I learned something really scary at the end of last year.

I can’t remember how it came up in conversation.  I just remember what she said.  My Mum, that is.

“You were so lucky not to lose that leg!”

Whaaaat??!

“Oh, didn’t we tell you, the doctor said if you’d had your accident six months earlier, they wouldn’t have had the technology to save it.  So like I said, lucky!”

Blimey!  I remember the nurses coming along every hour or so, nervously lifting up the little hat-like thing they’d perched on my right foot, feeling my toes and going off frowning.  Until some time on day two, when Sister was summoned.  She checked, nodded, and she and Nurse Kaur smiled at each other as they made a note on my chart.  Apparently, they’d been anxiously waiting to see if circulation was going to return to the leg below the (very) compound fracture.  I’ve always been very aware that the muppet in the Citroen had made a pretty good mess of my right leg that damp December night 33 years ago.  But until Mum’s comment I’d never seriously considered that I’d been in real danger of losing it.

After spending a good chunk of my nineteenth and twentieth years on the planet on crutches and in plaster, I’ve been rather cautious about my poor old leg ever since.  Anything that might harm it or be too much for it has been ruled out – skiing, sky-diving, fell-walking, playing footie.  OK, not footie – I can’t blame the footie on the leg injury, that was never something I was any good at.  Many other things, though, I’ve turned down: “Oh, I can’t do that, I’ve got a dodgy leg.”  What a great way to hide from actually stretching myself!

Mum’s comment, got me thinking.  For just about a third of a century I’d been thinking I was unlucky, that it was awful that the silly beggar in that Citroen didn’t see my motorcycle, and that I’ve got this bogged-up leg.  Yes, you read that right – unlucky that I’ve got this leg.  Huh?

That was the day I decided I’m no longer going to focus on the scar tissue all over my right shin, nor on the rather neat zip-like scar all down my thigh.  Nor even on the lump missing out of my calf (I once convinced a girl that was a shark-bite btw).  I’m not even going to focus on the inconvenience of needing shoes with a deep heel to fit the orthopaedic wedge inside.

No – I’m going to focus on the fact that I get up in the morning and put on two socks, and that I even need a right shoe to put that wedge into.  I’m going to focus on the fact that I’m whole, two arms, two legs, all my bits in place and there’s nothing – other than the limitations I choose to argue for – to stop me doing absolutely anything I please.

That’s what *I’m* focusing on.  What about you?