I was treating a patient who had some pain following a surgical procedure performed the week before. The pain was real but improving, and frankly, his attitude was a bit whiney. So I shared with him this story about another patient who 5 months ago had complications from a kidney stone surgery.

This woman went from living her normal life to having both feet and nine of her ten fingers amputated after becoming septic from surgery. Just four months after the procedure, she walked through the front door of my office a month ago and not through our handicapped access. She had learned to use her new prosthetics and announced that she was not planning on applying for a handicap parking sticker. “I am not disabled” she proclaimed.

She and her husband then starting sharing their gratitude for what they had been through. It is a beautiful story of community reaching out to help the family purchase a house that met her current needs. It was also an incredible story about how gratitude can transcend any circumstance by setting the right attitude.

After sharing that story with him, I asked “How are you feeling now?”  He answered, “Pretty darn good!” and strolled out of my office with a completely different outlook.

Two Lessons:

First, your attitude is set by what happens between your ears. Second, your thoughts are directly impacted by gratitude. We are eternally grateful for the constant living lessons we learn from our patients’ experiences.

We are also VERY grateful for our decompression machine. It broke a month ago and we received it back this week. We didn’t realize how many people with neck pain, low back pain, and pinched nerves it allows us to help, until it was taken away. It acts by putting a gentle pull length wise in between your vertebrae. This opens up the foreman (hole) which the nerves pass through thus unpinching the nerve. Click here to read about decompression treatment as well as others we provide. We send gratitude to the technicians that repaired our decompression machine. Little do they know how many lives they touched by doing so!