Too many things to deal with...

Too many things to deal with...

Physical therapy went well today. I got on the exercise bike and was able to do like half a rotation, which was more progress than my therapist expected. It was hard work - after ten minutes of that I felt like I'd just run a marathon. Physical therapy is by far the most difficult part of the healing/recovery process. It requires a lot of strength and willpower. Oh, and it hurts. The thing about physical therapy is that nobody can do it for you. That sounds obvious, but if you think about it, everything that's happened so far has been done to me (usually with the help of prescription drugs) - surgeries, x-rays, casts, etc. Despite the difficulty, I like PT so far. Regaining flexibility in my knee is tough but it's pretty much the first thing I've had any control over in the past five weeks. Having control over something in my life makes everything a little more bearable.

Tomorrow my brother and I are going to visit Brian. I'm a little nervous about it. I want to be a strong role model for him and show him that recovery is possible, but it's going to be hard for me to see him in that condition. Also, he'll want to talk about the accident. I don't mind that so much, but I don't want to figure out the play-by-play or even really hear what he remembers. That sounds so insensitive but I've just reached a point where I can't take any more. It's all just too sad. Every time I learn a new detail about someone else's experience, it haunts me and I can't stop thinking about it. It bothers me that the people I care about so much had to see what they did. My experience wasn't as bad because I got knocked out, I just have a fuzzy memory, and I didn't really come to until I was out of the bus. It's probably selfish of me to complain about hearing the experiences of others since I posted my account of the accident on this very blog, but I guess that was before I realized how hard it is to hear about what everyone else went through. I didn't really think many people were reading this blog anyway (but I'm glad to hear people do) and I just sort of wrote that post to get it off my chest. Anyway, I'll be there for Brian and talk about whatever he wants to talk about. It would probably be therapeutic anyway for me to talk about it... I'm already trying to bury my experience of the accident but I need to get used to dealing about it because it's going to affect me for the rest of my life.

Well, I didn't mean to be depressing, so now I'll post my rant about the (lack of) handicap accessibility on campus because it's funny. Our campus is awful. Have you ever wondered why you've only seen one or two people in wheelchairs on campus during your entire time here? Upon returning to school, I paid a visit to the students with disabilities office or whatever it's called. I asked them about a class (that I've since dropped) that's in one of the lesser lecture halls in Hibbard. I don't know how I was supposed to get my wheelchair in and where to park it so that I didn't have to deal with the slope. Well, the people in the office didn't know either. Great. Our tuition and tax money pay these people. Speaking of the disabilities office, it's on the second floor of a building that has no elevator! It's in the old library, and you have to use the elevator in Schofield and work your way over there. The disabilities people told me that our campus is up to code on handicap accessibility, but just barely. There are a lot of ramps that you simply can't do by yourself unless you have a motorized wheelchair. The buildings on campus don't have many automatic handicap doors, and some of those doors don't work anyway. The ones that do work don't stay open long enough to account for the huge lip that you have to get the chair over to get in and out of the buildings. The list goes on and on...