The 11th of February marked the 17th anniversary of the snow skiing accident that flipped my world upside down and set my life on a completely new trajectory. I’ve spent much of the month reflecting on the morphine-fogged memories of my first few weeks in the ICU at Harborview Medical Center; waking up each morning…
Category: Keeping perspective
The Next Chapter Begins…
If my first four decades on this spinning rock have taught me anything, it is that my life rarely goes according to plan. From calamitous road trips to disastrous air travel fiascoes, we’ve long since established that the hard-earned lessons learned on life’s detours are just as important as our intended destinations. After all, that’s…
“I’m watching you fight…”
Today marks 10 years since I flatlined in the emergency room at Auburn Regional Medical Center after a bladder infection made it up to my kidneys and into my bloodstream. My parents and Kristen watched five minutes of CPR as an incredible team of doctors, nurses, and medics fought to bring me back online. In…
Word to Your Mother, Part 2.
I don’t know how or when it happened, but one of my favorite blog posts got lost in the migration of the website to a WordPress blog after the original host, MSN Spaces, shut down. I wrote it on Mother’s Day of 2009, a few short months after my youngest niece was born via natural…
The Revolution Will Not Be Paralyzed
Last week’s trip to DC was our shortest yet, but we packed quite a bit into those four days in terms of advocacy, growth, and memories made. Being my third year at the ROCH, I wasn’t as awed by the idea that I was about to be rolling through House, Senate, and Capitol buildings. Granted, not…
Another Lap Around the Sun
I have written about it a handful of times, and each time, I’ve found that my relationship with the anniversary of my accident has evolved. The first few years, I didn’t need a reminder because I’d been counting the days, breaths, and heartbeats that I’d survived along the way. At five years, I couldn’t find the words….
Goodbye to One of The Greatest
There really is no proper way of explaining him. Like any other force of nature, his energy and impact had to be experienced firsthand. My earliest memory of him is that he had a tattoo, definitive proof in a three-year-old mind’s eye that my Grandpa Ed was a pirate. His gravelly voice, perpetually tanned skin…
Full Circle
There is a Kierkegaard quote that says, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” After taking a couple days to decompress from our travels, it’s time to take a look back at the last few days of this trip and see what I can learn. The first and most obvious lesson: What a difference a functioning…
Reasons and Seasons
November has always been a difficult month for me. Before 2010, the majority of those troubles were of the self-imposed, “first-world-problems” variety due to my choice to forgo Thanksgiving dinners so I could roll around with other sweaty malnutritioned guys in spandex in gymnasiums across the country but, at the time, those struggles were as real to me as anything…
Breaking the Habit
This blog is making me insane. My writing (or lack thereof) is making me nuts, too. As much as I wish both of those statements were true, I know that they are not. The only thing really making me feel bat-sh!t crazy right now is, wait for it… Me. There is a maxim out there…
Kenny Salvini 