making plans about what I want to do, and carrying them out, but there is a lot of room for improvement in there, too.

6) Appreciate the little things: like being able to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom without a big production, like being able to make your own meal, or go out to eat to celebrate a birthday, like laying on your left side to snuggle with your honey at night.  There were a lot of little things I was taking for granted, but I will be savoring every one of them from now on!

That’s probably not all; I am sure I will think of more later.  I am also making another kind of list – the list of things I want to do when I get better again, the things I am looking forward to when I am finally cleared to head back to my normal life.  I am looking forward to sharing those adventures as they unfold in the near future.

One of the main objectives for our trip was some specific old geocaches – “grandfather caches”, and GCD was one of those Do Not Miss ones. It was a prime reason for us being in this area in the first place. So, after a breakfast we cooked at our rental cabin, we drove out an hour or two to Hyak, across the highway from the Snoqualmie Tunnel where we would spend the afternoon, and drove up a rough service road to the parking area for the Mt Margaret trail head.
While we were getting out of the car, a man drove up behind us and started talking to us. He seemed nervous and his conversation choice was just kind of odd, and I had a hard time letting go of that the rest of the hike. There has been an issue up along this trail and along the Lake Annette trail nearby with a “geo-pirate” – someone with a vendetta against geocaching who was destroying all the caches in those areas. Recently, this had caused the archiving of the last remaining APE cache in the US. I thought maybe this man could have been this person, or possibly a theif or a murderer. Frankly, this man made us both so nervous that we felt unsafe during our hike, and had a hard time letting go of that feeling enough to really feel comfortable on the hike. Perhaps he was just a lonely old man…in the end, nothing was taken or harmed, but it just set a vibe that made everything not feel right.

Also, the hike was harder than anticipated, at least for J. I had at least read the cache page and was aware that it was not going to be an easy hike up due to the elevation climb, but J was not expecting that and was really not in the mood for hiking or carrying a pack. He was sore from the previous hiking we had done and his backpack was pretty heavy with camera equipment and the laptop (so the electronics would not get stolen from the car). So I was bouncing around excited and just loving it, but he was anti-hiking and several times suggested we turn back around. But no! I really wanted to get this cache so bad! This was also my favorite kind of hiking experience. The air felt crisp and clean, the mountain views were beautiful, the birds were singing, the weather was just right.

What wasn’t just right, though, were the trail conditions as we got closer to the cache. The hike is about two miles, one way. As we got less than half mile from the cache, the trail became more and more challenging. Snow lay over the trail, and had iced over, making the way slow and dangerous. As it turns out, after looking at the logs, someone falsely logged a find on it a few weeks earlier, with only a cache note of “thanks”, making me think it was somewhat passable, but really the last true find on this was the previous October, some eight months back before the winter. We started to realize that this was going to either be a lot more risky and challenging than we thought, or that we would have to give up. It says on the cache page that the cache is impossible to find under snow, so some months of the year it is not possible. I guess I was thinking summer would clear things up, but we were just too early in the season.
J was all in favor of turning around, but I really did not want to. I was about to try to talk him into waiting for me, while I went up by myself (I thought there was a way I could get around the snow and get up there – turns out I wasn’t crazy for thinking that because that is what the next person did, a few days later) but he didn’t think it was safe (probably wasn’t), and as I was about to argue with him about it, I saw a tree in the distance moving suspiciously, which made me question if there were predators ahead. The idea of meeting a predator out there alone with no weapon scared me into agreeing with him, and we went back down the mountainside, defeated.

Just two weeks later, cachers were logging finds on this cache again, and the snow was melting. Several of our friends found this cache later in the summer, around the time of the Groundspeak Block Party, which attracted a lot of people to the area. For us, it was all in the timing, and our timing was bad. This cache now has becomme another “Potter’s Pond” – another epic cache that J talked me out of due to prudence. I am the reckless one, he is the cautious one – the yang to my yin.
GCD, we will back, another year. Hopefully a warmer one and later in the season.

(still sharing stories and pictures from this summer’s vacation – with sports winding down for the kids though, we are starting to collect some new nature stories for the fall)

This day, after leaving Forks early in the morning, then driving to various points within Olympic National Park, then hurrying along to catch the ferry, and then the tour of Groundspeak – we were kind of overwhelmed and exhausted by the time we got to Pike Market.  We tried to make a go of it, though.  We bought some fresh vegetables for the next week (we were eating off this salad we put together that day for a few days after this) and some supplies for meals the next couple of days at a cabin.  We checked out the original Starbucks location but did not want to brave the crowd.  We checked out some of the stores on the inside of the market, as well as some stands along the outside. We were too cheap and too tired to really get into shopping, though, and we left before our parking meter expired. Onwards to Mt Rainier from here.