Reflection 80 – What My Last Year Taught Me!

BANG! And the ambulance door slammed.
I was hardly fitting in the ambulance bed with my legs squeezed at the end. This is my first time for my skin to receive direct sunray for almost a year. It felt very strange encountering sunlight once again. The ambulance started moving and off we went. The weather inside, despite having the AC on, was extremely hot. I could definitely feel it as well as seeing those around me sweating intensely. I forgot what it means to be in a car, to experience traffic, and to enjoy the frequent bumps on the streets. I was scheduled to do some checkups and change my tracheostomy and gastronomy tubes. It had been around 410 days since I left the ICU last year. Going back, of course, brought different types of feelings and emotions for myself and those around me. Though it is not usually a very pleasant experience going to ICU, I felt this time I was different. This is because of different reasons.
First, my tough experience of last year has taught me a lot and left a huge imprint inside. Throughout the last year, I had to get used to and adapt to a very different lifestyle where I am mostly bed-ridden. I am not breathing as I used to, nor eating, drinking, going out or enjoying life as before. BIG CHANGE! Probably all of you reading this can’t imagine how difficult my life is. The good news: it’s not that difficult as you all think . And it has nothing to do with me being a super-duper person. It’s all about ADAPTATION. Let me explain to you how. But first I must tell you that I am blessed with reading in the fields of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology. Just the day before entering hospital, I read an extremely interesting chapter about adaptation in the book The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely.
Psychologists are always doing different experiments trying to explain human behavior. In one interesting study, they wanted to understand how BIG events in life (both good and bad) affect our satisfaction levels as time passes. Would being sick really make you depressed? Would winning a million dollars set your happiness for the rest of your life? They looked at three groups. The first is what scientists call the control group; those are people who have regular lives having not experienced any huge event. Then, you have the treatment groups. One group is people who are quadriplegic; they basically lost movement in all their limbs. A second group are those who won lottery tickets. Basically, both groups had sudden life-changing events for better or worse. They interviewed both groups one year after that incident asking them how satisfied they were and comparing them with the condition group. The surprising result was that after one year all groups had a pretty similar outlook on life. Now, this is very unusual! You would imagine someone who won millions of dollars to be much happier and more satisfied with their lives. The secret is in adaptation. Yes, at first one group will be probably miserable and the other happy. However, as time passes eventually everything is largely normalized and we adapt to the new changes.
I believe adaptation is a great gift given by God to human beings to carry on normally with their lives. This whole thing reminded me with the beautiful ayah:
مَآ أَصَابَٓ مِن مُّصِيبَ ةٓ فِى ٱ أ لَْ أ رضِٓ وَلَٓ فِ ىٓ أَنفُسِكُ أ مٓ إِلَٓ فِى كِتََٰ بٓ من قَ أ بلِٓ أَن نَ أ برَأَهَآ إِنَٓ ذََٰلِكَٓ عَلَى ٱللَِّٓ يَسِي رٓ لِ كَ أ يلَٓ تَأأسَ أ و آ عَلَىَٰٓ مَا
فَاتَكُ أ مٓ وَلَٓ تَ أ فرَحُو آ بِمَآ ءَاتَىَٰكُ أ مٓ وَٱللَُّٓ لَٓ يُحِبُّٓ كُلَٓ مُ أ ختَا لٓ فَخُورٓ