Jim Harris
speaker
92 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jim Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Like, the timescale is a little fuzzy, but not long. I think my friend came running.
Maybe he was right by my side when I came back, and then he left to go get help. And I was there by myself for a bit, and maybe that's what I'm remembering. Like, I feel like the recall is a little blurry.
My whole neurology got quite a shakeup in that.
I felt fairly calm and resolute in that moment. One thing I've learned about myself is that I tend to have a fair amount of composure in really stressful moments. And then in the aftermath, once the acute crisis has moved on, then all the flood of emotions come in. But I remember being backboarded and carried for a distance. I remember cracking jokes while being backboarded. Oh, really?
One of the things I remember being a little like joking cynically about was the people, friends, would encourage me to make more art beforehand. And I felt like I never made time or space for it in life and didn't prioritize it. But it was something that, like, for years, people would gently and kindly give me this encouragement. It's like, you should do more of that.
And I was, like, resistant to it and preoccupied elsewhere. And so on this backboard, I remember being like, well, I guess I've got more time for art now. Wow.
I mean, there's probably some psychological coping there. Yeah. But yeah, I think that it seems like that gallows humor is... comes up a lot for people in really sad and gory and traumatic times.
I don't think there was much night staff on duty. I think I got left on the, on like the rigid backboard overnight and not moved to a hospital bed till the morning.
The medical situation was so far above my level of Spanish competency. I leaned really heavily on Google Translate.
I think I really, out of naivete, made up my mind that I was going to have a recovery and use all the resources and all the willpower that I had at my disposal to shift the course of the outcome. And I wonder if I would have had that same sort of drive and optimism if I had known right away or knew what I know now about spinal cord injuries.
My neurosurgeon was very circumspect in not giving me any definitive prognosis. He was like, well, we'll just have to wait and see. Like, this doesn't look great. Like, these circumstances here are really not ideal. But I was never, I wasn't told that I wasn't going to walk again.
It was a slow shift from wheelchair to walker. And by about seven or eight months post-injury, I really could only walk a few steps with a walker at a time. I was living in an old folks home where my parents had been able to rent themselves an apartment, and I was staying with them.
Yeah, I was the youngest person there by decades. Wow.
Oh, that was absolutely surreal and a little bit comedic. People who have moved to this assisted living facility are all in this sort of a degenerative phase of life where they've moved to this facility to help...
soften that landing as they lose different degrees of independence bit by bit so I was like a minor celebrity there the first time I came down through the lobby which was a real congregating area came down to the lobby with a walker instead of a wheelchair I got a standing ovation oh so people there were so sweet to me were you in a relationship at the time of your injury
I was in a seven-year relationship that ended about two weeks prior to my injury.
It was. It was a long and committed relationship that was really wonderful. And eventually we got engaged, and that engagement brought up all these questions of what married life would look like for each of us. And through that, we realized that we had some very diverging aspirations. At the time, I was traveling a ton and was on this very adventure-y track of traveling the world.
My girlfriend at the time said, really wanted me around home more and was really kind of shifting more into like wanting more domesticity and safety and security that were really normal and sane things to want in her early 30s. And I was not there yet. And I didn't want to give up this life of travel and adventure and being footloose. We went to some couples counseling.
And the nail in the coffin after a number of sessions was this therapist saying something like, you two are both pretty articulate. You're both fairly self-aware. I think you can talk through this specific instance of this disagreement. But ultimately, maybe there's some differences in values here that are going to keep coming up and keep causing conflict.
And this is going to be something that you two keep dealing with year after year. And she's like, a lot of times in my experience, couples with these sort of differences, it doesn't work out for them long term. And then she added, maybe you guys get five more really good years out of it. And those last words just felt gutting. I remember we went to a coffee shop and cried in each other's arms.
Showing 21–40 of 92 · page 2 of 5
← Previous
Next →