A Personal Perspective: It's painful to see a friend going through something hard and unable to help.
Sometimes, life is constantly teetering on a razor edge of chance.A close friend of mine fell down some stairs in an Air BnB house and got seriously injured. Nothing life-threatening, but bad enough: aShe is the strongest, healthiest person I know, and when I got the message about what happened to her, I was stunned.
That was a week ago. Things have improved some since then. My friend still feels pretty awful, and she’s had to cancel everything for now. But the pain is getting better, and she’s been to a top-notch audiologist and learned that she should recover her hearing in about six weeks—right now, she can’t hear anything in her right ear. Most of all, I can see her processing this event, finding ways to handle it, and rising to the challenge inside herself.
And there are plenty: Something bad happened, but most of the time, bad things aren’t happening. Even this is not as bad as it could be, she could have died, she could have broken her back or sustained brain damage. Although I care almost as much about my friend’s well-being as I care about my own, I have to remember that this is not something bad happening to, putting little mental boundaries around what is and what isn’t, and trying to hold onto those boundaries.
My friend Anne was with me through the whole thing: She took me to my doctor appointments, sat in the waiting room during my surgery, and made a cotton sleeve to put inside the brace's sleeve when I couldn’t stand to have the brace’s horrible synthetic fabric rubbing on my elbow day and night. I keep thinking about that now.
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