For whatever reason, when I woke up, and decided to write this morning, I had trouble finding this entry.
I did find what I’d written the past few years. Holy shit 2016 sucked.
*steps aside to look*
Now that I found the draft of today’s, on to it….
if you could change one thing in your life what would it be and why? (reach-back to 2010)
Finally found what I wrote back then after some searching….
Day 22 — Uhhmm – 11/22/2010
It was a foggy and chilly morning, I’d just been asked, if you could change one thing in your life what would it be and why?
Uh, yeah. Do I need to explain?
At the same time, I wonder what my life would have been like without MS.
Similarly, I’ve wondered what life would be like had I been diagnosed much sooner.
Still, I really can’t dwell on either. Either one would have sent my life on a much different trajectory, and, for all the struggles, I am happy. I’m respected in my profession. I have a wonderful wife, who I love dearly. If I’d been 100% healthy earlier, probably neither would have happened. I might be in the military. I might be an attorney. I might be that guy I always see at the office Christmas party (which, BTW, I am NOT attending this year. Fuck ’em.) spinning bad music as a side gig, because he didn’t make it in top-40 radio.
Who knows?
And who really cares?
(Excuse the exasperation…. another day of just really lousy conversation starters. I thought about looking at these before I went to bed last night, but they’d probably have put me in a foul mood. Three days only this week. Yay. I was below the target weight again yesterday. My doctor, the one who told me to come see her immediately if I dropped below my target, isn’t scheduled to work in my clinic this month….she’s a resident, so she rotates in to the main hospital….but I figure that if I don’t gain something this week after stuffing my face Thursday, that yeah, there’s something really wrong. It can wait a bit.)
The elephant standing on my belly (yes, I have a pretty odd case of the MS hug this morning), I mean, in the room is the same. This condition has affected so much of my life, and I don’t know that there’ll ever be a time when it doesn’t.
Still, since I can’t put a numb finger on an exact start date, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what I would have done differently to mitigate the symptoms I was having. I can’t point to something in, say, 1992, and correct it. What was I worried about back then? I was thirteen. Sports. School. Girls. What was happening in the world. What was happening in my country, halfway around the world.
So, saying, “not have MS” would be easy, but there’s so many other things that influenced why I am what I am.
MS aside, though, I don’t know that there is one thing. (And there I go again with the inability to choose something, anything.) What’s happened to me has happened, and I try to react as best I can in the situations presented going forward.
This gets in to a discussion I recently had with one of my doctors. I’m not someone who plans things down to the smallest detail. Get the biggest things finished, then figure out the smaller particulars later.
Tying it back, then, to football, and this might speak to my dislike of the vaunted “West Coast Offense” teams, with the masterminds who script the first number of plays for each game.
I think that’s foolish. If your third play is listed as a long pass play (with only about a 30% chance of success), how does doing that make the least bit of sense when what you’re presented is a third-and-two. This is even more true when you’ve got someone like Leroy Hoard on your bench.
But back to the prompt, I don’t know that there’s a single thing I’d do differently, or change. All I can do is continue to try to react to the situations presented. My reaction mechanisms have been negatively affected, of course, but I still don’t foresee myself ever doing something I’m going to regret forever.