What I See From Here: A Matter of Perspective

What I see standing here may not match what you see standing where you are. Call it a simple difference in point of view. Or maybe it isn't so simple. I used to stand where you stand. Then, without any announcement, things began to change. The shift arrived in small doses, and it crept up on me quietly. Years ago I told myself that if I ever had to pick between losing my mind and losing my body, I'd hand over the body and keep the mind. You should be careful what you wish for, because sometimes it arrives.

The first sign was cold feet, and after that came the business of being weak in the knees. The knees, at least, had an answer. X-rays showed both of them were bone on bone, no cartilage left at all. Cartilage is what keeps the joint sliding smoothly, the grease in the machinery, and mine was gone. Two knee replacements followed.

The cold feet never got such a clean explanation, and to this day I can't say for certain I ever found the real cause. I went through more than one neurologist with nothing to show for it. Then the feeling started draining out of my fingers too, and I kept dropping things. Everyone around me had a diagnosis ready: I was clumsy, I needed to be more careful.

Cutting a long story down: a hand doctor, one I'd point anyone toward, sent me on to another neurologist. That one read an MRI and finally got it right. A little over six months later I was in surgery on my neck, and fast, because my spinal cord was being pinched. That pinch was behind both the feet and the hands, and left alone it would have made me a quadriplegic. The operation worked.

So that is why what I see from here doesn't line up with what you see from over there. Perspective does the dividing. What put all of this back in my head happened this evening, when I went out to the car to grab some medicine I'd left behind. I looked at the three or four feet of gravel between the drive and the back steps and noticed it didn't loom the way it had a year ago. To you, three or four feet of gravel is nothing. A year ago it might as well have been the continental divide.

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