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 Scituate
- What is
success? Is it achieving in your job or competing at the
highest athletic levels and making the big bucks? Does
success always bring riches, recognition and happiness?
Sometimes, but not always!
What about a person born with a severe handicap who can
barely accomplish the basic activities of daily living? They
will be ignored by some, avoided by many. Most of us enjoy a
degree of success and satisfaction; they will not. Can you
succeed, if you cannot compete?
What about a young hard charger, moving well career-wise,
with a young family and excellent prospects, who is struck
with a subarachnoid hemorrhage? His very survival in
question and those favorable prospects now unlikely. The ski
house is no longer a priority, when speech is garbled,
memory poor and the likelihood of financial survival in
doubt. If cognitively aware, insecurity and fear can be very
depressing and sap one’s energy and initiative. Will he be
able to return to being a husband, a father a provider; if
ever, when? Does he fail if he cannot compete?
Certainly what occurred was beyond their control and the
wounds not self-inflicted, but failure is still a
possibility. Both individuals can succumb to self-pity and a
sense of victim-hood. Depression is common, but certainly
treatable.
I have heard success defined as “a ladder that you cannot
climb with your hands in your pockets.” My eight years of
experience with brain aneurysm survivors has clearly shown
that while many are physically unable to take their own
hands out of their pockets without help, they are climbing
success ladders every day. Those born with a severe
handicap, work hard to keep focus on the accomplishment of
some very basic things. The SAH survivor works at sequential
goals, each bringing him closer to where he was before. It
is likely that he will learn to modify his objectives to be
more consistent with a realistic ability to succeed, but he
keeps working at them. Both folks succeed because they have
dreams, compete every day and refuse to give up; they are
champions!
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About The
Author
For more information you may contact
Tom Quirk at (617) 513-3578 or via email at tfquirk@aol.com.
For more information about brain aneurysms, please visit the
Brain Aneurysm Foundation’s web site at www. bafound.org.
The South Shore Brain Aneurysm Support Group meetings are
held the second Wednesday of every month, from 7:00 - 8:30
p.m. at Norwell Visiting Nurse Association, 91 Longwater
Circle, in Norwell.
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