6 Minutes Wrestling with Life

Tourette's Without Talking

Don't let what you cannot do
Interfere with what you can.

John Wooden

Life is a choice.

I choose to be better rather than bitter.

I choose to be glad rather than sad.

To be thankful, rather than say "Why me?"

When it comes down to it, you can find happiness in any and all situations.

It is your choice.

Life really is wonderful, hard, but amazing.

Sometimes, a lot of times, life doesn't follow the script we would have written ourselves, if we had the chance.

Sometimes life seems incomplete because at that moment, we haven't seen the whole picture.

When you live life with belief, confidence and enthusiasm, there really are some great moments.

Today I experienced one of those moments.

It has just dawned on me that Jess has been sedated with either Propofol or Morphine since she has been here. My idea is to wean her off of the sedation and to see what would happen.

The doctors agree and lower Jess's dosage a little at a time until she is no longer on any kind of sedation.

After a little while, Jess looks more natural; she moves and follows commands to move her hands.

She has a very mad facial expression and seems to be in pain.

I urge the nurse to let the experiment play out. She obliges.

Jess starts to move her left arm up and she got it all the way up to her head and tries to rip out one of the electronic monitors there.

While she was doing this, she looked like she was exerting every ounce of energy that she had. She went through numerous facial expressions ranging from sheer determination, to anguish, to disgust, to exhaustion.

After Jess rests a bit, the nurse in the room gets excited and starts giving Jess one command after another without giving her any time to respond to her prior command.

She says, "Jess, move your finger."

One second later she says, "Jess, move your hands."

Then she impatiently blurts out, "Move your legs."

I explain to her she needs to slow down and give Jess time to respond; it takes about a minute for her to acknowledge and execute the command.

At this time Jess has her hand in the air with an open palm.

The nurse says, "Jess, move one finger."

After about two minutes, the nurse starts to loose patience.

As she turns and walks away, I start laughing hysterically.

The nurse turns and says, "What's so funny?"

I nod over to Jess, where Jess has not moved only one finger; she has moved four fingers, leaving one finger standing straight up in the air.

I die laughing...

Jess just gave the nurse the finger.

I knew she was in there.