Many electronic devices have a reset button. It is usually a very tiny apparatus, located in some extremely obscure place on the device and can only be pressed with something tiny, like the end of a straightened paperclip. Probably the most recognizable reset button is the little square that sits quietly between the two electrical ports on a GFI outlet. Those are the outlets located closest to areas that are wet, like kitchens and bathrooms.
Pressing a reset button does just what its name implies. It puts whatever the device is back to its original starting place. In theory, it makes it just like it was, before ever being used.
Life has a way of hitting our reset buttons. Recently, my better half and I had the opportunity to leave the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, a place we had called 'home' for four years. Things were changing. The apartment complex had been sold and when that reset button was pressed, nothing was as it was before. Familiar faces and co-workers disappeared, tenants were leaving en masse and the place literally came to a grinding halt.
A new opportunity arose. A job offer. The offer was from a place I call the "Beautiful Land of Pike". Home. Another reset button had been pushed. We scrambled our belongings together, shoved them into a Uhaul truck and 18 hours later, we were home. We arrived just in time to celebrate the end of the year holidays with family and friends.
Right before we bid Raleigh, NC farewell and during his last week of employment there, my husband hurt his back at work. He and a refrigerator did not see eye to eye, while one moved the other, from the back of a truck, down a ramp, in the rain. Thinking it was just a wrenched back, he went to the chiropractor. For a reason, unbeknownst to us at the time, the pain in his back did not go away and began to radiate around his ribs and across his stomach.
Another reset button was about to be pushed. The result of this was not going to be setting us back to normal because in the first week of February, we found out he has multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that likes to eat bones. As of yet, this is not a curable disease, but treatable. Its prognosis though, for a man who has worked with his hands and tools all of his adult life, was rather bleak. Nothing heavier than 5 pounds can be lifted and, among other things, ladders are off limits.
This reset certainly was not what we were looking forward to, but, it has made us reset our own thought process. We have discovered that even though somethings are out of the picture, activity wise, others can be learned. He can take a walk, with the ever so entertaining Jack Russell Terrier, Runtly, and they do so daily. In fact, I've nearly lost my "he's my dog" status because Runtly rarely leaves his side. He can read a book, run the sweeper and a dust mop, fix his own breakfast and learn Sudoku. This last accomplishment is a work in progress. It has given reason to rise early in the morning, to beat the next puzzle, or tearing the sheet out of the book, telling it what he thinks of it and slam dunking it into the trash.
Our lives, like the lives of so many others who face one of the many varieties of this disease, have changed. It will not be exactly the way it was and we can only do one day at a time. It has a weird comparison to what is going on in the world today. There is a disease spreading around the globe. It has put the entire population at a near standstill. People are perplexed and some are afraid. Perhaps planet Earth has hit the reset button. Maybe it's a time for change, to not take things for granted, to learn new things, to take one day at a time.
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