In yesterday’s post, I was talking about how much martial arts mean to me. I most certainly would not be here without Taiji. I believe this to be true with 100% of my heart.
When I was in the hospital, every medical person I talked to could not believe that I had woken up from my coma. Almost everyone said that it was a miracle, and they marveled over me whenever they came tho check in on me.
I was drugged to the gills, rememmber, so I didn’t pay much attention to what they said to me. However, one thing that stuck in my brain was the survival rate of people who go into cardiac arrest. It’s 10%. Later, when I looked it up, I learned it’s not quite as dire as that. It’s 10% if no one is around. It’s 20% if it happens in a hospital (with medical personnel nearby). It’s 30% if someone applies CPR to the patient in time.
I had all that happen to me. There were cops around and I think the EMT when I had my first cardiac arrest. They applied CRP and defibbed me. I had two cardiac arrests, and they used the paddles once on me and jabbed me with an EpiPen as well. I don’t know if that was on the same cardiac arrest or on different ones, but it was a dire situation.
I know I should not be alive. I’m lucky to be alive. And yet, I’m tired.
To that end, I want to beef up my martial arts practice because it’s one of the few things that brings me joy. Or rather, not joy exactly, but peace and strength. I feel more focused and centered after my morning routine, and I am able to carry that with me throughout the day.
I do want to work on my eating habits, but I’ll get to that in a future post. This one is solely about my love for martial arts and how I want to do even more in the next year.
Before my medical crisis, I attended three classes a week. For the first several years, I only did one class a week. I added a second and then a third because I could not make myself practice at home for the life of me. I rationalized that if I went to more classes, it didn’t matter sa much if I did not practice at home.
I really wanted to do so, though. Practice at home, I mean. I knew I would benefit from it, and I could not understand why I could not make myself do it. Do you want to know how I finally did it? I told myself that I would stretch for five minutes. That’s how low a bar I set, and I still struggled to meet it.