During the last fifteen months I have experienced how important it is to be taken care of when shit hits the fan.  Growing up in Norway make me feel like I won the lottery. For the last months life has offered me lots of great adventures and some really hard challenges. Once again I’ve been forced to dig deeper to find the will power, strength and motivation to stay positive and not give in.

The last four months have been quite a journey. On May 8th, I had surgery on both my ankles and my elbow. In total they removed 17 screws and two plates. It was an overwhelming feeling to face a new period of rehab and pain. As I healed from the initial operations, the gratefulness of being alive was overpowering, but this time I was not prepared for what I was about to endure.

Four days after they had opened both my ankles on each side and my right elbow, one of the wounds got infected. They had to get back in there and scrape out the infected tissue. They put me on massive dosages of multiple types of antibiotics for a month to prevent the infection from reaching the bone.  The rehabilitation process has been more mentally challenging than anything else I’ve experienced. I have found that the key to handling a rehab process is to accept the situation and find a game plan to attack it.  This time I knew that I had it in me and I knew what surgery and rehabilitation involved, but I guess I had become a little too cocky. I wasn’t mentally prepared to be set back this much one more time, and it made it way harder to deal.

The continuous pain is tiring. Sometimes climbing and hiking takes more that it gives and it makes me question what I’m doing. I have to dig deep, and find ways to handle the pain. I tell myself to be grateful. That was “easy” early in the process because every small step was a huge bonus. But as time passes and as I gradually win back some of what I lost, it is challenging to stay grateful, especially with pain shooting through my ankles with each approach and each first pitch of the day. Normally the pain goes away when the adrenalin kicks in, and I can enjoy getting lost in the climbing.

I try to remind myself of situations in the past, when I would hurt after an epic day in the mountains. The pain was satisfying. Now I try to relate pain with the satisfaction of deep accomplishment, and doing so helps to keep the feelings of hopelessness at bay.

This is a way longer journey that a sixteen hour scramble.