Hello world!

March 11, 2021 27 By Jeff Dellovade

I’d like to start off by thanking you for taking the time to visit my blog. Hopefully your time spent here will be fruitful. Let’s get right to the question on everyone’s mind.

Why?

Why have I decided to blog and why are taking the time to read it? Well, the short answer is that I’ve heard from enough people who told me that my story could help others that I’ve been able to convince myself that maybe they’re right so I’ll give it a shot. I’ve been living with a spinal cord injury for 27 years. Throughout that time I’ve had to endure more than your average number of complications that able-bodied people don’t necessarily encounter, and I’ve learned a lot about how to deal with these situations; not to mention how I could have avoided them in the first place. It’s been brought to my attention that there are vast numbers of people out there in the world that are going through the same, or similar, situations that could benefit from my insights on these issues.

I will not presume to think I know what anybody else’s situation is like, I only know what I’ve experienced. What I can tell you is that getting and living with a spinal cord injury is hard, and not just for the injured. Family and friends suffer as well. A disconnect happens when this traumatic event happens and all these questions and issues arise but there aren’t any answers to be had. And the questions and concerns don’t stop. The further you get into the healing and recovery process the more questions you have. Now, the healthcare professionals tasked with working with these patients do a phenomenal job of dealing with the situation and help the patient recover to a functional level, but when it comes to the minutiae, their knowledge is inevitably going to fall short, simply because they don’t live it. They deal with it on a daily basis and their clinical knowledge is beyond reproach, but there’s more to it than that. Patients, family, and friends, I think, need and want to hear from the people in the fight themselves. They want to see and hear about what it’s really like once you get released back into the wild. As Theodore Roosevelt said:

Image result for man in the arena quote

And this is at the heart of what I’m trying to accomplish with this blog. To be a resource for people who are, in any way shape or form, associated with a spinal cord injury. I’m not going to tell you I have all the answers or that the ones I do have are the only ones to the questions asked, just that this is what I discovered along the way.

It’s hard to say what this blog will evolve into but I’ll start by elaborating on any number of events that have occurred to me throughout my disabled life, both good and bad. I’ll discuss health-related issues like pressure sores and UTIs as well as family and friends, adaptive sports, and even some more serious issues like the best way to smoke a brisket on the Big Green Egg. I’ll do it all by wielding my witty repartee with every stroke of the keyboard. It’ll look a lot like sarcasm to the casual observer, but I’ll just call that an unfortunate coincidence. Nothing is off the table here and I’m counting on my community following to provide comments and feedback on issues I’ve discussed as well as issues about which they’d like to know more. I’m looking forward to embarking on this endeavor and, in the process, hopefully providing hope and insight into what may seem like an intolerable situation.

I’m not promising miracles just my honest opinion about the lifestyle. But though all of this, let’s not take this too seriously. We can still have some fun along the way.

…because that’s how I roll…

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