Try to make friends with my pain, cos my pain makes me humble (Humble by Ren)

Ren has many songs and life experiences that I can fully relate to, as I'm sure many of you could if you listened to his music. But I'm not here to promote him, just using his lyrics. I've found that living with long term and incurable conditions that you either learn to live with them and accept life for what it is or you sink into some deep dark place (where I slip a little at times). Life isn't always what we want it to be, but whilst I still have a happy life, albeit not a very easy one, I will make the best of my situation. Saying that, I have had to realize how disabled I have become when I lost the use of my powered chair for just a short time over the last week. But there have been positives as well as negatives and I am thankful for just being alive.

As usual I can't remember the order of things and probably not everything, but I'll try to get the main gist of things. 

One of the major events that happened was the aforementioned bit of a disaster with my chair which although is meant to be able to mount small obstacles with ease, does in fact struggle to mount quite a few small obstacles. The video shows me stuck in the back lane with drive wheels spinning but the castors obviously not heading in the right direction. So I was taking Loki out but ended up phoning Dee to rescue me. She ended up bringing some crutches out to me (and I don't do crutches brilliantly if there isn't a wall or some form of support near to me) and I had to get to a wall off to the side of the track whilst she lifted the front end round and straightened the chair up. I then took Loki for his walk but chair felt a little strange.

Later that morning we had a walk up to the Trevithick day festivities to visit the South West MS Society stand but I couldn't stay to help as Dee had an MRI booked at Bodmin Hospital that afternoon. So after our visit we set off to Bodmin, having a short stop at Trago Mills, Liskeard on the way.

At Bodmin Hospital later I had to obviously wait outside the MRI for Dee and it was here whilst mounting a drop kerb that I heard a grating sound from underneath my chair. Looking down I noticed the front left castor wheel hanging off the wheel. I can only surmise that it must have started coming off when I was stuck in the back lane. So when Dee exited the MRI, and I had asked her how it had been I invited her to study my chair to see if she noticed any differences to how it should be. I won't write what she said but we decided to head straight home.

When we got home she had to dig my old manual wheelchair out of the garage, which was always a bit small for me, but seven years of near total inactivity (chairbound) had made it really difficult to sit in and arthritis etc in my wrists made it very painful to operate. And that's how I found out how totally reliant I am on my powered chair to just be able to do minor activities like carrying a cup around as with a manual chair both hands are needed to perambulate (big word, not even sure if that's the right word lol). Going to the toilet now even more difficult, bringing things in was impossible so Dees workload increased too (Thank you Dee). Far too much to write and not enough energy to explain it all.

And no blog would be complete without Dee and me walking Loki at Tuckingmill Valley Park.