The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Keep on keeping On is life lesson
Do you ever get weary and brainsore and in need of a rest? It can happen to the best of us when there’s too much going on, and not all of it’s good.
“You really want me to keep on putting one foot in front of the other? Seriously?”
(Yeah, maybe it has been one of those weeks.)
But when I looked back over the news we’ve covered in The Courier for this column, I came away with a different story.
Because for all the hurt and misery – and Lord knows, there’s more than enough of that to go around – it’s the accounts of people beating insurmountable odds that stuck in the mind. Take Grant McIntyre. The 52 year-old from Perthshire was labelled “Scotland’s sickest Covid survivor” after he spent 128 days in hospital – 86 of them in intensive care.
Two hundred NHS staff were involved in his recovery between Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Ninewells Hospital in Dundee.
And while he’s not quite back to his old self – his lungs have just 70% of their pre-Covid capacity – he’s back at work as joint clinical director for the Hospital Dental Service in
NHS Tayside and a consultant and honorary professor of orthodontics.
This week he was awarded an honorary fellowship from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, whose president described him as “nothing short of remarkable”.
And what about Lynn Ashdown?
On Monday we told how she’s preparing to graduate with a master’s degree in medical education from Dundee University, eight years after she was left with life-threatening injuries.
A previously undiagnosed heart condition caused her to collapse. And, as she fell, she suffered a traumatic brain injury, broken neck and spinal cord damage, in addition to a cardiac arrest.
Lynn’s recovery makes Grant’s look like a walk in the park. She spent more than two years in hospital and was told she might be left quadriplegic.
But she has learned to talk again and has adapted to being a wheelchair user.
“If I’m being honest, I’d still choose to go back to my old life if I could,” she said. “But I know I must make the most of what has happened to help other people.”
Store that statement away for the next time perseverance and hope seem in short supply.
It’s the kind of spirit Sophy Mitchell is drawing on now, to everyone’s amazement.
The 30-year-old from
Dundee has a smaller target in mind: to spend one more Christmas with her family and friends.
But her determination is no less inspiring.
She was told last month she has just six months to live after her cervical cancer spread to her bones.
But that will only take her to the end of October, and Sophy has other things in mind.
So between now and Christmas she intends to tick as many activities as possible off her bucket list, with the aid of £14,000 in donations to her online fundraising page.
She also plans to continue raising awareness about cancer symptoms because, like Lynn, she’s learned there’s no turning back the clock and maybe she can help some other folk along the way.
There are people being put through the mill every day, and mostly we have no idea.
Sick people, grieving people, broken-hearted people grappling with the worst news in the world.
And odds being what
they are, we’re all in with a chance of turning over that rotten hand the next time the cards are dealt.
But sometimes things that look a lot like miracles happen. And when they do, you might find there are people – lots of them – ready to drop everything and go out of their way to help you get there.
It won’t always happen. Stories like Grant’s and Lynn’s wouldn’t be news if they were commonplace.
But when the brown stuff hits the fan, I guess the best we can hope for is that we’ll be like Sophy and dig in. Content ourselves with smaller miracles – the everyday kind – and put our faith in the helpers all the same.
“Keep on keeping on,” a wise pal told me this week. “It’s all you can do.”
And really, isn’t that what all of this comes down to in the end? ------------------------------------------------I let the train take the strain this week. A return trip to Glasgow from Gleneagles. What a treat.
Clean, fast, punctual, free wifi, a table to myself both ways – and strangely peaceful.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that there were so few passengers on board.
I don’t remember the last time I heard the name “ScotRail” without the words “industrial action” and “reduced timetable” being spoken in the next breath.
But services like these are worth protecting and it would be a disaster if the current unrest led to falling demand and a question mark over their future.