Blindsided - Page 12


It's for the love of life that I sometimes peer into the future with trepidation. What I have could all be taken away. If Faye were to become disabled or die, I couldn't live independently. A pressure ulcer on my bottom could disable me long enough to shut down my practice. A chest cold could turn into a lethal case of pneumonia. A urinary tract infection could go septic and cause kidney failure or a heart attack.

People with spinal-cord injury live at the edge of the nursing home. I've been there and don't want to go back. But having lived my life predicting lots of things that didn't happen and being blindsided by what did, I choose not to dwell on future catastrophies. After all, thinking about those would only paralyze me, and I've had enough of that.

J. Gibson Henderson, Jr., Ph.D., is a psychologist living near St. Louis, Missouri, and adjunct faculty for the Department of Community and Family Medicine, St. Louis School of Medicine. Contact: ghenjr@sbcglobal.net. Letters to the Editor about this article may be e-mailed to letters@psychnetworker.org.

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